Words of Wisdom?

In his work De Veritate Religione, the 4th century Christian theologian, Augustine asks:  “Is a thing beautiful because it gives delight, or does it give delight because it is beautiful?”

That can be said to sum up the philosophical argument over beauty for the last nearly 3000 years in western civilization.  Is beauty a given, inherent quality in things, or is beauty in the eye of the beholder.  Of course, one can argue in favor of both perspectives. Human beings tend to agree very often about what things are beautiful (which implies that those things come with inherent beauty), and individuals disagree about whether some things are beautiful (implying that beauty is what the individual mind of perception makes of it).

In these days when we seem capable of arguing about everything, even those things that more recently we would seem to have had near universal agreement on, I don’t want to argue about the nature of beauty.

I do want to point out what happens when we fail to perceive beauty.  If beauty is subjective, then a failure to perceive beauty implies that we are failing each other, at least from one generation to another in pointing out beauty in the many places that we might find it. If beauty is inherent in things, then a failure to perceive it implies a disconnect between humanity in general and the nature of things.

When we fail to perceive beauty, regardless of its nature, we participate in the devaluation of things in general.  Nature.  All things belong to nature.  All objects belong to nature.  All people belong to nature. I think we see this devaluation all around us.

Why does the opioid crisis suddenly get national attention when it was just an inner city problem, we did not mind?

How can we see rising water temperatures and water depths, a huge increase in the number of storms and the mass die-offs of birds and continue to deny climate change?

How can we see the continual disproportionate number of suicides and murders among LGTBQ youth and not see that our cultural practices toward them are killing them?

How can white people still say with impunity that “we don’t see color” when not seeing color is a vehicle of racism?

I suspect you could add to the list.  The list is of those places in the human community where we fail to see beauty, where we collectively experience a failure to perceive what is beautiful in nature.

By the way, in the fourth century, Augustine concluded that we delight in things because they are beautiful.  Look what we do when we fail to see that.

Bob Patrick

It seems that there is something awfully present tense about beauty.  Of course, we can all remember a time when we saw or experienced something beautiful, and that memory is fond.  But, honestly, wouldn’t it be sad to live out one’s entire existence thinking that the memory of a beautiful experience was the only beauty there was?  It seems to me that beauty is really always best as present tense–in this moment.  Now.  The memory of a beautiful think or person or event or landscape is a treasure, but in a sense it ceases to be beauty.  It becomes a good memory.

Beauty is now.  Hafiz captures what I am after in two little poems.  Consider.

Stop Being So Religious

What
Do sad people have in
Common?
It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past
And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.
What is the beginning of
Happiness?
It is to stop being
So religious
Like That.

(“The Gift” – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

That is the problem of the past.  But, he also captures the present tense of beauty in this little verse:

Every child has known God

Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does Anything weird,
But the God who knows only 4 words.
And keeps repeating them, saying:
“Come Dance with Me , come dance.”

— Hafiz

I wonder today what people, what events, what landscapes, what experiences will whisper those words to us:  Come Dance with Me.

Bob Patrick

And it is always there, like love is there.
Whether it fairly shouts at me or hides,
Whether it turns and turns in my heart
Like a slowly turning dagger, it is there.
                               And I shall find it.       It Is Always There, by Kenneth W. Collier

We pondered these words yesterday at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Gwinnett.  This morning, out of the dark of early morning, I could hear the wailing and yelping of our 18 year old Dachshund, Jewel.  She was downstairs where she sleeps these days, far too old to make the staircase up to our bedroom.  She now has her own plush sleeping quarters in the sun room.

But, I could tell that she was unhappy.  I got up to go and check on her.  The rain from Irma had already begun.  I took Jewel outside and then back in.  She was inconsolable.  She got in and out of her bed a dozen times, tried to get under her blanket and then came out from under it half a dozen times, wailing and crying the whole time.  Nothing soothed her–nothing that usually does, not the offer of food, not the comfort of her bed or her blanket, not going outside.  Apparently not being inside.

So, instinctively, I got down on the floor next to her bed, and held her–mostly her head, cupped in my hands.  Her wailing became whimpers.  Her whimpers, after they stopped sounding continued to reverberate through her body for several more minutes.  And then, she was asleep.

It was something between us that worked.  It was in our touch. It soothed, it calmed, it cared, it worked.

This is September 11, a day that bears a national scar for us as Americans. Today, I am home from work because Hurricane Irma is moving through our area and schools are closed.  Much of Florida is waking up to devastation.  In the Caribbean, they are out of food and in panicked states.  The Houston area is still trying to catch its collective breath, to calm the panic that reverberates through life there after Hurricane Harvey last week. To the south of us, Mexico is dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake.

It strikes me this morning that “IT” always exists within us and between us–whether IT’s the fears and anxieties of an elder dog, the horror of terrorism, or the devastation of nature’s storms on human dwellings.  We do IT for each other.  We are IT.  We have IT always.  IT flows between us. IT moves us toward pain and suffering with hands ready to help.

So, let us be aware of IT, and answer IT’s call today.  Comfort is as close as our hands, and when we find them reaching toward another, IT is about to happen again.

Several years ago, a short prayer emerged for me that I say almost every day during my morning meditation:

This is my deep soul, and this is Spirit of which I am a part.

For me, this is IT.

Bob Patrick

I woke up from what seemed like a night full of just weird dreams, and that is most often my experience. I began a complaint in my mind: why can’t I just have a joyful dream every once in a while. Instantly, as if in conversation with someone else, I was reminded that I had also had just such a dream and I slipped right back into the full memory of it.

I was back in the area where I grew up, in a house that I never knew, on a front porch looking out over the beginnings of the Appalachian hills and mountains of north Alabama. There was a child on the porch with me and the child’s mother, and it was clear to me that I was to teach the child something.  I said to the child:  look out on that (pointing to the mountainscape in front of us) and tell me what you see.  I had in mind the beauty of the mountains and particularly the beauty of the sky and clouds above them.  “Tell me what beauty you see.”

The child responded pointing lower in the landscape:  “The Southern Railway.”  I looked out, and the child was right (and that was true in the place where I grew up–the Southern Railway traveled parallel to the mountains north and south bisecting several towns along the way which became little train stations).  “Yes, so it is.  But look higher, I said. What beauty do you see?” The child gazed up and pointed at the blue sky and the beautiful clouds in it.  “Yes,” I heard myself saying.  “Jesus reveals himself to us in beauty.”  I looked into the face of the child, and the child’s eyes made me smile.

I realized, lying there in the dark of early morning, remembering this dream, that there were actually three beauties through which “Jesus was revealing himself.”  There was the beauty of the mountainscape.  There was the beauty of the child’s fascination with the railway.  And there was the face of the child itself.  And it became so clear to me that in each of those instances, beauty became the way the gods reveal themselves to us: the beauty of the Earth, the beauty of the things we are drawn to, and the beauty of every human face.

I don’t know what “the gods” mean to you.  They don’t have to mean anything.  They may mean everything.  You may think of God.  You may, like my dreaming self, think of Jesus. I also realized that Jesus was the beautiful version of God that I came to know growing up. Now, I think of the gods and goddesses as all of the expressions of that great unifying life and love that really has no name and all names at once.  Beauty is that–revealing itself to us.

Notice the beauty giving itself to you, today.  In the Earth.  In what you are drawn to, and what you see others drawn to.  In every face.  In every single face. Each instance of beauty is the gods revealing themselves to us.

Bob Patrick