God and the Blood Orange
As of late, I’ve been on a kick of eating blood oranges. A blood orange is, yes, an orange, but has tints of red, and even dark red, like, might we say, as dark as blood. The peel of the orange isn’t your usual bright colored orange as you’d expect; each one is different, and some have plenty of dark red hues throughout the peel.
That’s not even the best part. The blood orange’s beauty lies within its protective outer peel. Each slice of the blood orange has variations of the orange to blood-red transition. Some of the slices are more pronounced than others but each one is really very eye-catching.
The other day I was eating one and as I was about to eat a slice, I stopped and took a moment to really look at the fruit. I set it on a sheet of white paper so that I could in a way draw out its colors more vibrantly. It really struck me as perhaps the most beautiful and colorful piece of fruit I had seen. I ate the rest of the orange but thought, “a fruit, the size of the palm of my hand, had completely captured my attention and made me appreciate its beauty. What?”
Why go into such detail about a blood orange? Why not, I say! When was the last time you really stopped to appreciate the intricate beauty of something as ordinary as a blood orange? Where does the blood orange gets its beauty? Why does it need to be colored the way that it is? What purpose does that serve?
The world around us is truly beautiful. Yet, how often do we take the time to appreciate and reflect upon world’s attractive qualities. The world can seem dark at times with what we’re inundated with on a regular basis. But the thing is, the beauty is there waiting for us to recognize it.
I’d argue that blood oranges and other visually enticing things around us point us somewhere. They draw us out of ourselves, towards another. Upwards. I’d argue they point us to the Creator. Why make a blood orange the way it is, or build La Catedral de Santiago de Compostela the way it was? What’s the point? Beauty, in the style of the Church fathers, is the tangible and physical representation of the perfection of God. The fact that beauty is and appeals to us, could be, I’d offer, a means of communicating with our Heavenly Father, to ponder His goodness, not because He needs it, but because we do.
God’s beauty and omniscience is so good that I’d challenge you to contemplate His infiniteness and goodness the next time you peel a blood orange, or step inside the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, or gaze upon the ceiling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
