Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
September 3, 2017
Audio includes Opening Words and Sermon
OPENING WORDS
The words of the Sufi Muslim poet Rumi:
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
We come together this morning, amidst so much pain in the world, perhaps amidst so much pain in our own lives.
Surrounded by so much raw need, why would we contemplate today the idea of Beauty?
How does beauty – not the superficial standards of commercialized beauty, but deep beauty… how does that beauty instruct us, awaken us, orient us, call us?
Let the beauty we love be what we do, be how we live.
It is good to be together.
SERMON
I’ll begin with a reading entitled “All Beauty Heals” by theologian Matthew Fox, known for the Creation Spirituality movement:
Ernesto Cardenal says that we can argue about the reason for the universe and the meaning of the universe but not about the beauty of the universe. … We all share beauty. It strikes us indiscriminately. It may be when our child was born into this world; or a simple flower; or a song; or a smile on a face; or a great act of courage; or a dance well done; or a child’s laugh; or a loaf of bread baking; or finding a worthy job; or a snowfall; or when drawn to the Source of Life itself. There is no end to beauty for the person who is aware. Even the cracks between the sidewalk contain geometric patterns of amazing beauty. …We realize we walk on beauty every day, even when things seem ugly around us.
Because beauty is a habit of the universe, it is essential that humans be about the good work of showering one another with beauty, and of bringing out the beauty of one another. Not to do this is to obstruct the universe’s intention. Injustice, it seems to me, is always ugly. What is just is beautiful and brings back the beautiful to what was broken. All works of healing are works of making beauty, and all beauty heals.
ALL BEAUTY HEALS
I remember after my miscarriage last year, one of you brought me a vase of flowers gathered from your garden. I thanked you, and you said something very similar to what Matthew Fox just said: “Beauty heals.”
Perhaps it is difficult to think Beauty is something worthy of our contemplation when our fellow Texans on the coast are suffering through Hurricane Harvey…when Nazis are marching…when people can’t put food on their table.
Maybe you have heard the quote by E.B. White: “I wake up each morning torn between two impulses: the impulse to savor the world, and the impulse to save it.”
Yet perhaps this is a false dichotomy. Perhaps savoring the beauty of the world in some way becomes saving the world – enables us to save the world – and how would saving the world, not include savoring the world?
WE ALL NEED BEAUTY
The poor need beauty as well as bread. In fact, studies show that being in nature, even just looking out a window at a garden instead of at a parking lot – increases things like healing times, concentration, health, compassion…
Yet beauty is often still considered a luxury. The author Terry Tempest Williams wonders:
How [is it] we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?((Leap, Terry Tempest Williams))
When we look at the universe, at nature, we can see that life itself has a built-in bias for beauty.
Despite cultural fluctuations in what is considered beautiful, few humans on earth can argue about the beauty of nature.
My colleague Lilli Nye tells of a chapter in the book When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals which includes … “a whole chapter that explores a multitude of evidence, or at least many strong indicators, that animals have an aesthetic sense. Noted are the intentional harmonies of howling wolves and singing whales, and the complex creations of bowerbirds that artfully display berries, colorful insect parts, flowers, candy wrappers and bright bits of cloth or paper in their elaborate nests. Also noted are certain captive apes that have a powerful drive to paint and draw and who…will forgo more basic sustenance in order to pursue their creative endeavors. A few years ago, an interesting Neanderthal artifact was excavated from a cave in Slovenia: a small bone flute, made from a bear femur, hollowed out, with four holes bored into it in straight alignment. This little flute could be as much as 80,000 years old, perhaps the oldest known surviving musical instrument.”
Our need to experience and create beauty is deep in all of us, the poor and the rich, the child and the adult.
CLEANING OUR LENS
Sometimes in order to see beauty, we need to clean our lenses through which we see the world. Beauty is not only out there, but incarnated in the very way we view the world and interact with it.
The Unitarian Henry David Thoreau spoke to this need to cultivate our view of the world. He said:
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
A much older philosopher, Plato, also spoke of Beauty. In his Symposium, Socrates tells of the teachings of the priestess Diotima about ascending the six-runged ladder of Love.
SIX-RUNGS OF BEAUTY
Each rung is connected to a different kind of Beauty. The first rung is love of a particular beautiful body. The second rung is seeing beauty in all bodies and beings. At the third rung, one recognizes that spiritual and moral beauty go even deeper than physical beauty, and so yearns for interaction at the soul level. The fourth rung is love of beautiful laws and institutions – unifying forms like a community or congregation, seeing within it its capacity to foster moral beauty. The fifth rung takes us to the beauty of knowledge. Finally, at the sixth rung, we arrive at the Form of Beauty itself, which encompasses them all.
