Beauty and the Beast
In Walt Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast’ there is a scene near the end of the film where the heroine “Belle” finally kisses the ugly beast. Immediately not only is he transformed into the ubiquitous handsome prince, but the screen is filled wth blazing stars and lusciously romantic music. Watching this a friend of ours remarked with some degree of cynicism to her young daughter, “Don’t expect your first kiss to be quite like that”.
This scene came to my mind recently as I read an article in the Times about the latest teenage phone App. Known as “Am I Pretty” apps, teenagers who use these upload a photo of themselves and the AI driven algorithm will rate how pretty they are. As if teenagers don’t already face enough body issues!. The app analyses the photo to determine the holder’s facial symmetry structure and the proportion of their features to give them a score. Some of these apps compare the holder’s features to those of celebrities. Others offer beauty products designed to achieve a higher score. It doesn’t take a genius to work out the impact of such apps on the self esteem of often fragile teenage egos. The terrifying message is, “if you’re not pretty, you’re nothing”. Commenting on these apps one psychologist remarks, “Real beauty is not about facial symmetry or the distance between your eyes”. To put it another way true beauty is inner beauty, ie beauty of character and attitude and action.
That brought me back to “Beauty and the Beast”. It wasn’t Belle’s outer beauty that changed the Beast, but the beauty of her action. In reaching out to what the world saw as an ugly reject she transformed him and made him whole. Writing in the New Testament Peter, one of the early church leaders, gives a similar message. Writing to Christian women (although this could also be applied to men) he said this. “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment such as elaborate hairstyles———rather it should come from the inner self, the unfading beauty of a quiet and gentle spirit”. Notice that word “unfading”. Inner beauty ie the beauty of your character will never fade whether you are 8 or 80. Outer beauty will fade all too quickly despite all the beauty treatments in the world. Inner beauty is not afraid of the bathroom mirror. It is that inner beauty that Jesus offers to all who ask. The beauty of a kind and loving heart. I wonder if we taught our teenagers that kind of beauty whether many of their problems would vanish.