A woman gets onto a bus with her baby.
The bus driver says, "That's the ugliest baby that I've ever seen. Ugh!"
The woman goes to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her, "The driver just insulted me!"
The man says, "There's no call for that. You go right up there and tell him off.
Go ahead; I'll hold your monkey for you."
In our hearts we honestly have to admit that at times we identify with that monkey. As an adolescent I remember concern about my emerging nose, and those Rolheiser ears. As we struggled through adolescence with our physical images and stature, we often felt that it would be great to be anybody else but me.
Maturity has its rewards. Now I know that God made each one of us different from everyone else. It is a gift to be who and what we are, a gift that no one else in the world has. Our uniqueness fills us with gratitude. We are the perfect product of the Divine Creator, and God "don't make junk".
For many of us the "ugly duckling" story has an application. Eventually we meet someone who falls in love, with what? With the nose and ears and Adam's apple God endowed us with. It is true that every bride and every groom, on their wedding day, are the most beautiful they have ever been.
It gets better. As we mature and age an inner beauty replaces the fading externals. Have you seen a more beautiful Saint than Mother Teresa before her death? I imagine God feels the same way.
Thomas Merton shares a mystical experience that reflects our true inner beauty in the most ordinary of circumstances. After 20 years in a Trappist monastery one day he went into Louisville for a medical appointment. He was standing at the intersection of 4th and Walnut Streets, when suddenly the ordinary changed into the extraordinary.
Everyone around him began to shimmer with a deep, divine radiance. They were all walking around, he wrote, "shining like the sun Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their heartswhere neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes If only we could see each other that way all the time... I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other."
In "A Well Dressed Beauty" writer Linda Wegner shares the following: "I read Coco Chanel's comment 'A woman with good shoes is never ugly'. Smug with justification for being well-heeled, I found myself nodding in agreement. No one knows better than I do that I'm your average 'mature woman' who has never been nominated for a beauty anything, but I've always worn shoes that are polished, in good repair and mostly, in style. According to Chanel's definition, being less than lithe but neatly dressed and wearing good shoes puts me into the 'never ugly' category."
Those of us who are privileged to know Linda Wegner through her spiritual writing and Christian living know that she is in the "always beautiful" category.
She goes on to share Isaiah 61:3"To console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness"
"Those are free," Wegner says, "The shoes you have to buy."
