"Beauty welcomes us in the sense that it is invitational, vulnerable, and unhurried. It tells us we are wanted in its presence. As we will see soon enough, beauty in art welcomes our broken parts as well as those with which we are more comfortable. Beauty leads us to worship by enabling us to live in the real world, the world of trauma and shame that is so pervasive, and then to see through it. We see and feel this as Thomas did when, invited by Jesus to touch his side and the nail prints in his hands and feet, Thomas’s response was, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).
"Irish poet John O’Donohue rightly spoke of how badly our world needs beauty as well as our deep hunger and thirst for it to survive. There is a great mystery in which our encounter with beauty evokes within us a sense of coming home, as it were—a sense that we are encountering something we recognize but that we have never seen before."
Excerpt From: "The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community" by Curt Thompson.