We gather here, surrounded by the promise of a June morning, in the wake of yet another mass shooting. As the number of dead and wounded people rise, month by month, week by week, across our country, we face the threat not only of being direct victims of a gun violence episode, but of becoming wounded indirectly – in other words, we are threatened with being deadened emotionally, to the point where we stop reacting. To the point where we stop noticing. And that is perhaps most frightening: approaching a point at which our society is too numb to respond in appropriate ways.

And somehow, today, in the midst of this ongoing carnage and this threat to our very humanity, we are invited to think about Beauty. I thought about throwing this whole service out and starting over. How can we talk about beauty in the wake of a horrible event such as the massacre in Virginia Beach? Isn’t that shallow, and self-indulgent? Well, yes, it could be. But there are other ways of thinking about this.

In trying to decide how to respond, it came to me that our culture, our daily existence, is becoming ever uglier. The other night, one of the commentators on cable news remarked that our national conversation is turning into a bar fight. And then he said, “And the bar where it’s happening is beginning to look a lot like the cantina scene in the original Star Wars movie.” I laughed and winced at the same time. The scene he mentioned was raucous, chaotic, violent, and ugly. Certainly there was no beauty there.

It occurred to me that talking about beauty in the midst of violence and suffering becomes a deliberate act: it becomes a response. Talking about beauty becomes an act of defiance, and resistance.

And so, let’s talk about beauty.

It didn’t take long to realize that most definitions of beauty are very shallow. Let’s begin with an old saying – ‘beauty is only skin deep.’ “Dear me,” I thought. “I really hope that that is not true!” Dictionary definitions of beauty are certainly no help – they focus on physical appearance, and particularly emphasize women’s appearance to define beauty, as in “What a beauty she is!” I didn’t find this helpful.

How do we go beyond these shallow descriptions of human attractiveness?

Let’s think back to our reading from earlier. It began, “Beauty is not decorative. It touches us deeply, dissolves our conscious control, and connects us to levels of our being well beyond our day-to-day concerns. Beauty pierces open a sharp clear space in which we directly encounter the immediacy of our experience. We know ourselves at that moment as beauty.

Beauty can appear at any time…”

Beauty, then, is a glimpse, a momentary awareness of something beyond us. Beauty offers us these little instances in time; it forces us to notice, to see things in a new and different way. Beauty is, then, truly in the eye of the beholder. We never know, in one moment or another, what might trigger this response from us, this appreciation of something that moves us. Driving around a bend and suddenly seeing the ocean, sparkling in the sunlight. A hummingbird stopped in mid-air. A few lines of music that brings tears to our eyes. Sunlight streaming through stained glass in an ancient cathedral. Moonlight creating a shimmering path across the water. Birdsong. Beauty is a glimpse that makes you catch your breath, and offers a moment of awe and wonder.

Beauty is not perfection. We talked a few minutes ago about the Japanese concept of wabi sabi – of the beauty that can be found in imperfection, in transience, and incompleteness. This philosophy has been a bit of a stretch for me. I’ve always had a strong aesthetic sense and am quick to notice what’s crooked, what’s misspelled, what colors don’t match. Wabi sabi invites us to look beyond perfection and to see with different eyes, to see a different beauty, to see an unexpected elegance or uniqueness.

Taking pottery lessons has been an opportunity for me to learn this and to expand my own vision of what might be considered beautiful. It has been a challenge. More than once I have thought about throwing away a piece before glazing it, thinking it would have no value, no beauty. And each time I’ve been surprised by what emerges from the kiln – a combination of shape and color that shows me something beautiful I had not seen. A son’s girlfriend fell in love with a piece I made recently. I had almost thrown it out because I couldn’t figure out a use for it. And it weighed about eight pounds. Maybe it was a doorstop. But I went ahead and glazed it and the combination of colors I chose blended together beautifully. “I’ll take that,” said Naima. “What is it?”, I asked her. “It’s a vase for a small bunch of flowers,” she replied. And she was absolutely right. She saw beauty where I was stuck on function.

Beauty asks us to broaden our view. It cannot be measured or defined by a description. Beauty is understood through our response to it. There is a conversation of emotions present – a call from something or someone suddenly seen as beautiful, and a response from the person who in that moment notices it, recognizes it, is called by it.

Call and response. A dialogue.

So what is beauty? We’ve talked mostly about what it is not. It’s not decorative. It’s not perfection. I was fortunate to officiate at an outdoor wedding yesterday. It was truly beautiful, but not perfect, starting with the cold fog. There were glitches. An arrangement of flowers tipped over. The bevy of little flower girls were gorgeous, but they didn’t all remember to spread their rose petals. And no one cared. It was heartfelt and full of love, and joyful. The families and friends opened their hearts and made it beautiful.

When I talk about the ugliness of our current culture, I am mostly talking about how closed our society has become, how walled off from one another. We turn away, we use threats and violent speech and wield weapons. We refuse to see each other as beautiful despite being imperfect.

Beauty calls us to open our hearts and minds, to be aware, to notice what it is offering to us. We began this morning by singing, “Seek not afar for beauty; lo, it glows in dew-wet grasses all about your feet.” And when we do see, we are offered a glimpse of something far beyond us.

Call and response. We are invited into a conversation involving our eyes, ears, and hearts, if we can but notice. Perhaps this is what the mystics experience during those fleeting moments when everything mundane falls away, and they suddenly sense the oneness of the universe and their place in it. What can you see? What is revealed to you? And how do you respond?

Beauty described in this way becomes a living force, much like creativity. It offers itself to us. If we notice, it asks us to respond.

The late Irish poet John O’Donohue once said, “God is Beauty.” This wording feels different than traditional belief. In traditional religious language, people who believe in a God controlling the universe might think that God gives us beauty, that it is a gift. But what if God is beauty?

Often, in our Universalist tradition, we say that God is Love. If God indeed is Love, then perhaps God is also Beauty, and Creativity. If God is our name for a generative life force, in us and among us, fostering life and love, then beauty, true beauty, would be a part of this force.
Names don’t really matter. What matters is our openness and our awareness. We can choose to open our eyes, our ears, and our hearts. And in doing so, we might be granted glimpses of beauty that will open our hearts even more. Call and response. A dialogue.

 

 

The selection we read earlier from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet speaks to this relationship, this emotional conversation. Gibran wrote:

And (the Prophet) answered:
Where shall you seek beauty, and how
shall you find her unless she herself be your
way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except
she be the weaver of your speech? …

In other words, beauty is the way to follow. And beauty is the source of the words we use to describe it. It is a full circle. Beauty is of life itself, as we ourselves are – part of the force of life, part of the universe. There is so much that we cannot see and hear, and understand. Beauty appears as an invitation, a way to see and understand that which is so often beyond us.

Gibran’s prophet concludes with these words:

People…, beauty is life when
life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

Beauty is life….you are life. We are connected to this force, to each other, and to everything in the universe.

May we be willing to notice. May we accept the gift of vision in the fleeting moments when it comes to us, and may we use that vision of beauty to foster life and love and beauty in this hurting, broken world.

May it be so,
Amen.