27 November 2020
So today’s topic is beauty--not of the “Ding-dong, Avon calling” kind--though I did get a kick out of googling their 1950’s jingle:
“Take time out for beauty when Avon comes calling;
Use Avon cosmetics and you’ll be enthralling.”
The truth is that if we’re paying any kind of attention in our lives, beauty gob-smacks us sometimes. And by that, I don't mean "pretty" does. Nobody wants pretty, right? We want "startling" or "stunning" or "celestial." We want "fascinating" or "fantastic" or "phenomenal." That's what we want in all the things that are important to us.
So when it comes to things divine, we want a God to be Startling, revelation to be Stunning, salvation to be Celestial. We want a Fascination of angels, a Fantastic sense of grace and a Phenomenal liturgy in which to celebrate this.
Your list may differ, but I think what we all want are stand-put experiences in our lives—I'm thinking of ee cummings lines: "the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky."
That’s why pretty just doesn’t cut it. Because our deepest joys are ones of unexpected and gob-smacking beauty.
Like this one: when I was nine, my father was sick and then—all out of the blue, suddenly he was dying. And I was a kid, left alone in the waiting room of a small local hospital with some Nancy Drews and Trixie Beldens books on my lap. I knew I had to be grown-up now. I liked to think I was doing a good job. And when I was scared, now and then I would take a walk in the little garden planted in the circular berm in the middle of the drop-off driveway.
Walking that circular path, I was struck over and over by the riotous density of flowers somebody had planted: pinks and scarlets, purples and fushias and magentas and violets and that strange, unnamable color of a woman’s lipstick smeared from kissing or a cocktail. My mind brightened with their dazzling beauty, though mere petunias, most common, nearly vulgar flowers. And I came to love them truly--their randy colors, rowdy smells, my friends in a friendless time.
The Psalmist speaks of restoration:
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, then we were like those who dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy;
But what is the “then” of which the Psalmist speaks?
James Myers, senior pastor at Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, writes this of Psalm 126, contrasting he grammar of the Second Testament’s Greek with the Hebrew of the First Testament’s writings:
Greek requires you to learn a complex host of verbal moods and tenses. Hebrew is much simpler, lacking pluperfects, perfects, participles, all those “p” things that bring clarity to when and how something actually happened.
Hebrew is so simple we lose some clarity, and nowhere more so than in Psalm 126. Has the Lord already restored Zion’s fortunes? Were we like dreamers once upon a time? Or are we pleading with the Lord to restore those fortunes? Are we longing for the day when our mouths will be filled with laughter? In a strange way, it is always both.
So you see what I mean about the petunias? I mean, my daddy was dying and I couldn’t wrap my mind around that at all. But the gaudy presence of the flowers gripped and assured my soul of the more-ness of things.
For me, the life of faith means being alive to both pain and beauty.
Being alive to pain is at once easy and awful, as this time has taught us--if we hadn't known already.
And perhaps what I love best about being a pastor is also the thing I like least about it. I love being a part of a religious tradition that privileges art and music and thoughtful writing as the lifeblood of a spiritual life. But this work also involves stark encounters with the worst kinds of human suffering, cruelty and injustice.
Together, we journey through the valley of the shadow of death because we forbear each other, because shared sorrow is halved sorrow. The life of faith is not a cakewalk--not if we are awake and alive and attentive.
But in being attentive, we also experience the staggering, stumbling beauty of this fallen, fragmented world falling in fragments all around us.
Psalm 126 ends like this:
Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.