5 Ways to Look for Beauty as a Spiritual Practice

Beauty is not decoration on the edge of the Christian life. It is one of the ways God has always been recognized, and it can be practiced rather than waited for.

Psalm 16:11 says you will show me the path of life, that in your presence is fullness of joy, and in your right hand there are pleasures forever more. Pleasures is a surprisingly physical word. Beauty noticed on a Tuesday is not a detour from the spiritual life. Five ways follow. All of them are about attention rather than travel.

One: Choose One Window

Pick a window in your house and look out of it deliberately once a day, for a minute, at the same time.

The same view across a year teaches you more than a hundred new views. You start noticing the light moving, the tree changing, the weather arriving from one particular direction.

Choose the window you already pass rather than the one with the best view. A practice attached to a route you already walk will outlast one that requires going somewhere.

Two: Learn the Names of Things

Find out what the tree outside is called. And the bird at the feeder, and the flower that comes up first in March.

Naming is old work. It slows you down and it makes a landscape stop being scenery and start being a set of particular things you know.

Three: Keep a Line a Day

One sentence in a notebook about something you saw. Only what it looked like, with no lesson attached.

Resisting the lesson is the discipline here. Beauty does not always have to mean something in order to be worth writing down.

Read the lines back at the end of a season. What surfaces is not the individual entries but a picture of where you were living and how much of it you managed to see.

Four: Look Up on the Way to the Car

Most of us cross the same twenty feet of outdoors several times a day without raising our eyes above door height.

Look up once each time. The sky is different every hour and it is completely free, which is probably why it goes unwatched.

Winter counts too. A bare tree against a grey sky is not a lesser thing than the same tree in May, and treating it as one is how half the year gets written off.

Five: Let It Turn Into Praise

When something stops you, say so. One sentence to God about what you are looking at.

This is what turns noticing into a practice rather than a mood. Psalm 19 opens with the heavens declaring the glory of God, and answering out loud is a reasonable response to being told something.

Some of what you see will be sad rather than lovely, and that belongs in the practice as well. Attention is honest or it is not attention.

Begin at One Window

Pick the window today. The one over the sink is usually the right one, because you are already standing there.

Look out of it for a minute tomorrow morning and see what has changed since you last actually looked.