#*We're awakened to our insatiable longing for heaven
through both beauty and the painful marring of it.
For beauty hints to us of that for which we are truly made,
and its marring shouts that we are truly not meant to find it here.
We can be eternally grateful for beauty lost when we realize
that it's one of the great secret-tellers of the universe.
Still we fear it so and often fear even to hope for the beauty itself,
though they are a necessary cycle that fuels us on and drives us home.
We cannot deny or diminish our intense longing for beauty--
to see it and have it and be it, and we cannot pretend that its
dreadful loss does not press down upon us like a crushing weight.
We must let it crush us until our ache for heaven is excruciating.*#