Perceiving inherent beauty in everything that exists

Wendy Farley began her career as a philosophical theologian. In the last 25 years, she has also studied contemplative practice and theology in Christianity, Buddhism, and other religious traditions. She has infused her book, Beguiled by Beauty: Cultivating a Life of Contemplation and Compassion (Westminster John Knox Press, 2020), with practical advice for opening the door to compassion, empathy, contemplation, joyfulness, and finding beauty in a society rife with challenges and injustice.

“I felt like we are entering a really difficult and dangerous period of our history,” says Farley, the Rice Family Chair of Spirituality in the Graduate School of Theology, about conceiving this book. Dealing with issues such as climate change, political division, and street violence, she says, “makes it very important to offer the resources for developing compassion for each other.”

That means a sense of justice and compassion for all beings—even those you might feel hostile toward, she says. “There’s a lot written on compassion, but I wanted to think about beauty as the doorway to compassion and empathy for people who are suffering and are experiencing difficulty. It’s a different way of nurturing our capacity for good.”

Exploring accessible avenues for contemplation “isn’t just sitting down and stilling your mind, which can be difficult for many people,” she says. Farley offers simple practices to connect to the divine source: “It’s working your mind to always put it in a place of positive attributes—in the place of the divine goodness—in all the different contexts of your life.”