Recognizing BEAUTY
“The Lilies of the Field” Matthew 6
Sermon preached at Leaside United Church by Rev JG Smith October 12, 2014
This is such a beautiful time of the year.
Frost on the pumpkins.
Bright red and gold, the leaves this autumn have been truly spectacular! Fresh
crisp apples right from the tree. The second pick of raspberries. It can easily make
us all dreamy-eyed, soft.
But, what if it wasn’t so beautiful?? What if, God forbid, the true colours of
autumn leaves were purple and blue and black? You know it’s only a trick of the
atmospheric light that they appear red and gold? What if they were black and
blue?
Our expectations of beauty and what is SUPPOSED to be the norm, are really just
constructs. No? And if that’s the case, then you have to admit that there is the
possibility that we are not always right about beauty. For example, one of the
most beautiful things I have ever done in my whole life is to have sat with a young
man dying of AIDS in a bed in his home, holding his hand. The person died, the
family all cried, we said a prayer together, hugged one another, and when I went
home, it was with a feeling of intense gratitude for having been able to share in
the experience, to share in the life of a dearly loved man. It was a beautiful
experience, though not one of deep reds and golds. Beauty lies alongside pain
and suffering. We just aren’t used to recognizing it.
Recently I’ve been preaching a whole series on the soul, as you know, because
this is a thoroughly Christian, in fact cross-religious topic that most people in our
secular world are afraid to address. Why is that I wonder? For people who have
a traditional faith, the concept of the soul is rather frightening because it’s not
something you can control with rules and regulations or doctrine. There is no real
dogma of the soul! For people with a mature or progressive faith, the concept of
the soul seems out of date and out of touch, so last century! Too religious! But
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Recognizing BEAUTY
“The Lilies of the Field” Matthew 6
Sermon preached at Leaside United Church by Rev JG Smith October 12, 2014
liberals haven’t replaced it with anything that comes close to the meaning that
the soul gives our lives. And of course, for atheists, the whole notion is absurd.
How can there be a soul when there is no God? How can we believe in something
so ridiculous?
The answer is beauty.
Jonathan Haidt is a psychology professor at U of Virginia in the USA. His
graduate students have done a lot of research into the concepts of beauty, awe,
and transcendence. What the research has discovered is that there is a distinct
physical and emotional response to scenes of great beauty. Beauty gives us chills
and tingles, which then can lead to awe. Awe is vibrational in the centre of our
being, (not in our hearts).
(((Sidebar from previous sermon: Our “hearts” are the
locus of emotion and feelings, but the soul is different
from our heart, the soul is in the centre of our being,
underneath the heart, underneath the emotional and
physical response.)))
Haidt’s research shows that there are two things required for a person to feel
awe and beauty:
1) A scene that is incredibly vast (I think of Chris Hadfield taking all those
pictures from the international space station) or the Grand Canyon, which
pic I’ve showed here many times, or maybe it’s the first time you hear
Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg variations
And
2) The vast thing cannot be accommodated by the viewer’s existing mental
structures
(Haidt, page 202203)
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Recognizing BEAUTY
“The Lilies of the Field” Matthew 6
Sermon preached at Leaside United Church by Rev JG Smith October 12, 2014
He says: “ Awe happens when something enormous can’t be processed, and
when people are stumped, stopped in their cognitive tracks while in the presence
of something vast, they feel small, powerless, and incredibly receptive.” By
stopping people and making them receptive, beauty and awe create an opening
for change. But note: it makes you feel SMALL!!!!
I sometimes wonder if we have, in our culture, insulated ourselves against
beauty, surrounded as we are with the daily narrative of gun violence, traffic
woes, and the situation in the Middle East. In fact, in a work by a writer named
Robert Sardello, the claim is made that in order for us to live from the soul in our
culture which is so saturated by the three-pronged powers of technology, science,
and the economic pulse of our nation states, all of which serve to diminish the
power of the soul (which then by extension gets people to insulate themselves in
terms of their love for the world, their world, the people they love become rather
tightly defined, a small circle rather than a larger more inclusive one), and once
the soul of the world is diminished, people who wish to live from this more
balanced state of being find they must work twice as hard to bring soul-work
back into the consciousness of the world around us.
OK, in short form, we who believe in the soul, have some soul work to do.
It’s awesome but it’s hard!!! We can’t hide in the bushes any longer. As many
writers have been asserting for the last 20 years or so, the process of soul
enhancement, , is like a very long and difficult labour that may take a few
generations, in order to give birth to a world that learns it can actually CREATE
love rather than RESIST love. It can create soul, rather than resist soul, it can
create beauty rather than resist it.
As you can tell, these are rather big goals.
In the early part of my sabbatical this past spring, I spent 3 weeks in BC. First I did
a retreat in a vineyard in southern Okanagan. I walked by growing vines each and
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Recognizing BEAUTY
“The Lilies of the Field” Matthew 6
Sermon preached at Leaside United Church by Rev JG Smith October 12, 2014
every day and literally felt my own spirit enlarging and growing as I did. Then I did
a retreat on Vancouver island, dwarfed by the redwood trees in Cathedral Grove
(a truly awe-inspiring experience which I can still remember vividly, with all the
fog and mist still intact), then I enjoyed many walks up and down the long
beaches of Pacific Rim National park. One day it dawned on me: I was
consciously choosing the backdrop of my days. I was consciously letting my soul
CREATE what it needed. It occurred to me that we do not have to be just passive
receivers of all that the world throws at us, we can assert ourselves, change the
landscape and even INSIST on beauty as an integral part of our lives. Our souls
have that much power, connected as they are to the Larger Soul of Love Eternal.
