Caged Beauty

         Unexpected beauty can bring delight and hope to a numbed soul.  One of the last places one would expect a ray of beauty would be at a maximum security prison, but in the film Shawshank Redemption there is an episode that, by itself, might help explain the movie's enduring popularity.

         Andy Dufresne, an inmate whose banker skills have earned him the warden's trust, is performing some duties in the warden's office one morning, while he is away. Andy locks himself in, places a recording of the opera Marriage of Figaro on the turntable and broadcasts it over every loudspeaker in the prison.  Hundreds of prisoners stop in their tracks to listen.  Red, another inmate and Andy's best friend, describes it in a way that belies the fact he has been in prison for most of his life:

          I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about.  Truth is, I don't want   to know. I like to think that they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words.  And it makes your heart ache because of it.  I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream.  It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those gray walls dissolve away.  And for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.

        Do you ever feel your heart aching for beauty ? Beauty that you know is there, but is just out of reach?  Oh, for certain, we get glimpses of attainable beauty, ephemeral glances that take our breath away.  We may see that special painting that has elegantly captured a scene.  A scene so beautiful that we may wish the artist had painted us into it.   We may hear a blending of voices in song that is so heavenly, that we feel certain the singers must not be earth-bound.   God's creation displays examples, proportional to our being alert for them:  murmurations, splashes of floral color, even the simple contrast of white billowy clouds against deep blue sky, and golden grain against the background of forest green.
But none of these can heal the ache in our heart for endless beauty.  The writer of Ecclesiastes explains why this ache is there, in chapter 3, verse 11:

            He (God) has made everything beautiful in its time.  He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.

        Those prisoners at Shawshank were given a glimpse of beauty and hope in the midst of their imprisonment.   God didn't stop at providing just a glimpse of hope for us.   He set the desire for eternity in our hearts and then sent his own Son  to set us free from our prison of sin,  so we could have that eternity and its endless beauty.