Socrates describes Beauty as “an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades.” It is the very essence of beauty, “subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness.” And every beautiful thing is beautiful because of its connection to this Form. The lover who has ascended the ladder encounters the Form of Beauty in a kind of revelation, an encounter beyond typical forms of knowing.
THE ART OF REVERENCE
In order to remain open to these encounters, in order to cultivate this lens for beauty; we may need to “rediscover the art of reverence.”((John O’Donohue: http://www.dailygood.org/pdf/ij.php?tid=2154))
The UU minister Maureen Killoran tells a story about rediscovering reverence:
It felt like being on the moon, walking on Mount St. Helens. Just a few years previous, that mountain had blown her top, destroying human and animal life, flattening vegetation and buildings for miles, and sharing its ash with the world. As we stepped from our car, we felt that ash drift like talcum around our ankles, rise in the air, enter with our breath. Other than occasional blacked memories of trees, all was grey, grey as far you could see.
Silence seized us for the longest time as we stood there, two irrelevant humans and this huge, mutilated world. Only gradually did our eyes slow and our hearts focus. Only gradually did we begin to see what was really before us.
How had we overlooked the fireweed, that perennial volunteer, its brilliant buds proclaiming, “Hey, world, we’re back!” What blocked us from celebrating the eager insect conversations around us? It was right there before us, and we nearly walked away. Overwhelmed by the devastation, we almost missed the tiny pond, its surface literally dancing with more tadpoles than I had ever seen.
We do this, you see – we ensnare ourselves with the magnitude of what the poet called the mutilated world. We get busy, and troubled, and frightened, and … I, at least, need … to remind myself to be grateful for intermittent beauty and the stubborn gifts of breath and life. I—maybe you too?—need this season, even if just quietly to say, “praise be.” ((http://www.uua.org/braverwiser/stubborn-gifts-breath-and-life))
During the destruction and pain and, well, ugliness of Hurricane Harvey, there has also been much beauty. We need to name the pain, certainly, and the deaths, and any faults of humanity that worsened the hurricane’s impact on us. And there is also a need to name what some call “collateral beauty” – call it kindness, compassion, heroism, but it is also beauty…
…The neighbors joined arm in arm to rescue a drowning stranger; the miles and miles of trucks and cars hauling boats down the highway, people ready to help with rescues; the mattress stores and mosques and churches housing evacuees; the government of Mexico offering its aid…
I’ve been talking with friends and family who live in the Houston area.
I received this photo from my colleague Becky Edmiston-Lange, who ministers at one of our UU churches in Houston.
The water is starting to recede from her neighborhood – she waded through hip-deep water to check on her house, and she sent this picture, saying:
“I share a picture which I took yesterday of rain lilies in bloom in my front yard. Ironically, these flowers – which are supposed to bloom whenever the sun comes up after a heavy rain – had petulantly refused to bloom all spring and summer, indifferent to the vagaries of our weather. But Harvey finally made them yield. Maybe they are a small harbinger of hope and renewal, at least of beauty, in the aftermath of a storm.”
BEAUTY BEGETS BEAUTY
These glimmers of beauty do not erase the devastation; these kindnesses do not imply that we don’t still have a long way to go to create the truly beloved community…but witnessing this beauty can reawaken our abilities to create more beauty.
We can say the same about the beauty of every person, of every soul. Even the man waving the Nazi flag and shouting hate. For many, our UU belief in the inherent worth and dignity of all people means that even in the person whose behavior is full of ugliness and hate, somewhere, somehow, we can witness a glimmer of beauty. That doesn’t mean we let them off the hook for the consequences of their actions, but it means we also find a hope, a point of connection, a possibility.
Beauty awakens our deeper selves. By witnessing and creating beauty, we are able to drop into the vastness of our being, the vastness of the interdependent web of which we are a part.
Concern for beauty is not a luxury or a distraction.
Beauty takes our hand and invites us into the heart of the world, all of its aching rawness, its tenderness, its possibility and potential.
Beauty focuses us, engages us, calls us. Beauty calls us in the religious or ethical sense of calling, in that it moves us to create more beauty, the deep beauty that is justice, that is peace, that is hope and love and forgiveness.
Beauty, fully experienced, demands that we cast aside the superficial and selfish, the isolated life.
Beauty by its nature wants to be shared, wants to multiply and flourish.
We are carried, called, resurrected by beauty. That is what we are to learn as spiritual seekers—that Love and human relationship are beautiful; that each soul is beloved and beautiful.
MAY YOU BE IN BEAUTY
May beauty heal your spirit in the days and weeks ahead. May you know that you are beloved on this earth. Know that you are woven in with all that is.
Let the beauty we love be how we live.
And I’d like to close with this video, entitled “The Beauty of a Second. It’s a curated video of many submissions from people invited to demonstrate beauty in one second of film.
-Rev. Emily