Many of us have said many times, we feel so much closer to God in nature. I think
I figured this out:
As I said earlier, we are dwarfed by the vast magnitude of mountains and
redwoods; It makes you feel small, powerless and reverent, not in the heart,
because the heart is emotion, but in the soul, because the soul is the centre of
your being. It’s here in the centre of your being, where a deep reserve of beauty
resides. Being in nature open us, makes us receptive, and gives us a way to
connect with this deep beauty, with this deep love, with this deep soul. Parker
Palmer, whom I spoke of last week with reference to the divided self, suggests
that when nature makes us shrink, makes us feel small and insignificant, it is our
outer self, the false self, the outer shell, the persona of our ego, that shrinks and
falls away. In the presence of the true beauty of our inner self, none of that
matters.
On another level, in the presence of great vast awe-inspiring beauty, we can also
let go of our anger. We can let go of our need to control every situation. When
we’re standing there watching waves roll in, waves that originated perhaps in
China, we don’t have to be consumed by our pain or our suffering either. We
don’t have to give it so much attention. It rolls in and it will roll out of there too!
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Recognizing BEAUTY
“The Lilies of the Field” Matthew 6
Sermon preached at Leaside United Church by Rev JG Smith October 12, 2014
And when we’re standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon and realizing how deep
it really is, we can see that the upper layers which are millions of years old, do get
washed away over time. We find we can let go of our layers too, like victimhood
for example (good things never happen to me, only bad). We can let go of our
neuroses, or our learned behaviours of sarcasm or critiquing every little thing, we
can let go of our negative patterns, because these are all just outer layers of the
false self. Persona. Ego. Fake in the sense that they are not of the soul.
Having said all that, how does one then live? We can’t walk around in a state of
awe all the time.
We can’t be inspired by great landscapes every moment or great art or great
music; we’ll get bored and tired of it.
Maybe we have things backwards.
Consider the lilies, Jesus taught. They’re not even conscious of their beauty!!
Isn’t that an astonishing thought!
Nature produces life constantly. The sun shines without judgment, on everything.
The rains come and provide nurture for life, life in all its fullness. Nature seems to
be able to create goodness and amazing beauty, effortlessly. It seems to be
programmed to produce awe, or love, or deep inspiration, just by being. It
EXUDES beauty, and it’s this beauty that we respond to.
Are we not part of nature too?
The love of God is like the sun. No matter what we do, where we are, how we
find ourselves, it does not stop beaming away at us. Does the sunlight shine on a
saintly person more brightly than on someone like you? Does the rain water your
neighbour’s garden more differently than yours? You could be an absolute
wretch of a person, turn your eyes away from the light of God, claim in your cold
atheist heart that there is no such thing, resist and resist and resist until your
very last breath, but if, with your very last breath, you turned to the light, it would
still be the same light you refused to see all of your life. If you turned to the light,
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Recognizing BEAUTY
“The Lilies of the Field” Matthew 6
Sermon preached at Leaside United Church by Rev JG Smith October 12, 2014
and were awed by its brilliance, you would experience the warmth in YOUR stonecold soul. Wouldn’t you be inwardly captured by the beauty of the light as it
illumines your own inner landscape, even in YOU, the soul-place, the place
where beauty resides?
But when you do turn to the light, then you BECOME like the lilies of the field but
UNLIKE the lilies, we CAN realize how much beauty and love is constantly present
in the soul side of you. Where does that beauty come from???? It comes from
that place which existed before you were born and which continues long after
you are gone. It’s the energy in you that gives you the ability to connect, with
others, yourself, and with the deep energy of the whole cosmos!!
Ahh, there’s that secret of the soul again!!! Do you remember the secret?
“An infinite God seeks and desires to merge with your soul”
(Richard Rohr)
(dear reader, the question of the secret has been asked four
times now. Don’t worry, no one else got it either)
When we turn our hearts to love, when we capture the beauty of creation in our
hearts and minds, when we allow ourselves to be stopped and stumped by aweinspiring events or scenes, THEN The beauty of God’s soul reaches out and
touches the beauty in our own little souls. This touch, helps us to know what we
are made of. We are made of the deep love of the universe. We are made of
beauty. Our souls are meant to merge with God.
When you touch this soul place, you will for the first time, recognize beauty. It is
awesome indeed.
Once your own souls are open, receptive to the beauty of the world, then you will
find you have the power to live as well as the power to change. WOW! THANKS
BE TO GOD!
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Recognizing BEAUTY
“The Lilies of the Field” Matthew 6
Sermon preached at Leaside United Church by Rev JG Smith October 12, 2014
I quote Jonathan Haidt a lot, because he is current, and is still studying religious awareness and
spirituality from a scientific lens. You can google him and find all kinds of current topics. The book I have
is called The Happiness Hypothesis, (Basic Books, New York, 2006), which is a collection of essays on
topics he has studied.
Sardello’s book will become a classic. It’s called Love and the Soul: Creating a Future for the Earth
(Goldenstone Press, 2008). I’ve read it through a couple of times and the cumulative effect of the
reading is one of hopefulness. It’s a bit heavy at times, but well worth the effort.
The idea of the lilies that bloom and bloom and bloom came to me from reading Michael Singer’s book
The Untethered Soul, (Noetic Books, 2007), particularly the last chapter. Again, this book has been a
gem of a read, one that I will return to many times.
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