You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are “yours” and which are “mine.” It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible…
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
That's exactly it. It is intimacy that makes us new and, to our own amazement, incredible. Yes, we really do become incredible — but we are so overwhelmed by the joy of the beloved that there is little room for vanity in our new-found self-awareness. It is our encounter with an oh so tender, oh so patient, and oh so certain affection that transforms us.
And this is exactly what I have found in God. I have found, or rather been found by, a God who has sifted through my shabby corners, who has entered into the debris of my life, and declared me to be something beautiful — and in that declaration I have actually become something beautiful.
It is this realisation that is the foundation for my own vision. Having been transformed by such an encounter how can I not see others as beautiful? It's not as though I am turning a blind-eye to everything that is hurtful, broken, or dirty within others, it's just that I have become aware of the fact that all of us are beloved by God. And when we start to see others as beloved, we also begin to discover that they are truly lovely. Yes, here too is beauty, here too is life, here too is that which takes my breath away.
And what I've really been meaning to say, all this time, is that I love you.