"Carry Beauty In Your Heart"

A sermon by Reverend Kathy Tew Rickey, inspired by John O'Donohue

The words of Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmi, Sufi poet of the 13th century:

"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 musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

Late in the afternoon on May 14th, I opened my email to a “breaking news” story from the New York Times. A gunman opened fire in a Tops Grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Ten people were dead and 3 wounded. My daughter lives in Buffalo. I talked to her earlier in the day on the phone, yet my heart seized when I read the news. I called her. She was fine, at home, taking care of herself after a PCR test the morning before confirmed she was positive for COVID, again! She’s a middle school teacher. No surprise there. Even though the gunmen, an eighteen-year-old male, was in police custody, I made her promise to stay home.

News of these acts of utter destructiveness not just in Buffalo but in every major city in this country as of late pierce my heart and soul. It’s hard to imagine that there was a far worse shooting yet to come in Uvalde, Texas, just ten days later, perpetrated by another 18 year-old male. What is happening? What kind of brokenness could prompt two very different 18-year-olds from disparate parts of our country, born to this world in 2004…what could have gone so wrong in these young men’s lives that they could want to destroy lives, many of them innocent and all of them defenseless? What could bring these very young men to act with such intense and cold-blooded violence? It seems to me they simply hadn’t lived long enough to accrue that much hate. I do know that our young people are growing up isolated, disconnected, and disaffected in a society that commodifies everything including love and belonging, and tosses aside what isn’t productive or profitable. How bleak and hopeless that must be to a young soul. Of course, most young people overcome these challenges but others, especially those who are vulnerable because of childhood trauma or mental illness, either turn their angst inward and self-destruct or they turn it outward destroy others. I don’t think it was hate that twisted the mind and heart of those young men, but rather a deep-seated fear and a dread-filled emptiness that comes from a false narrative of scarcity in our society.

A deep malaise of despair is emerging in our culture. John O’Donohue in his book titled "Beauty" claims that part of our despair is our estrangement from beauty.

What is beauty? Ironically, O’Donohue says, “What beauty is can never be finally said.” But he does attempt an exploration in his book. O’Donohue, deceased at 48 years old in 2008, was a priest and philosophical theologian whose later career was devoted to scholarship, writing, and public speaking. I find his prose is so lyrical. What could have easily turned out to be the dry abstract of an academic is saved by O’Donohue’s soul of a poet. His first language was Gaelic, he grew up on a farm in the limestone wilds of Western Ireland, and all his life he had an ongoing relationship with Celtic mysticism grounded in the living landscape of his homeland. He thought of life’s journey as a consciousness developed alternatively between physical and mental landscapes, between the waking hours of days framed by time, and the timeless dream states of the night. He didn’t think of this in a dualistic sense but that the senses, the perceptions, the imagination, and the spirit are interwoven to create a life that is more than a mere compilation of experience.

Garnering a sense of coherence and meaning in our lived experiences is vital to our well-being. O’Donohue thought modernity created a culture devoid of what is needed to bring coherence and meaning to our lives. Thus, the cultural malaise I referred to earlier is nothing less than a collective soul-hunger that in some cases manifests despair and destructiveness. O’Donohue says those of the Western World are spiritually malnourished. He says the soul is hungry for beauty – not so much aesthetic beauty but beauty as a feeling or an experience which brings a sense of homecoming. Think of a moment when you felt most alive or felt a deep sense of comfort and belonging; chances are, some element of beauty was present, engaging your spirit directly.

In these times of anxiousness and uncertainty, our comfort and confidence in the world has been broken. Our trust is no longer naïve and now more than ever we know the future can change on a dime. Our foundations shaken, we now stand on shifting sand. While it may seem wholly inadequate to offer beauty as an antidote to all that’s wrong with the world, consider that our unheeded call to beauty may be the very cause of our problems.

