Beauty is a slippery term, really, covering everything from a good looking human being to a work of fine art to a piece of symphonic music to a sunset over the ocean, and more.  It's definable, but it's not, apprehensible, but not.  We all see it differently.  The French memoirist Marcel Proust, famous for his lengthy, insightful, and voluminous In Search of Lost Time, once observed that beauty occurs when our perceptions of present reality remind us of some long ago and now lost experience.
     Proust had a good point.  We build our present on our past, and we live on the basis of what we remember going forward.  Sometimes beauty surprises us, sometimes we expect to see it.  What we find genuinely beautiful, however, we find to be so largely because it speaks to us in a way that other things do not.  It seems to encompass and enlarge our ideas, like tentacles of an octopus, remembered from recently or long ago, about what is most pleasing or remarkable about the world.  Whoever we are, we find beauty to be singularly special and unique.
     Long did the Greek philosophers debate over the meaning of the beautiful, trying hard to discern exactly what it is.  They only succeeded when they agreed that it is rooted in some sort of ultimate point, some sort of final definition.  But what would this be?  We're still looking.
     The greatest beauty, however, is that which is new, radically new, and in no way dependent on the old.  Although it builds on and connects to the old, it has not been produced by the old.  It's never been before.  The prophet Isaiah once recorded God saying, "Behold, I create something new; even now it will spring forth."
     The greatest beauty is that there is beauty at all--and that we can know that it is so--the beauty of the absolutely new, the inexhaustible newness of God.
     It's a wide open universe.