No matter how plain your face may be, no matter even how ugly, if it reflects your inner joy, everybody will be glad to see that face. If it is suffused with humility, people will be charmed by your face. If it is a face full of love, it will be transfigured into a thing of radiant beauty.
This is neither some metaphor nor some merely sentimental thought, but sober reality.
In fact, if we see the face of a saint, we literally can no longer tell whether it is beautiful or ugly in the secular sense. That category simply no longer applies. All we know is, it's one of our very favorite faces in the whole world.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Your Sunny, Funny Face
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Nice! It reminds me of Staniloae's beautiful exposition of "what is a saint".
I'd love for you to post some quotes from that, s-p. (And I'm enjoying the photos of yor progress with your church, too!)
Thank you for this post. It reminded me of my grandmother who left this world almost 6 years ago. While her face was plain and wrinkled, it so shone with her love and care for others that even people who barely knew her called her a saint.
The morning she died, my dad had taken his grandson (my nephew) to the park to get out of the house a while, and a stranger to our family was there with his grandson. They were talking a bit about grandkids, when my uncle drove past. The man said "I know that man. In church this morning we prayed for his family because he lost his mother. That woman was an angel sent from heaven, always smiling and kind." My dad replied, "Yes, she was. I was blessed to have her as my mother-in-law for more than 30 years."
Thank you for bringing that memory back.
Post a Comment