A meditation on Loving Beauty and Lusting for Celebrities

You guys know me and my penchant for falling into moments where I ALMOST love the creature so much more than the Creator. Anyway, here is a quote:

"Do not let any family member who is amiable, moral, and attractive die without coming to You" --the Valley of Vision, Puritan prayers


Uhm... At first, one thinks... "So what, we are only to pray for the salvation of the amiable moral and attractive family members, not the frustrating immoral ugly ones?"


But then I got to thinking

It's funny the human love of beauty. I remember God once or twice challenging me. I have all these actors whom I love -- actors who are beautiful and who i lust for, who are wonderful and witty. And I sometimes just look at them

and it's like God said to me: "These people who entertain you, and whom you love because of their beauty, and talent, and wit...think about their souls as well. Pray for them to be saved. Don't just enjoy beautiful people and forget about their souls."

It is shallow to pray for an actor because one likes him because he's beautiful. But there are other actors and celebrities as well. People who are amiable but don't have  beauty. Or folks who, like the Japanese society, have a weirdly communal goodness and morality, people who are trying to be good but who are so far from the truth. 

It's true that all humans are in need of salvation, not just the good beautiful souls. But there are those we love and who we kinda don't think of their souls at all. We are consumers in this world, and beautiful witty entertainers are people we consume. When they get old and lose their beauty, or their wit...we toss them aside for others who are more beautiful. Can it say we really loved them in any true deep way? Or were we merely consuming them?

So we really have to remember that those who give us pleasure are not merely things placed on the earth to make us laugh or to make us wonder with their beauty. We can't just stop at using them for their looks or their kindness. We must see a bit deeper and we must learn to want these objects of beauty to live forever in heaven and to be blessed with spiritual truth.

It's odd this notion of beauty. We love Beauty because we know intrinsically that beauty should be normal, but yet on the earth it isn't. The angels are beautiful, flowers are beautiful. So we do love beautiful people a lot more in many ways. But it is also a shallow age where we have fine-tuned this notion of beauty to a weird degree. But forgetting Beauty for a moment...even if the celebrity is just amiable. Or a great singer. Or has brought us pleasure by his/her wit, we must go deeper into this and not see them as commodities.

We ignore both the ugly and the beautiful when we pray for only the souls of those who are our friends, families, neighbors, foes. The only thing some stranger we lust for has going for him to make us pray for him might be his beauty or his wit or his talent. This quote FORCES US TO NOT SEE PEOPLE AS THINGS. Of course, all this is spoken by someone who lusts for hottie young Korean popstars and Japanese actors.