Beautifully gray

Dear friend

Quoting the phrase, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", is often the way a conversation ends when two people can't agree on whether or not something is aesthetically pleasing. In a related but rather different vein there is also the comment that a person has "inner beauty", which usually suggests, by faint praise, that they may be a nice person but they lack skin-deep good looks. Certainly concepts of what counts as beauty are not fixed to a universally agreed single standard.

An interesting insight into beauty comes from the Old Testament, Proverbs 20:29.

29 The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the gray head.

It isn't often in modern times that gray hair would be described as a feature of beauty. There are a few men whose maturation towards gray has not seemingly diminished their appeal, but these are surely the exceptions. Gray hair in men is usually seen as a problem to be disfavoured and even disguised; for women even more so.

Culturally, there are extreme examples such as elongated necks, lip bowls, bound feet, scarification and other modifications that are beauty enhancing in their own context. In more Western leaning societies beauty is increasingly fakery, with a reliance on products and treatments to obtain an idealised concept of beauty.

Returning to the scripture verse, maybe it would be useful to reconsider and re-establish the naturalised beauty of older adults. With the gray often comes experience, insight, wisdom, and thoughtfulness, and these surely all have value, and a form of beauty, when set against today's cult of youth.

I hope we can not only appreciate the older generation, but really see the beauty in lines and creases, in work-textured knarled hands, and yes in gray hair. I pray that we can accept ageing as a positive progressive process; and leave our longing for eternal youth until the Resurrection.

Samuel.