#hwba

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Diab Alkarssifi, Lebanon, 1989

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Palestinian Christian couple from Ramallah, undated (before 1920) via UC Riverside Museum of Photography

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General Union of Palestinian Women, 1976

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The more human beings desire and search for their divine beloved, even more does God desire and search for them.

Miguel H. Díaz, Queer God de Amor (2022)

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The Six Corporal Works of Mercy, carved ivory cover for the Melisende Psalter, Palestine, 12th century

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Oh, how sweet your presence will be to me, You Who are the supreme good! I must draw near You in silence and uncover my feet before You that You may be pleased to unite me to You in marriage, and I will not rest until I rejoice in Your arms. Now I ask You, Lord, not to abandon me at any time in my recollection, for I am a squanderer of my soul.

Maxims of St. John of the Cross

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Beauty and the yearning that it engenders bind the soul to that for which it longs. The more powerful the beauty, the more powerful the longing, and the more powerful the bonds that are forged. “Beauty summons all things to itself,” writes St. Dionysios, “and gathers everything to itself." And the divine beauty, which is beyond beings, and thus can render from itself to beautiful beings the beauty they possess, generates a divine longing (erōs) that leads the soul beyond itself so that it belongs to that for which it longs. Moreover, as St. Gregory of Nyssa points out in commenting on the Song of Songs, the experience of this divine longing renders the soul insatiable: “Even as now the soul that is joined to God is not satiated by her enjoyment of him, so too the more abundantly she is filled up with his beauty, the more vehemently her longings abound.” Nor is this provocative beauty to be found only in the starry skies, for all around us we can find “some slight trace of the divine fragrance, which the whole creation, after the manner of a jar for ointments, imitates within itself by the wonders that are seen within it.”

Bruce V. Foltz, The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible (2013)

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Frequent combing gives the hair more lustre and makes it easier to comb; a soul that frequently examines its thoughts, words, and deeds, which are its hair, doing all things for the love of God, will have lustrous hair. Then the Spouse will look upon the neck of the bride and thereby be captivated, and will be wounded by one of her eyes, that is, by the purity of intention she has in all she does. If in combing hair one wants it to have lustre, one begins from the crown. All our works must begin from the crown (the love of God) if we wish them to be pure and lustrous.

Maxims of St. John of the Cross