Connection Between Beauty and Obedience
Bob, thanks! I'll make a contribution right now!

I saw quoted recently Simone Weil's description of how the beauty of the world is displayed in its obedience to law. "What is more beautiful than the action of gravity on the fugitive folds of the sea waves, or on the almost eternal folds of the mountains? The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it. On the contrary, this adds to its beauty. If it altered the movement of its waves to spare a boat, it would be a creature gifted with discernment and choice and not this fluid, perfectly obedient to every external pressure. It is this perfect obedience that constitutes the sea's beauty." Waiting For God, p. 129.

Is this principle applicable to human beings, who have free will? I would suggest that human beings display the beauty appropriate to their nature through the virtues of docility, humility, and imitation of Christ (who came only "to do my Father's will"). These virtues are specific to rational beings, for all depend on openness, and obedience, to truth: docility is the willingness to be taught, humility seeing truly, and imitation (obedience) conforming oneself to the true.

In that regard, I saw in Helen Alvare's address at the Family Conference in Mexico City (Jan 14, 2009 http://www.zenit.org/article-24778?l=english) the following: "...as John Paul II pointed out in Evangelium Vitae -- there is something overtly ugly about the demand for "rights" to kill family members at their weakest points of their existence. . . ." John Paul II rightly saw ugliness in selfishness, the demand to do it "my way."

In the Henri Nouen excerpt that Bob passed out, Nouen states that "In the act of prayer, we undermine the illusion of control . . . by directing ourselves totally to [] God. . . ." (p155) ("Thy will be done...") I never before thought of prayer as a "beauty treatment." But isn't it a nice idea? "Makeover" anyone?