Finding my beauty
“Every woman is beautiful,” announced a speaker at a retreat I was attending. “And I don’t mean spiritually, on the inside. Every single woman is physically beautiful, and if you don’t believe that, then you need to pray about it.”
I had struggled to sit through her talk up to that point – not because I didn’t agree with her, but because I identified with the experiences she described to a painful degree. Like me, she had been bullied by her peers at a young age, and like me, she had come away with the deep-seated belief that she was ugly, that her appearance was at the root of this rejection. Her story struck so close to the bone as to be a direct hit. It literally had me squirming in my seat. What kept me listening though, was the hope that she would tell us the story of how she had escaped from that destructive view of herself, and give me a road map to follow. And she did, in a sense.
She told us how she had had a relationship with a loving man who called her beautiful over and over, until she began to believe it herself. This was the reason she gave for declaring that every woman was beautiful. “That’s fine for you,” I felt like saying. “But what about those of us who aren’t in a relationship, and who possibly never will be? What are we supposed to do?” The end of her story felt to me like an insult, like a thin bandage slapped over a gaping wound. To my mortification, I was unable to control myself: I burst into angry tears and ran out of the room.
The ugly truth
Initially, I tried to rationalise my angry response. I argued that calling every woman beautiful contradicted the meaning of the word. I defined beauty as a certain aesthetic standard, the degree to which a woman’s appearance was pleasing to the eye. With every woman in the world looking so physically different, how could we all possibly meet the same standard? I felt that no matter what her intentions had been, the speaker’s talk was dishonest, and that was what had made me so angry. We couldn’t just twist the meaning of words, I argued, even if it made us feel better.
Unsurprisingly, my attempts to be “honest” about beauty did nothing to heal my destructive self-image. Back then, I still hated what I saw in the mirror and obsessed about my weight, my skin, my teeth, and everything else that could possibly go wrong with my appearance. At the same time, I didn’t apply my theory of beauty to the people around me. I didn’t measure my friends or family by that visual standard – I delighted in the sight of the people I loved. I was not practising what I preached.
A shift in perspective
One day, while praying, I wondered whether being made ugly (as I saw it at the time) might not be a kind of blessing, God’s gift to protect me from vanity and pride. Unusually, I received a very definite response: I do not make ugly things. I wasn’t certain whether these words came from me or the Lord, but I couldn’t dismiss them out of hand. Perplexed, I went to talk to a friend who had attended the retreat with me. I told her that to me, calling everyone beautiful felt like erasing our uniqueness, forcing every woman into a rigid, one-size-fits-all mould. “I think you’re stuck on the worldly definition of beauty,” she said.
This was the start of a shift in perspective for me. After that conversation, I saw that I had been measuring myself by the eyes of the world, and what they saw as beautiful. This standard, pushed at me from books, films, my peers and strangers on the Internet, truly is a rigid mould. To be called beautiful by the world means being thin and having high cheekbones, full, pouting lips and vaguely exotic eyes – if you’ve ever spent five minutes scrolling through the beauty tag on Instagram or Pinterest, then you’ll know what I mean. This worldly definition of beauty is narrow and exacting, because it reduces femininity to a question of sexual desirability. I had always claimed to believe that there was more to female beauty than being perceived as ‘sexy’.
But I didn’t practice what I preached here either. Looking back over my life, I can see that this standard has always defined the way I’ve thought of my body – in fact, it led me to reject my body because it didn’t perfectly conform with that worldly idea of what beauty is.
Seeing through heaven’s eyes
Part of the reason that this perception of the body came to dominate my worldview was that I was never given a strong positive vision to counter it. The Church mostly taught me to focus on spiritual beauty and inner perfection, and of course, that is important. I know that the Lord won’t be judging me by the circumference of my hips or the straightness of my teeth on the Last Day! However, there’s a difference between recognising the rightful primacy of the spirit and hating my body because I believed that it was ugly, which is what I had been doing. When I was taught about religion, my body was simply never mentioned; my body image was left as a blank page, and the world was free to scribble all over it in thick, red ink.
But once I realised that I’d internalised a false view of my body, I began to wonder what the actual truth was. I knew the Church had to have some kind of teaching on the body, so I went looking for it. I found it in the aptly named Theology of the Body, a series of lectures given by St John Paul II in the early ‘80s on the way in which God is revealed by the human body. I listened to talks by Christopher West on the subject and felt something unlock in my heart. First and foremost, I learned that my body was made in God’s own image: it was something I’d heard before, but never really thought about or considered the implications of. My body, as it is, right now, is an image of divine love – generous, life-giving love. No wonder I received such a sharp response when I called it ugly.
But the Theology of the Body does not finish there. It asks, why has God made our bodies this way? What does it tell us about His plan for us, that our bodies are made for a fruitful union? What is going to happen to our bodies at the final resurrection? Christopher West put it very simply: “God wants to marry us.” When I heard that, I realised that the speaker at the retreat had been right, in a way; I was just too hurt to see it. It is in being desired that I can find my beauty, just as she did. The missing point was that this does not have to happen in the context of a romantic relationship. God, who is Beauty personified, wants to woo me like a bridegroom. In the eyes of the Lord, I am told, my body is quite literally a temple. I do not have to be thin, or smooth-skinned, or endowed with perfectly symmetrical features for Christ to desire union with me, for Him to want to come and live in my normal, flesh-and-blood body.
Of course, far from being an easy, comfortable thing to believe, this makes my hair stand on end. I spent so long accepting the lie that I was ugly that it actually hurts my pride to be accepted and loved as I am. I want to make myself perfect, to be deserving of love, and yet I can never manage it. Instead, love is bestowed on me as a free gift, too enormously gracious for me to believe in it with my full heart. It is a truth too massive for me to absorb on my own. It is humiliating for a proud, independent adult, but if I want to see my own beauty, I must ask Him to show it to me, as He showed the bride in the Song of Songs.
What He says to her, He says to me, and everybody: You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you. (Song 4:7)