There's a moment in the film 'Casablanca' when the face of Ingrid Bergman is set in close-up, all shadow and soft focus and distilled light, and for that brief few seconds, she appears to me to be the most beautiful woman on Earth.
 
That very same shadow and focus and light is used on Humphrey Bogart in several close-ups, and it doesn't really seem to do a thing for him. All things are not equal.

I love beautiful photographs. I always have. If I could have been anything, other than a musician, a writer, a singer, I would love to have been a photographer. I would also love to have been an architect, building small cathedrals and Latin American-style housing developments with courtyards and common areas and portals and stairs to the rooftops.

Beauty may be subjective, and perhaps at times lie in the eye of the beholder, but it is also often so spiritually ordained and concocted that there can be no doubt where it comes from and what it is that makes a beautiful thing beautiful. It comes from the Artisan and Physician, the God of all creation, who surely has an eye for beautiful things, and wants us to enjoy beauty whenever and wherever we can.

Your list might be different than mine, though I suspect we'd all agree that the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls or the Shenandoah Mountains are beautiful, without a doubt. A polar bear floating on an ice cap, or an Okapi drinking from a watering hole just a few yards away from a zebra or giraffe on the African plains is nothing but beautiful to just about any eye that beholds it.

I used to work with a bunch of guys who would occasionally poll each other to critique everyone's list of Ten Most Beautiful's. 'Women,' of course, was usually the topic. Those lists would be amazingly different and unique. It was sometimes shocking to hear what some guys considered 'beautiful.'

My wife is beautiful in a classic, exotic kind of way, but she's usually the most beautiful to me in the morning, drinking coffee, sans make-up, prior to getting all 'fixed up.' I catch myself often, staring across the room at her, remembering the first few times we met, before whatever physical beauty I saw finally manifest itself in the deep, deep inner beauty that made her face just about perfect to me. Beauty being 'skin deep' gets quickly shot out of the water once you've spent a decent amount of time with someone whose beauty is revealed over and over again in kindness, joy, and energetic concern. It inspires and it comforts and it beckons.

I can't say why, exactly, but I think one of the most beautiful things on Earth is a pregnant woman. If that's even remotely shocking to anyone it shouldn't be, and I wouldn't waste much breath trying to explain.

I think Myrna Loy is absolutely beautiful in 'The Best Years of Our Lives,' particularly when she's not the focus of the scene. I guess that means I think great acting is beautiful. It's what makes Al Pacino beautiful in 'Dog Day Afternoon,' and Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron both beautiful in 'An American in Paris.' Paris is beautiful, too, by the way. The last scene in the film 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,' when Spencer Tracy gives what would be his final great speech on film, just weeks before he died, that's poignantly beautiful.

'A River Runs Through It' is a beautiful film.

Of course, from Beethoven's 9th to 'Thunder Road,' there is everlasting and mysterious beauty in music. I'm all but certain that on our initial tour through the streets of Heaven, Samuel Barber's 'Adagio for Strings' will ring through the corridors and roundabouts and green valleys of  Paradise and completely contradict the long-held belief that there will be no tears in Heaven.

We cry over beautiful things. I cry at weddings when the bride comes down the aisle and we all stand in her honor, and in honor of her father who must now hand her over.

We cry over and over again during the same scenes in movies that we've already seen a hundred times. You know what's coming. You still choke up.

I cry listening to beautiful sermons preached from a humble pulpit.

I'd be happy to fill my life with more and more beauty and less and less tension and disagreement and cruel arrogance. I'd be happy to find more of the beauty we used to know in our quietness. The loud, shrill voices of angry men and women drowns out the sound of the songs we used to sing. I'd be happy to sing 'We Shall Overcome' every Sunday in church, if it meant that we took each other's hands and braced ourselves for the storm.

La Sagrada Familia will one day be swept up from Barcelona, and replanted in either the new Earth or the new Heaven, not sure which. It will get finished, finally. Gaudi will have his dream. Beauty will have its day. We will waste no more time in pride and prejudice and ignorance and cruel brutality. We will find beauty all around us. And Ingrid Bergman and Myrna Loy and the photographs of Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, and the paintings of Van Gogh and Modigliani and Kahlo and Chagall, and the music of Ludwig and Amadeus and Johannes and Bono and Bruce will fill the skies and the streets and the landscape of whatever life it is that awaits us, that is being prepared for us.

'Til then, we need more weddings, more great films, more deeply spiritual 'folk' songs, more open spaces, more cathedrals, more photographs. I'd upload one here of my wife, but she'd kill me. It's a face that takes on global proportions; Turkish, perhaps, or Arab, or Spanish, or Italian; or straight out of the American Southwest; without make-up, drinking coffee, listening intently and patiently to yet another story told by her young son. It's the face of love and beauty, and I'm blessed by it at every turn.

I don't know that beauty is more important than anything else. Surely that wouldn't be true. Love is most important, with truth and faith and hope right up there alongside it. But that's where beauty resides. In love, and in faith, and in hope, and in truth. Awarm cup of 'chocolat' on a cold autumn night; a glass of sweet iced tea on a hot summer day; the sound of a baseball hitting the center of a glove; children laughing in a park; a glass of red wine shared with a friend or lover at a sidewalk café; the caves of Carlsbad, or the canyonlands of Utah, or the ocean along the beaches of Coronado Island.

We do trudge along in this life, but more than one wise person has told me before that life is too short, and what I assumed they meant was that time might be better spent looking for beauty rather than pursing your lips at every sour note you can find.

No doubt, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Say that five times.