This morning I rescued two cute but battered end tables from someone's trash pile and I am going to paint them and make them like new again. There was a dresser and bed headboard and footboard too but to heavy for me to pick up alone. Someone beat me to the punch and scavenged the handles from the drawers.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor, maintains that the love of beauty is a natural good that brings peace and harmony to the human soul. The pursuit of beauty, albeit one of the highest of natural goods, can, however, be perverted and turned away from its proper end. St. Thomas, again reminds us, that even though "Every one loves beauty, spiritual people love spiritual beauty and carnal people love carnal beauty." (Comm. in Psalmos, 25, 5) Whereas spiritual beauty is ultimately found in its Source, God, carnal beauty can, and often does, lead away from Him. From the very beginning the pursuit of beauty has had its dangers and pitfalls. “And the woman saw that the fruit… was fair to the eyes and delightful to behold.” (Gen. III, 6) http://agdei.com/Art&Beauty2.html

"...we can also miss the deep-down Christ-pattern of reality because of its sheer elusiveness. God's presence in the singularity of created objects - the infinite housed in the finite, the shoreless ocean absorbed in a sponge - can be glimpsed but never held for long. It flashes before us like lightning, illuminating everything for a brief second before vanishing again. As creatures with finite rational powers, we find it impossible to hold in our minds the spiraling depths of inscape in a bird feather or fish scale. "Our vision fails, our thought fails, we cannot follow it home, we cannot reach its littleness or its vastness, for the end of both is God." We must be content with the realization that "God's way with us [is] to hide and reveal Himself at the same time" - not because God is coy, but because we can only take in so much." ~ from The Art of Dying and Living, by Kerry Walters, Lessons from Saints of Our Time

Images help us know when our sense of self, our relationship with God and others is distorted. They invite us to see and acknowledge unresolved feelings around hurt and forgiveness, as well as the blockages of pain and suffering. Above all, where can the healing and transforming power of images be experienced more effectively than in the space of a person's encounter with the divine source of healing and transformation? In the gospel story of the Samaritan woman, imagination may draw us to see the jar which she lowers into the well as an image containing her feeling responses and reactions to Christ challenging her in conversation. As she metaphorically raises draught upon draught, the Samaritan woman seems to reach down into the depth of her limited image of God, self, and other to encounter the transforming power of Jesus who mirrors and exalted image of God and the human person. ~ Art, Containment and Language of the Soul, Renate Dullman

Whenever we create or ponder images in a space set apart for silent, meditative and reflective experience, something will be known and understood about our inner feeling responses and resistances to new awarenesses, insights, and the kind of exchange which transforms into the 'image that we reflect' (Cor 3:18). Most importantly, images we make or contemplate in the context of prayer can enshrine moments of peak experience, which are thus held and remembered in visible form long after the experience has faded. ~ Art, Containment and Language of Soul

"What is done in love is done well." ~ Vincent Van Gogh