For example, the 24-hour news cycle and social media that dominates our worldview holds up for us, like a mirror, the mediocrity and downright meanness of people these days. Our politics and our economy are dominated by unfairness and greed. Greed demands possession; combined with the errant notion of human dominion over the earth, we’ve extracted and polluted to disastrous effect. Our most popular forms of art and entertainment are big business these days, but they offer glamor not beauty. As the Red-Carpet reveals, glamor can be dazzling but since it’s always fleeting, it rarely satisfies, leaving the beholder with a sense of wanting more.

When we accept these conditions as cultural norms, we lose our sense of genuine beauty. We also let slip away from us adequate standards of truth and goodness. O’Donohue says, that when we forsake beauty, she takes her sisters truth and goodness with her. Thus, our neglect of beauty becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of emptiness and apathy. In O’Donohue’s words, “By the calculus of consumerism and busyness, we are less and less frequently available to the exuberance of beauty.” And of course, that is exactly what the market gods (retailers) want us to be – deaf to the call of beauty, because a true experience of beauty enlarges the senses, creates a spaciousness within, points to abundance, invites gratitude, and brings a sense of awe. Where there is beauty there is gentleness and kindness. Where there is beauty there is a feeling of connection with that which is larger. In the presence of beauty, our egos melt, our anxiousness subsides, our thirsty souls are slaked.

I’ve been talking about the call to beauty but have not named any experiences of beauty. That is as it should be for no one can name that experience for you. Perhaps as I have talked, you have thought about your own experience of beauty or an object of beauty or a vision of beauty in your own mind’s eye. My charge to you today is to carry beauty in your heart, or your mind, or your body so that you might, as Blaise Pascal of the 17th century or John O’Donohue of the 21st Century suggests, have beauty with you when life is difficult. For beauty is a saving grace when things seem hopeless. Like Fr. Daniel Berrigan, incarcerated for his activism and social justice work, depressed, afraid, surrounded by anger and misery, looked out onto the grey prison yard where he spied a single yellow tulip. It was the brightest yellow he ever experienced, and it gave him hope and the courage to continue the work of justice. This is what I invite you to cultivate in yourself – an eye for beauty.

I invite you now, in this moment, to find a comfortable spot in your chair or wherever you are seated and take in a deep breath and release it slowly. Relax your body and keep your gaze soft as you ponder these questions:

● What is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen or experienced? How did it leave

its mark on you?

● When did you first feel beautiful?

● Have you ever been healed by beauty?

● Do you think beauty can save or heal the world?

● Have you ever found beauty in brokenness?

Sages like O’Donohue remind us that our human experience of struggle, disappointment, and pain tend to harden our hearts; yet beauty can always find a soft spot to enter and restore our ability to be at peace. In addition to Pascal’s suggestion to always carry something beautiful within us, Rilke suggests staying close to something in nature. Indeed, being immersed in the beauty of our old-growth Florida wilds, lakes, rivers, springs, ocean shores, or perhaps our own backyards can be restorative if we but linger there without agenda. O’Donohue says, “The slowness and the stillness [of natural surroundings] gradually take us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent…The tired machinations of the ego are abandoned.” He goes on to say that we each have an elemental aspect of ourselves that nature draws us to, inviting us to go deeper inward where our own serenity dwells – a serenity that tends to be otherwise neglected in all the superficiality of our lives which play to our egoic selves. O’Donohue says the “world cannot ruffle the dignity of a soul that dwells in its own tranquility.”

Unfortunately, the violence and ugliness we witness in our lives will persist and nothing can protect us from the hurts and disappointments that every person endures in a lifetime. This is our human condition. But we also come into this life surrounded by the consolation of a world filled with awe-inspiring beauty – the beauty that calls to our hearts and souls. Take the time to pause and put yourself in the midst of it. Or, like Father Berrigan’s single bright yellow tulip, improbably emerged in a cold grey environment, look for beauty wherever you are, wherever you go and let it soften your heart and enlarge your spirit. I hope it may be so for all of us.

Reference:

O'Donohue, John. Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.