You are beautiful and unique, so rare and unrepeatable that you are a diamond in God’s eyes! How many of you truly believe that with your heart? How many times have we heard that beauty comes from within? How many of us believe that deep in our hearts? In today’s modern society we are surrounded by billboards, TV advertisements, and magazines convincing us that we need to buy this mascara to make our eyelashes look bigger, this lip gloss to make our lips look bigger or this foundation to make your face look flawless! The fact is all the ads we see are all digitally enhanced and airbrushed into images of women that we are being told, we have to look like. This is unrealistic as none of us look like that, this feeling of inadequacy and self-loathing is deep-seated in women because they think they fail to meet a false standard of beauty, one of being objectified and exploited in society.
St Thomas Aquinas’ definition of love ‘is to will the good of another’. The heart is a doorway into the soul, if we do not possess beauty within our soul, this will show in the way we behave, the way we treat others, etc. The beauty of the soul reflects itself on the face and eyes of a woman, as the beauty on the outside never gets into the soul; it is radiated through the face. A woman’s beauty is an incarnate symbol of heaven, of God’s dwelling place. Beauty is a glimpse into the mind of the creator. I know I struggle to realize and even accepting this beauty, but it is important to remember that all women are beautiful in the very essence of their being. Beauty is not about a dress size or how much we weigh, or how straight our hair is. Instead, true authentic beauty is inherent to every woman simply because she is a woman. How awesome is that! In Matthew 6:26 we are reminded “Look at the birds of the sky, they do not sow or reap, they gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they are?”.
The feminine soul has a distinct beauty to our rich Catholic faith, as it is created by love and for love. We are all discovering God’s love for us in our hearts. The world sees a woman in the physical sense, nothing more than a set of body parts, made for pleasure; we are immersed and saturated with this throughout society. However a woman is worth so much more, she has a beauty within her which contributes to the loveliness of our faith, ‘bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, this shall be called woman’ (Gen 2: 23).
Mother Teresa was an amazing woman who showed what love is all about and what true feminine beauty is. She once said;
“It is not how much we do,
but how much love we put in the doing.
It is not how much we give,
but how much love we put in the giving”.
St Augustine expressed that ‘God is beauty itself’. If we are to discover and rediscover true beauty we have to become close to Jesus’ immaculate heart, by spending time in adoration, praying, and receiving the sacraments. St Augustine once said ‘since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul’.
