Slim is beautiful. Fat is ugly. That’s how it is the West. And maybe that’s the reason why ramp models have this anorexic (starved) look. But this is not something universal. In Africa fat is beautiful. This is how one blogger puts it: “Many women in the western world want to look slim, which is considered that a woman is beautiful and healthy.  However, most of the women in Africa have a tendency to gain weight on purpose, which is an ideal beauty for that society.  Being fat in Africa means to be desirable, beautiful, wealthy, healthy, and possess a good status in a society.”

“Ballerini”, a bronze sculpture of Colombian artist Fernando Botero, seems to suggest the belief that indeed fat is beautiful. A commentary on the sculptor reads: “A brilliant sculptor, Botero worked within the perimeters [parameters?] of generous proportions and created greatly rotund yet graceful figures, which convey an ironical yet boundless ideal of beauty.”

Slim. Fat. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What does it mean?

Beauty is not objective. It does not depend on what one sees but on how one sees it. For instance, have you ever heard someone say that no child is ugly in the eyes of its mother? There is truth in that assertion, isn’t it?

While there is such a thing as objective reality, there is also such a thing as subjective reality. And it is subjective reality that matters more in everyday life. A birthday card made by a seven-year old may be objectively ugly. But it will bring tears to the eyes of a parent, who receives it first thing in the morning from his beaming seven-year old son.

Subjective reality is how we look at the world. It is how we interpret it. And how we interpret the world depends very much on the environment, on what we read, on the events of our life and on people we live with and listen to.

When Jesus spoke about the eye as a lamp, he was actually asking us to check on the way we look at the world and perhaps, take some necessary steps. “The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be” (Mt 6:22-23).

Are our eyes sound? Or are they bad? How do we know? We may need to examine the way we look at the world against the backdrop of the teachings of Jesus. But then are we so immersed in Sacred Scriptures as to know the teachings of Jesus?

Maybe the first step we need to take is to buy a bible and then start reading the gospels. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Buy that bible. Take the first step.