ABSTRACT
As people mature, their experience of longing deepens and generalizes, so that eros can be experienced in relation to the world or the divine. Often (as for me) the spiritual quest begins in late adolescence as desire becomes more profound and amorphous. The route from Emma Peel to God seems obscure, but it is direct, as many great spiritual texts (such as the Song of Solomon, the poems of Rumi, Plato’s Symposium, and the testimony of St. Teresa of Avila) attest. Beauty is fundamentally connected to spirit in every culture, and every religion expresses its spirituality in some of its most exquisitely made objects, which are offered to God, or to the people as a way to achieve contact with God.
