It is More Important to Be Beautiful on the Inside

Raising daughters is easy, they grow up. Tomorrow is the birthday of my first daughter and I did nothing to get her to this day. I can buy a present, but I cannot prolong or put off the day. She has grown up to twenty-three without my doing a thing.

Making a beautiful, mature, Christian soul is a great labor and it is all God’s. Yet God allows some of us to contribute as she says a voluntary “yes” to Him. Ave!

I hope that I have helped in a few ways. God knows I wished to do so and yet was so afraid of making mistakes. Worse was a culture that would fight the good in her no matter what we did to help her. Terrifying it was to know that the little baby I held would someday be judged by what was on the outside and not by what was on the inside. It did not help that this baby was so beautiful that people would come over to touch her hair. She was that lovely on the outside.

Fairy Tales helped me. These wise old tales reminded me that beauty would love a beast, if the beast became as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside and inside. The Bible urged me to consider that outer beauty was good, but inner beauty was eternal.

The person, man or woman, that was beautiful on the inside would be seen to be beautiful forever by the All Knowing God. The Beauty of the fairy tale was beautiful on the outside, but it was her humility, a term we dare not say in polite company, that made her devastatingly lovely.

Beauty did not want riches, she wanted a rose from her father. Beauty knew her place and so transfigured that place into one of startling richness that made it desirable to everyone else. The way of the Beast is to desire the castle and hold onto the pinnacle of power until one has ceased to be human. The boor in power soon becomes a boar indeed. Pig-like, he wallows in money, fame, and every external thing until the ugliness within breaks out to the outside.

The wise see the Beast from the very start. Beauty comes and the Beast is transformed. How? Not by the external beauty of  Belle, though it is great. He has seen all of that before now and horded it in his castle. Belle is a servant and cannot be humiliated because she is so great and good. The powerful virtue of the woman more beautiful on the inside than the outside overcame all the piggishness. Humility made the servant’s role so beautiful that it was better than a crown.

It gave new life.

I hoped to teach this lesson to my girl by encouraging her to say, when people told her that she was beautiful, as they did so often: “It is more important to be beautiful on the inside than the outside.” Say it she did until it became a kind of joke. She could say it at high speed and so earn praise from us. I would like to think that it was a liturgy of truth: it was more important to be beautiful on the inside than the outside.

As my daughter grew more beautiful on the inside, good, strong, humble, kind, and true, she brought light, life, and loveliness to those around her. She has persisted in valuing herself for the divine spark within her and not for what can be bought, polished, or manufactured. She is a woman down to every cell of her body, but even that is the “outside.” She is a woman as God made women and so her mother and I are in awe of her beauty.

Her soul is more beautiful than her DNA. Her inner soul is known only to God, but it peeks out more beautiful still. If you know her, then you are transformed by her poetry, her wit, and her wisdom. She is doggedly determined and beautiful: inside and out.

Happy birthday, beautiful woman.