The Daily Pearl
On Beauty
A pearl kept from the brand’s mornings: a verse to hold, a prayer to say and a word to carry.
“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time.”
Ecclesiastes 3 : 11
A Prayer for This Morning
Father, you make everything beautiful in its time, and I keep consulting my own clock. Give me eyes for the loveliness already present in this unfinished season. Teach me that what you are making of me will be worth the making.
Affirmation
I am being made beautiful in his time, and his time has never yet been wrong.
The Reflection
Everything beautiful, but in his time: the verse holds a promise and a timetable together, and refuses to separate them. Ecclesiastes has just listed the seasons, weeping and dancing, rending and sewing, and then declares that each, in its appointed place, is beautiful. Not pleasant; beautiful. The claim is that time itself is part of the design, the kiln the loveliness is fired in.
The lily blooms for a fortnight and is not diminished by the other fifty weeks; the bloom needed the whole year, root, rain and dark included. Much of what the world calls beauty is really timing admired from the outside. Scripture's beauty runs deeper, because it includes the unphotographed seasons. In his time is not a delay. It is a signature.
In Her Company
St Cecilia
Patroness of music, who sang to God in her heart. Beauty, in her keeping, was never decoration; it was worship.
Cecilia was a Roman woman of the early centuries who, tradition tells, sang to God in her heart on her wedding day and led her husband Valerian to the faith. Martyred in Rome, she was buried in the catacombs of Callixtus, and the basilica in Trastevere has borne her name since ancient times. She is the patroness of music and musicians.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
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