Reading: from “Resort to Beauty”  by Joseph Robertson

         One method of surviving, emotionally, as an intellect, as a human being refusing to give up on humanity, is the resort to beauty.

         Mountain sage and lavender in opaline mist.  A ruby sun nestled in cool streams of fire, inventive fire of eventide.  Small blue avian beings canting eerie recollections of abundance.  Mindscape without color, crystalline and teeming with life.  Sojourn away from contention, braced by natural fact.  Beauty.

         Beauty, though mysterious, undefinable, even variable according to subjective experience, is woven into every aspect of life and lived experience.  Maybe it is the poet’s province alone to take on the burden of working this through, seeing it always, being aware of the most menial, severe and terrible beauties.  But the poet’s work has resonance because it conjures up a latent awareness of improbable charms, hidden among the tortuous threadwork, the causeways of consciousness.

         Life itself, as biological fact, is such a magnificent achievement, it lends a certain quality of beauty and wonder to everything that occurs within it.  But beauty as such arises with the consciousness of it; it is a conscious condition, a state of the mind, however sensual, in which one deliberately approves of being in the world, and one’s whole self resolves implicitly to continue life’s exploration of the living world.  And though it overtakes the mind, even steals the breath, beauty (being a conscious experience) is far from absolute.  Beauty can be experienced in/as/through joy or pain, in/as/through aspiration or irony, in/as/through victory or defeat.

         If one engages the self, the living fullness of one’s own existence, if one confronts the tiny absurdities of dwelling within circumstance, if one filters out the jagged edges of social pressure and brings forward the unmasked rhythm of meaning that underscores and gives shape to experience, one finds that around the edges, and at the center, of virtually every body across the plane of fact is the real possibility of beauty, of a recognition that knowing that one exists is in itself the beginning of all joy and connectivity.

         It is in such resort to beauty, which is focus, engagement, comprehension, not escape, not isolation, that one gains perspective as to the worth inherent in certain choices, certain moments, certain sorts of activity.  One can put aside any excessive regard for the empty and meaningless; one can put aside the overtly, even stupidly selfish; one can put aside ambitions that have to do with conquest for the sake of conquest.

         In such conditions, freed from the strictures of want, zeal, and frustration, the mind is better able to recall itself, better able to see the value of actual human beings, actual life, actual interest.  Through beauty, not artificial, but real, present and deeply experienced beauty, one is better able to find a genuine relationship to one’s world.
 
 
 
 

Sermon:
        A few months ago I did a sermon on Vocabulary for Religious Liberals.  One of the concepts I touched on briefly was that of God.  My comments were brief, but I promised to devote an entire sermon to the topic later in the year.  Well, the time has come.  Of course, even an entire sermon can barely scratch the surface of what might be said.  But it might just be enough to raise some questions, and to start a process of reflection and exploration.

        In that earlier sermon I made the point that, for me, and I think for many, God is a kind of shorthand to point toward some aspects of reality beyond human grasp, for the essential mystery that we continually encounter and grapple with in life.  All of us struggle with fundamental issues of life and the world, whether we use god language or not.

        Another point I made in the earlier sermon was that simply knowing whether or not someone believes in God provides very little information about that person’s theology.  There are so many qualities, images, models, and even names attributed to God, that a simple “yes or no” response can only be the introduction to a much more extensive dialogue.  Even if someone doubts or denies the existence of God, full understanding requires more knowledge of what God it is whose existence is being questioned.

        I guess what I’m saying is that, as strange as it may seem, I don’t consider “existence” to be among the most important attributes of God.  That seems counterintuitive, since why should we waste our time discussing and speculating about something that doesn’t even exist?  I happen to believe that the question of the existence of any particular deity is undecidable in any ultimate sense.  That is, on the question of the existence of God, I’m an agnostic.

        One book I consulted in preparing for today was called Is There a God?  Its whole focus was on answering that question.  At the end of the book, the author concludes that “on significant balance of probability, there is a God.”  That conclusion is based essentially on the number of features of reality can be explained on the basis of God’s existence.  But it’s really not conclusive, any more than any of the classic “proofs” for God’s existence through the ages.

        But my claim is that it doesn’t really matter.  The more important question is, “If there were a God underlying the reality within which we live, what would that God’s qualities or attributes be?”  And what implications would that have for how we live?  I’m reminded of the famous newspaper editorial, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”  The point is that the values, the ideals represented by the being in question do exist, and they do inform our decisions about how to live.

        Early Christian conceptions of God were grounded in classic Greek philosophical categories.  One such model was of the “supreme and ineffable principle of truth, beauty, and goodness, the One about which nothing could be legitimately said, but which was the timeless origin of all things.”  Note the inclusion there of the principle of beauty.  I’ll have some more to say about that later, because I see some interesting parallels.

        But any useful, meaningful concept of God must somehow touch real life, and be compatible with actual experience.  And so, through history, God has been made more real through the use of personal symbols.  God as Father.  Goddess as Mother.  God as Shepherd.

        Feminist theology in particular has helped to identify one of the serious problems inherent in such concrete imagery, especially the very common image of Father.  In a book called Theology for Skeptics, Dorothy Soelle writes, “Feminist theology does not deny that ‘father’ is one mode of speaking about God, but when we are forced to make it the only mode, the symbol becomes God’s prison.”

        Joseph Campbell used to talk about “getting stuck in the metaphor.”  That is, the danger in using metaphorical language and images to talk about complex abstractions like “the mystery of life” or God, is in taking our metaphors literally.  One contribution of feminist theology has been to encourage symbols of God without inherent authority or power or chauvinist flavor: symbols like “the well-spring of all good things,” or “water of life,” or “light.”  If God is only called “He” then God is too small.

