"Always keep something beautiful in your mind." – Blaise Pascal
Our regular contributor, Liz Wessel, quoted Pascal in her weekend essay. She then followed Pascal's advice and put "something beautiful" in our minds by combining his words with one of her gorgeous mandalas – a gift to our hearts.
How do we "keep something beautiful in [our minds]?" We need only look within and draw from our heart's library whatever images fulfill us.
We may also look at the world with the eyes of our hearts – our sacred eyes. Through this lens Beauty will arrive because Beauty is always present. The question is whether we are present to Beauty.
For me, Beauty is the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. It is the memory of my three-year old granddaughter in her ballet outfit. It is, as my photo above suggests, the discovery of color in the midst of the woods . I summon Beauty to help me drive back melancholy, to endure pain, or to deal with some of the other ugliness so inevitable in life.
Music composer W.A. Mathieu wrote The Listening Book to suggest to us new ways to approach listening. "I think we basically have two fears," he writes, "death and our deep selves."
The deepest truths within us are the hardest to tell – and the most important. Religion calls us to face our deep truths. But this is so difficult that we need to nurture compassion for ourselves.
This is the gift of Beauty. If we can always hold her in our hearts, than we can find the courage to speak the truth essential to meaningful living.
This is what Beauty offers to caregivers. Radical Loving Care is so demanding that we can't continue to give it without Beauty in our hearts.
The patient down the hall calls to you. He has an ugly disease. A co-worker comes to you for help. She has an ugly problem. A friend seeks your compassion. She is facing an ugly divorce.
Amid all of this ugliness, we must have Beauty in our minds. It is her sweet secret that enables us to walk past the fear of "our deep selves" and into the light of God's Love.
-Reverend Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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