SEEKING BEAUTY AS A SPIRITUAL PATH A Sermon by Reverend Lynn Thomas Strauss Do you remember the first time you looked through a microscope? Like me, it might have been the junior version in the blue box with the plastic window the one that came with a few already-prepared slides. Did you prepare a slide yourself with a drop of water from your faucet, putting it carefully under the metal band so it would sit still over the light and under the lens? Did you put your 8- or 9- year-old blue, brown, or green eye to the eyepiece and focus the magnification, at first moving the focus way too fast, then carefully slowing it down to get a clearer and clearer image? Do you remember being positively amazed at what you saw? Wow! Microbes, cells what life lived in that single drop of water! I hope you remember what you learned that day that there is life within life; that what we see at our ordinary level of seeing is only the tip of the iceberg; that there is extraordinary life deeper than we can imagine, all around us, inside of us There is more than we can see at first glance. To seek what is deeper is to discover beauty, even in the mundane. Some days it feels hard to live only within the most obvious layer of reality, to only read or listen to the news and not seek out something beautiful to appreciate and be thankful
for. To be hurt by a mean-spirited word or crassly stated opinion and not find the inner resolve to balance that nasty experience with a moment of happiness or kindness. I search for beauty to counter some of the pain and ugliness of reality. I am constantly on the lookout for ways to create beauty, whether in poetry, in dance, in gardening, [or] in playing with children. Sometimes I feel I couldn t live without beauty in my life, and luckily it is all around us. To seek beauty in the dailyness of our lives requires us to delve deeper into the surface of our everyday experience. Perhaps we need to keep a magnifying glass in our pocket to remind us to look deeper. To be a seeker of beauty is to join the ranks of philosophers, poets, theologians and mystics. In seeking after beauty we enter the realm of love and desire, of intimate and ultimate; in pursuit of beauty, we may touch upon the holy and the eternal. You may have once studied the writings of Plato and learned of Plato s Ladder of Eros. In Plato s Symposium, Socrates recounts the teachings of the Priestess, Diotima, who uses the metaphor of the ladder as an image of a pathway toward the highest level of beauty. On the first rung of Plato s ladder there is love for a particular body. On the second rung is love of all bodies. The third rung brings one to the love of souls, of the whole person. Loving
souls is a moral good and brings you to the fourth rung, the love of institutions and unifying forms (such as congregations). Next is the love of the beauty of knowledge. No longer are we focused merely on the physical; now it is the ideas of the mind that we love. And finally we come to the love of Beauty itself the highest form of Platonic Love. Consider, if you will, how it is you seek and appreciate beauty. How many rungs of Plato s Ladder have you climbed? How much beauty have you seen and loved lately? Last week, I experienced a previously unseen layer of reality. It was an experience both concrete-material and also mysticalintuitive. It was revelation to me. As you may know, Dave and I have downsized to a smaller house; we sold our home of 16 years on Mannakee Street in just four days. The buyer of our home was so eager and happy to find such a big and lovely home that she acted quickly. At the closing, we met the buyer and her family. There was an immediate friendly connection. Last week, I returned to see if any of our mail had been delivered there. I rang the bell, and the grandmother answered the door and immediately invited me in. She was excited to show me around, and she kept thanking me for our beautiful home.
She invited me in to see all of our rooms all the bedrooms, the study and family room, even the bathroom she wanted to show off the whole house. To see the familiar rooms filled with another family s furniture and art felt odd, but also made me happy. The grandmother s effusive generosity was touching. I had hoped that the buyer would have children, and it was a joy to see two of the bedrooms arranged for children, and to learn that one bedroom was being made ready for another grandparent to move in. They had already painted the deck and had all the doors and windows wide open for fresh air. As I left, I felt a little teary We had moved so quickly that I didn t have time for much ritual grieving; but I was also feeling amazed at how this family had brought so much new life into the house. It looked and felt entirely different, and their pride and gratitude let me know that they had seen possibilities in that very familiar space that I had not seen in 16 years. What I had come to take for granted was new and shiny and wonderful to her, and to the 7-year-old grandson that followed us around on our tour of the house, doing a little translating for us when needed. It was a revelation, and a gift, to realize how much I had missed how much I had taken for granted. How much I loved
the beauty of that house. The grandmother reminded me of the beauty that had surrounded me for 16 years. Religious community is a place to explore beauty, to see with new eyes, to delve into the depths of reality and find what was there all along. Religious and spiritual community is a place to explore both outward and inward reality. Outward and inward beauty. If you are someone who is adept at measuring and understanding the outward reality be it a drop of water, the square footage of a house, the concepts of physics, or the number of bagels needed to feed 5,000 then your way of seeing is needed and a good place to start, with the beauty of form, proportion, fit. Reality can indeed be viewed by what we can touch and sort and count. I rely everyday on people who see the world in a different way than I who see, in fact, a different reality, a different layer of beauty. But, there is also that impulse to go ever deeper, and this is what spiritual exploration requires of us. Outward reality matters, and offers a level of truth. But there is more to know, more to see below the surface, especially if we turn our attention inward as well as outward.