        Islam, in order to avoid the trap of capturing God in too small a single image, explicitly provides ninety-nine names for God, each suggesting different attributes.  Among them are the One, the All-Wise, the Most Merciful, the Generous, the Kind, the Forgiving, the Creator, the Powerful, the Loving, the Just, the Guide, the Truth, and the Beautiful.  Ah, there’s “beauty” again.

        Diana Eck, in her book Encountering God, points out that in many traditions, “people speak of the Divine as both ultimate and personal, beyond and yet within, transcendent and yet near.”  God must have the quality of transcendence in order to be the ultimate source of order in the universe.  And yet we also attribute to that impersonal abstract being qualities that hold meaning only in a deeply personal way – qualities such as love, justice, mercy, forgiveness.  In so doing, we give God a face we can recognize in human faces.  God becomes immanent as well as transcendent.  That is, in here and all around, as well as out there.

        But even transcendence need no longer be understood only in terms of “out there” or as separateness from the rest of reality.  Dorothy Soelle points out that feminist theology means more than just changing pronouns.  She writes, “Transcendence is no longer to be understood as being independent of everything and ruling over everything else, but rather as being bound up in the web of life.”  Feminist theologian Carter Heyward speaks of “God the ‘power-in-relationship,’ which lets us take part in the power of life.”

        Theology is so much more than postulating a personal deity with some set of ideal human qualities.  It’s so much more than writing down a set of rules for living that purportedly come directly from that deity.  I like Diana Eck’s definition:  Theology is the “task of bringing to the surface and examining the ideas of ultimacy and reality that we already employ and in terms of which we live our lives... It undergirds the way in which we think about all questions of value.”

        And so, if you want to have a meaningful, productive theological discussion with someone, don’t get hung up on the existence question.  Rather, compare your ideas about the nature of God, or Divinity, or Ultimate Reality, of what principles underlie and guide the operation of the world.

        One reason I included the topic of “beauty” in the service today was to point out some interesting parallels, and to provide yet another angle from which to look at the idea of God.  First, let me raise the question, “Does Beauty exist?”  And if so, what exactly is it?

        How many of you think beauty exists? . . . Can you prove it?  Where is it?  Where does it live?  Where did it come from?  Who or what created it?  Somehow, those seem like the wrong questions to ask, don’t they?  Sort of like, “Do you believe in God?”

        We all know that beauty exists, because we have experienced it, whether in a multicolored sunset, or in a work of art or music, or in the beaming smile of an infant, or in an arrangement of flowers.  In fact, beauty is not a physical object sitting on a shelf somewhere.  Beauty is a quality of sensory experience, a pleasing sense of symmetry, or order, or color, or . . . something.  We have a habit of attributing beauty to objects – objects of art or of nature.  But we don’t all agree on which objects are beautiful.  Each of us brings our own taste and our own previous history of experience and associations.  And so I would claim that beauty inheres not in the object, but only in our subjective experience of it.

        Perhaps there is a theological lesson here.  As I said earlier, any useful, meaningful concept of God must somehow touch real life, and be compatible with actual experience.  Perhaps God, like beauty, has meaning only within the context of our experience.  Perhaps it is only in our experience of life and the world that God manifests.  Or at least perhaps those are the only manifestations that are worth our time and effort to understand.

        One of the most meaningful concepts I find in recent theological work is that of relationship.  Theologian Sally McFague, in her book Models of God, writes “individuals or entities always exist within structures of relationship; process, change, transformation, and openness replace stasis, changelessness, and completeness as basic descriptive concepts.”  If relationship is a central feature of reality, then perhaps it should also play a central role in our understanding of Divinity.

        And the exciting thing for me is that these ideas seem to be coming from all directions, not just from formal theological work.  Poet Wallace Stevens declares “Nothing is itself taken alone.  Things are because of interrelations or interconnections.”  Similar messages have emerged from the world of science.  Sally McFague again: “Relationship and relativity, as well as process and openness, characterize reality as it is understood at present in all branches of science.”  And it is our conception of relationship, and of our interconnectedness with others that form the basis of our ethical impulses of justice and compassion.

        Beauty, as we understand it, lies not in the beautiful objects we encounter.  And it lies not within us.  Rather, beauty exists, or arises as a part of our experience in relationship with the object of beauty.  Joseph Robertson, author of our reading this morning, writes “Beauty touches the core of what is good and valuable about human existence.  In locating beauty, the mind itself is beautified, humanized, because it is in consciousness where beauty finds its hold in the world.”

        Perhaps there is another theological lesson there.  Beauty – and God – are finally about relationship – our relationship to the essence, the essentials of life.  And it is in our experience, our consciousness, that beauty and God find their hold in the world.

        So, does God exist?  I don’t know.  If the concept of God has no resonance for you; if you feel no Divine presence, then for you perhaps God is only the Great Mystery, or even the Great Absence.  But if you sense a comforting presence in times of struggle and difficulty, then God the Comforter is there.  If you see the face of God in a spectacular sunset or in the radiant smile of a loved one, or hear the voice of God in a Handel Sonata or a Beethoven Symphony, then God the Creator of Beauty is there.  If you feel an invisible hand leading you on in works of compassion and justice, then God the Merciful and Just is there.  If you sense the invisible lines of connection and relationship between yourself and all other beings, then God the Glue of the Universe, Architect of the Interdependent Web, is there.

        If you experience God in any of these ways, or in any of a myriad other possible ways, don’t let my doubts or the doubts of anyone else take that away from you.

        Blessed be.