I remember as a young girl watching my grandmother's skin care routine. 

I wanted her skin.  It was perfect in my eyes.  Soft, tender, with deep lines that had  witnessed her love affair with all things warm: the sun, the outdoors, exposure to the light, and to what it means to live and love and let be.

My eyes coveted the story my grandmother's skin told.  I wanted those lines, I wanted the softness of her skin. 

I'd watch her put on her foundation, lightly covering her sunkissed cheeks and I ached to one day have that kind of skin.

I've thought about those days as of late, especially as my own skin is starting to show and tell its own story. 

The past three years have accentuated the story my face, my skin has lived.  And there is a deep and strong pull within me to want to silence the continuation of the story that is unfolding based on my facial lines. 

I think of one particular moment from this year, after a season of intense loss, looking in the mirror and desperately wanting to erase these deep lines across my skin.

Age, time, the cost that comes with living in this beautiful and heart breaking world was bearing down on me.

My forehead lines had grown deeper, new lines seemed to appear overnight.  They reminded me harshly and visibly of the weight of time leaving its mark on my body.

Everything in me wanted to pick up the phone and schedule that consultation. 

Can you make it stop?  I wanted to ask.  Can you make these lines of time disappear? 

And beneath all that, an even deeper cry:  Am I still beautiful with all these lines of time leaving their testimony on my face? 

Can you see beyond them?   Do you see the kind of beauty that lives timelessly in one’s depths?  She's there, isn't she, the essence of my beauty can still be witnessed even amid, and among all these lines? 

My existential beauty questions were an invitation from my own soul to remember these lines as a divine mark of love; each line representing a joy or a pain I have lived through.  Mistakes I weathered.  A tragedy I embraced.  A dysfunctional thought pattern I lived into for too long.  The grief of a failed relationship. A deep laugh or line of thought I refused to push away. An ugly cry I decided to welcome.

Our bodies were meant to hold these lines.  Our faces, meant to be canvases displaying the work of art that time and living ask us to bare.   

These lines are a beautiful melody of existence, etched over and upon our bodies.

——-

*I want the tone of my words to be tender, but I cannot fail to mention this, clearly: There is a whole system, an empire system, designed by a certain kind of power structure that has a root system that is as old as time. This empire system knows how to take what God deemed “good” in the beginning and contort it into something evil. It is a system that has distorted the meaning of imago dei (the truth that we all are created in the image of God) by the way it has created systemic boxes of exclusion, giving certain groups the power to control narratives over what bodies are in fact beautiful. And it is evil. Think power and principalities evil. And it is a system that is not, in any way, for you or your body. Never has been. Never will be. Do not be blinded by its subtleties and all its forms. The whole arc of the Gospel story, the God story, is about the call to love people beyond any kind of empire constructed boxes or definitions. It is a love story about being liberated from such empire structures. By the God of Love. The Creator of beauty. Please be awake and please be careful.*

——-

I think of the healing gift I have received through the love of a man who has always been able to see through and beyond the dominant narratives of beauty, both internally and externally. I think about how being loved in this way, for the essence of who I am, the good and the bad, has healed a deep dysfunction I have long held towards and within myself. This love has taught me how to be at peace within my own skin, to be at home in my own body. His love shows me how to have grace towards those ever deepening lines and imperfections I want to erase. He has taught me, in his own way, how to cherish the unedited beauty of who I am.

And this kind of love makes me think about how I will live in front of my son.  A boy, soon to be man, who will feel the weight of temptation to define beauty by a kind of harsh and toxic cultural narrative.  Can I live another path for him?  Can I model a different way, a way of being grounded in my own skin, allowing his pure eyes to behold my unedited lines? 

Will this small act of resistance make any difference in him, in the way I hope to raise him, to be a man that sees into the depths rather than the edited surface of things?  Will he be the kind of man that can look at any human and see their beauty, their deepest beauty, in all its raw form and complexity? 

Can I teach him how to behold beauty in a way that pushes against that strong pull, those empire systems, that objectify women, people, based on appearances, on size, on skin?

God, I hope so. 

God, I pray so.

There are moments when my son’s blue eyes sink deep into mine, and I realize the beauty of what he sees: me, the essence of me. The God in him catches a glimpse of the God in me and all my soul can sing is: My eyes have seen the glory of the Lord.

This child of mine, with his pure seeing, has healed me.

I know this in my bones.

And I think about what I will model for my daughter, a fierce and tender spirit who looks to me, implicitly, to show her what it means to hold beauty in one’s depths.  Most days I wonder if I’m up to the task.  Can I hold this sacred space?  Can I teach of another way: one that does not rely on silencing the testimony of living in one’s skin?  One that refuses to succumb to the smallness of an empire that seeks to lull its adherents to sleep: Silently.  Invisibly.  One fine line at a time. 

Can I teach her, with the evidence of embodying my own skin, what it means to consciously resist the dominate pull of cultural norms, those empire systems, that have constructed false definitions of beauty?  Can I model for her what it means to speak truth to a certain and particular kind of power structure by the way she actively lives in her own skin? Can her eyes learn to behold the God-given beauty of those who look, or think, or believe nothing like she does?

Can I show her another way, one outside the constructs of narratives that will forever tell her beauty lives solely confined to manmade, empire systems that only deal in harsh and exclusionary lines of interpretation? 

Can I tenderly hold her own skin, cherishing its uniqueness, its softness, the beautiful canvas that it is, and remind her with all of my unspoken fervor, all of my focused lines, to let herself be.  And may she let others be, too.

May she be exactly as her skins longs for her to be: Free. Soft.  Real. Open.

Unedited and beautiful.

God, I hope so.

God, I pray so.

I think back to that young girl, beholding her grandmother's skin.  The one who noticed each tender line of time, marking an ancient path of living, loving, and loss.  She was a matriarch of strength, unafraid of her own unedited reflection.  A lover of all things warm.  A survivor of deep love and deep loss.  And it showed.  She never stopped it. Thanks be to God, she always let it show.

This is the essence of beauty, I remind myself.  Full, in the flesh, imperfect, stunningly embodied, ever unfolding beauty, it lives in us all.  Always has. Always will.

**It feels a bit tone deaf of me to write something on beauty amid all the pain our world is holding this week. And yet, what I am learning with time is how powerful it can be to call out particular beauty; to see it, to name it, as best we can, even among and alongside unthinkable pain. I think of Mary Oliver’s wise declaration: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

When I was in the fifth grade I got the chance to go to Israel. I was young, so young, but even then, I realized it was a profound experience. Our guide for our time there was a Palestinian man. He was kind. Tender. So warm. The God in me, saw the God in him, it was impossible not to see it in him. Early on in our tour we were at a holy sight, and we heard yelling directed our way, his way. I couldn’t understand the language of what was being said, but my soul knew, instantly, this dear friend, our beloved guide was under attack. Rather than violently entering into an exchange with this group, he moved on. He invited us into his home, he invited us to meet his family. He told us stories of war and hate and unthinkable ancient violence that has permeated the area for far too long. Intellectually, I struggled to hold this history, but intuitively, soulfully, I just remember thinking of this man’s beauty. His God given essence, shining through, speaking and showing us all what embodied Love, embodied Gospel, looks like in such an incredibly broken and nuanced world.

May our “telling about it,” those moments of beholding beauty in all its forms, be the small act of resistance in the name of Love that moves us all toward one another. May our eyes behold the beauty of the other, may the God in us always look for the God in the other.

One telling, one gaze at a time. I still believe this is what heals.

Lord in your mercy, hear this prayer.