As someone who feels a great attraction to beauty, I came across this nice little post on divine beauty by a blogger named Bhetti: http://healbritannia.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/divine-beauty/

As she says:

Words uttered by the Prophet Muhammad: “God is Beautiful and Loves Beauty.” To surround yourself in beauty, then, is to more easily be struck by an awe important for communing with divinity. To surround yourself in beauty is a religious practice.

This needs to be repeated: God is Beautiful and Loves Beauty.

And I wholeheartedly agree that to surround yourself in beauty is a religious practice. There is link between the beautiful and the divine.

I don’t think I have come across such a statement before. In the dark, pragmatic, utilitarian and reductivist world of North American, Calvanist and Catholic Irish dominated Christianity, such sentiments about beauty are few and far between.  There is a reason why so many of our Churches, especially those constructed in the past half century, are so hideous. Partly it is due to the poisonous influence of nihilistic modern thought, but part of it is also due to certain distrust of aesthetic pleasure that is inherent in a lot of Protestant and Catholic thought, especially those of the Northern European kind. I always love beauty and enjoy plunging into the beautiful whenever I can.

Also, in our world of great religious tensions, it is nice to dwell upon such statements. There is nothing but truth and goodness expressed here.

I often rejoice in the pleasures of physical beauty and the sensual delights therein. Yet spiritual beauty is important too, perhaps, in the end, more important than physical beauty. Of course, when you combine both physical and spiritual beauty, you have the best of both worlds. On those few occasions I have discovered both, I have found great happiness.