Last spring was spent recovering from a hysterectomy. I wore last winter’s clothes straight through the summer because my summer clothes were stored under the bed. Needless to say, nothing got planted in the garden, either. This year we wanted to plant a few trees around the house. We have pines that look like Italian umbrella pines and decided to plant a few tall arbortitae among them.  I’m hoping to create a Tuscany feel to the garden. Ridiculous, I know but I’m very excited to see if it works.

It was a job getting three 7’ tall trees in the ground during a rainstorm. After we were done, JeanPaul put his favorite CD by Sarah Brightman on the stereo and headed into the shower. Sarah’s gorgeous rendition of Con te Partiro (Time to Say Goodbye) wafted through the house. We had heard the song for the first time last year while we strolled through San Marco’s Square in Venice. It was cold and rainy that night, too, but we snuggled under an umbrella and enjoyed the music. This romantic experience has become my favorite memory of the trip. As I washed the dishes listening to the music, I thought about the power of beauty.

JeanPaul is a tough as nails construction worker. He’s been doing it for years and can force himself to work in any weather with any injury. When I first met him, he had no need for what he called fancy food, basically anything that had herbs in it, or fresh vegetables or wine. He’d been busy raising 3 boys by himself and didn’t have time nor the energy for frills and culinary explorations. But, that was before. Most people who have known him would find it very odd to see him having a glass of wine with dinner, let alone listening to opera arias. I don’t find it odd at all. Beauty is contagious.

For centuries the power of the Church resided in the beauty of the buildings it created. While most of Europe lived in low-slung hovels, churches soared to the heavens. Considering how most people lived then, walking into a beautiful church with stained glass windows, exquisite music, gold candelabras and satin cloths must have been an overwhelming experience. They would have been deeply affected by this beauty and felt it to be the power of God. Actually, I do think it is the power of God, however you define God. Experiencing beauty does something to you inside. It shows you something higher than yourself. It changes you.

More and more, I am afraid for our society. It seems to me we are surrounding ourselves with the ugly rather than with the beautiful, spending our time more with the vulgar than with the sublime. I see this in the buildings we live and work in, the schools we teach our children in, the music we listen to and the movies we see. Living lives devoid of beauty is a present danger for us.

Beauty and ugly, good and evil are equally powerful. Each is seductive and knows our deepest fears and weaknesses. Because so many children never experience beauty while they are young, whether it be through music, art, nature or faith in a higher being, my fear is that they won’t be able to distinguish between the euphoria of beauty and synthetic euphoria –  opiates. Without knowing any thing other, will they worship the power of opiates as a benevolent entity, rather than an evil unleashed?

What is evil anyway? To me, it is the force that comes between a human being’s ties to others, a force that separates a person from everything and everyone they love and takes who they are away from them. We call it lots of things; greed, lust, jealousy – the seven deadly sins, basically. It is the dark force, the chaos that separates a person from themselves, from their potential, and from those who love them. Beauty is the opposite.   Beauty can be symetrical or not, full of energy or subdued, glowing with light or full of shadows. It brings us closer to ourselves, closer to each other and closer to God.  There is no cacophony of chaos in beauty.

Opiates destroy individuals and dynasties with ferocious equanimity by fooling humans into believing they are experiencing beauty.   I may be completely naïve or intolerably optimistic but I think the power of beauty can save our youth from the power of opiates. Exposing our children as young as we can to beauty through nature, music, and the arts is a form of inoculation and re-instituting the arts in schools and into their everyday experience helps them see the possibilities within themselves, within others and within the world around them.

I appreciate how simplistic this sounds and one can argue that global politics and third world economic reform is the answer. I agree to a point. That’s a macrocosm, I’m thinking of it on a micro level.  Within our own neighborhoods and our own families, we need to take action to help them build resistance. Let’s give our children beauty first in the hopes that by doing so, we make them strong enough to resist the power of the pretender. Let’s put music and art back in the schools, let’s put money into building public gardens and planting trees, let’s teach them about our Gods and about character and honor.

It is in our individual, adult efforts that we give strength to one power over the other, that we protect our children from one by giving them the other. Like vulgarity, beauty is contagious. We have the power to choose which becomes their familiar.

Beauty is contagious, spread it.