The Man begins to Notice beauty...

John Eldredge quote:

"Down through its history the church has held up the good, the true, and the beautiful as a sort of trinity of virtues. As we think over the stages of the masculine journey, we find that the boy begins to understand Good as he learns right from wrong, and the warrior fights for what is True, but when a man comes to see that the beautiful is the best of the three, then is the lover awakened. As with the other stages, you'll find expressions of it in this youth, but something happens about the same time a young man begins to become a warrior, late in the cowboy stage, late in his teens and into his twenties. Awakening with his passion for a battle you will often find another longing emerging, a longing for...he knows not what. An ache, often expressed in music, or perhaps poetry, a film or a book that stirs him like never before. His soul is undergoing a sort of second birth.

He begins to NOTICE. Sees moonlight on water for the very first time. Is stopped by certain movements in a song he loves. Pauses to realize that a snowflake or a flower is really altogether amazing. Discover authors that stir him with some special quality in their writings. Now yes, it is often aroused by a woman. Baucher tells of a time when as a boy he fell in love with a girl in Bermuda, "and all the beauty I longed for beyond the beauty I longed for in her." Woman is the personification of Beauty, and it often takes her to turn the young man's attention from adventure and battle, "turn his head," as the phrase has it, and his heart comes along for the turning too.

A young writer who came to see me said that he began to write poetry, and lots of it, when first he fell in love. Over time the woman faded from view--it was a high school romance--but the writing continued, his heart awakened. This is the story of the pilgrimage of Anodo in MacDonald's Phantastes, where a man is awakened by particular beauty from whence he must take a perilous journey to find that it is Beauty itself he longs for."