In Act 5 Scene 2, Hamlet delivers to Horatio one of Shakespeare's most oft-quoted lines: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will."

   Why worry about mistakes? Hamlet tells us. Everything is already predetermined by God.

   The reason I don't accept this view is that it seems to defeat our humanity. If there is nothing we can do, for what are we responsible?

   Life is a partnership between God and us. Love opens the door to God's light. Our role is to walk through it. 

   Our choice is whether to open to God's Love or to ignore it.

   How do we "find" Beauty? It's already here, of course. 

   The "divinity" isn't in the dish rag or in the sun. It's in the way we notice and celebrate the relationship between the two. 

   This doesn't mean we can't create. It means our best creations appear because we listened for Love's song, trained our voices to sing it, and acted to serve up this music to ourselves and others.

   I didn't manage the cloth in the photograph to catch the light. I simply noticed it and photographed it. A painter could express this beauty. A musician could convert this image to song. A poet could describe it. An entire novel or film could be inspired from the way this cloth turns to catch a slice of sun.

  An example appears in the 1956 movie "The Red Balloon." In it, a balloon follows a small boy through his travels in the streets of Paris. The film succeeds because we see the divine in the relationship between balloon and boy. 

   We can train our hearts to see divinity. We can do the same with others we love.

   As you and I create together, the divine can appear. Two people in love can nurture divinity in their lives so that their relationship becomes more and more sacred.

   Yet, we often do the reverse. We may take both ourselves and those we love for granted. The more matter-of-fact we are, the less we are likely to experience the divine. 

   The more violent and disrespectful we are, the more we desecrate of Beauty. There is no divinity in the human acts of rape or child abuse or murder.

   Similarly, pornography degrades everyone involved. Pornography, of course, does not mean nudity. Otherwise, great works of art like Michelangelo's "David," Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" or Edward Weston's photographs of nudes would be banned instead of celebrated.

   The power of these examples is that they teach us not how to "rough hew" divinity but how to  let God guide our efforts.

   Look at the photograph. 

   How could such a thing be divine? How can your life celebrate divinity in our relationships?

-Erie Chapman

Photograph- "Dish Towel 1a" copyright erie chapman 2012