Art whether music, poetry or visual art is intended to awaken us to that inward exploration by offering an intimation, a hint, of a different form of reality. Curiosity draws us back to museums, concerts, libraries, and Sunday morning services, with the possibility of learning something new, seeing or understanding something at a deeper level, hoping to be touched by a revelation of meaning or gratitude or love. Discovering something beautiful. Last week, someone brought me a basket of tomatoes, grown in their garden. I love the taste of fresh tomatoes; a taste of childhood, for sure, but I also saw a deeper reality than the tomatoes themselves. I saw, felt, knew this was a gift from the heart. Gifts from the heart are a lot more than meet the eye. The tomatoes were just the tip of the iceberg. Philosophers and critics have debated through the ages whether or not beauty is subjective or objective. Augustine asked, Are things beautiful because they give delight, or do they give delight because they are beautiful? Kant added, speaking of art and form, taste is fundamentally subjective, every judgement of beauty is based on personal experience and such judgement differs from person to person. The tomatoes, as well as the tour through our former home, were experienced as beauty, because of my lens, my perspective, the context in which I experienced them.
Often I work at finding meaning in my spiritual seeking; but of late, I m looking mostly for beauty. Contemporary author and professor of philosophy, Jacob Needleman, speaks of the universe as a teaching. Isn t that a wonderful thought, to consider the universe as a teaching? He suggests that one important lesson of the universe is that human thought as wonderful and crucial as it is must give way to consciousness which only comes through sensory experience. Experience the universe! Ocean, moonrise, horizon, sunset Looking at the stars and planets through a telescope is most definitely a sensory experience. Eating ripe, red tomatoes tended by the hands of a friend is most definitely a sensory experience. Seeing how a new family settles into your old home was, for me, a sensory experience Professor Needleman writes, to be seekers of spiritual truth (and beauty), is to be on the long and difficult path to selfknowledge and self-transformation. All curiosity, all learning, leads us to more awakening, to inner truth and beauty.
It s not an easy path. Wisdom from many traditions teaches that we must walk barefoot through the fire in search of truth and beauty and love. Wisdom teaches that we must enter the cave alone, that we must enter the dark in order to find the light. Lately I am struggling to find my spiritual footing amid the fires of illness and decline of several people close to me. Suddenly, it seems, I am on the verge of losing several very close friends. Every few days I am shaken by difficult news. I know many of you have walked this path before me many of us walk it together. So while at the beach in New Jersey this past week, I went out in the early morning. I had passed Holy Innocents Episcopal Church several times; but this time, I noticed the garden. At first, I thought it was a rose garden. There was no one around, and the gate was open. I entered and found myself alone in a beautifully designed memorial garden. Parts of the garden were old and I took that narrow path first, close to the red brick wall surrounding the garden which had brass name plates with dates of those who had died many decades past. The wall was covered with ivy, and there were lovely benches and small religious statues beautifully placed amid small bushes and wildflowers.
The central area of the garden was open, spacious, out under the hot August sun. Here, large stone markers were laid out in what had previously been a series of garden plots, now covered with closely laid 10x10 stone markers, many with names and dates, and many still blank and waiting. I walked slowly, reading the names etched in stone. I realized the stones mirrored the shape of the interior nave of the sanctuary the shape of a wide, large, open-air cross. I have over years of officiating at memorial services, and funerals, and graveside burials I have thought a lot about Life and Death and Life after Death, and the new life we discover in our grieving. And as I contemplate the loss of loved ones of my own, I wonder how I can hold on to them. Where will they be? Where will I be? How can I stay with them? Or, how can I take them with me? The Episcopal memorial garden was reassuring, for on many of the headstones loved ones had left seashells, stones, small statues, coins, and sea glass. The living had left gifts, signs, that they remembered, that they knew, that a life had mattered greatly, that their lives, too, would matter greatly. Signs that they were still carrying their loved ones.
Nothing is lost; and even in death there is beauty, and life, and continuation of meaning, and giving of gifts. A circle unbroken, a kind of eternity. As I was leaving the garden, I walked back out the arched iron gate and looked up at the lettering under which I had entered. The quote was familiar to me. It read: I am the Resurrection and the Life As a Unitarian Universalist minister, as a spiritual seeker, I exercise my editing skills to make Love accessible to more hearts. I don t worry about my beliefs about Jesus or God; I focus on the intention behind those words. As we are remembered, as we leave love behind when we go, as we walk in beauty and relationships of love in this journey of life, thus we are carried in the hearts and memories of those we have loved. Thus the Spirit of Life lives on in the human spirit.
We are carried, held up, resurrected by beauty, by Love, by human relationship. That is what we are to learn as spiritual seekers that Love and human relationship are beautiful; that each person is beloved and beautiful. 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 connected to all that lives. Let us be the beauty that we seek. Amen/Blessed Be.