Beauty cannot be objectified or envisioned—it must be understood, felt, experienced and believed in. So it is with God or whatever Higher Power one worships. While the following from The Prophet is lengthy, it is lyrical and true. It reads like Corinthians on love: love is gentle and kind. We often look for definitions and limits but Beauty and the poet call us to wonder and awe, a limitless expansiveness. Let us rest in the gentleness, in the “half-shyness”, with the angels, and let Beauty whisper to us. May we hear ourselves, our true selves, our beautiful selves, in the whisper. On Beauty Kahlil Gibran - 1883-1931 And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.      And he answered:      Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?      And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?      The aggrieved and the injured say, “Be...

One of the most beautiful, grace-filled passages of the Bible:The woman who wiped Jesus’ feet with precious nard and flowing hair is simply sacramental, exquisite, and selfless. In short it is a gesture which carries meaning in expanding ripples which lap the shore of my soul. Br.Geoffrey Tristram of SSJE preaches these words: “The woman who pours costly oil on Jesus’ feet doesn’t just drop a few drops on – she smashes the whole neck of the bottle and pours the whole lot over Jesus. What a waste! But that’s what God’s love for us is like – lavish, overflowing with generosity – beyond what is rational, beyond what we can comprehend: so much does he love us that he allows his son to die on the cross for us. Love without measure.” To me this demonstrates at least three things about Beauty.   Beauty and generosity are intimately entwined. God’s generosity revealed in creation meets human generosity and stewardship. Beauty tends toward the arc of precious and cherished as...

I have always loved the work of Mark Rothko. Abstract Expressionism is a term often used to describe his style yet apparently he was less interested in being so named. Beauty transcends labels. Rothko Chapel in Houston bearing purplish black canvases on the interior by Rothko and an obelisk on the exterior to honor Martin Luther King is intended to be a place of worship for all faiths. According to its website, “The Rothko Chapel is a spiritual space, a forum for world leaders, a place for solitude and gathering. It’s an epicenter for civil rights activists, a quiet disruption, a stillness that moves.”  As we consider Beauty in all its forms and with all its transformative power, it occurs to me that space itself might be beautiful and might invoke the sacred.  I have had a lot of blessed experiences with space and what I refer to as its liminal quality. Space can be a threshold to the holy, an in-between to connect this world to the next, humans to the divine....

Beautiful, authentic, gestures transform. They change the space, rearranging molecules of stillness and silence ever so gently. I knew a woman who did not speak yet facilitated the most beautiful worship experience I could imagine. With authentic reverential gestures she conducted a space of silence and stillness as though a symphony of invisible harmonies. Arms stretching upward with hands open, there was no doubt as to her intent to offer self and receive Spirit, Worship Embodied. The space was thus stirred by the Spirit invoked and by expressions of personal piety.  Like a glassy lake at dawn into which a pebble falls, it came back to itself more wholly: the space and the souls.  I remember this experience when I remember Beauty. I remember reverence, devotion, incarnation and sacred space. No words.

Beauty continues... The question on my heart today is how does beauty change us, transform us? And once again this seems to me a parallel if not equivalent question regarding God, the Divine, that which is Holy. The Swan and Grace change us. Mary Oliver provides so many beautiful observations of beauty, as though the beauty we see becomes the beauty we do, or write, or play, or represent.  Today The Swan assists me in leaning into a mystery which is all around us to be noticed and received. The Swan Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river? Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air – An armful of white blossoms, A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies, Biting the air with its black beak? Did you hear it, fluting and whistling A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall Knifing down the black ledges? And did you ...

Blessed be God who animates our lives and calls us through prayer to empty ourselves of preconception and delusion that we might grow into the fullness of the Kingdom promise.   Rilke writes to the young poet: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. One of my good teachers reminded me this week when pondering the arrival of the presence of beauty that when the student is ready the teacher appears And one of the overwhelming messages of the Gospels is that when we prepare our souls, empty them of extraneous matters, and orient ourselves toward God we receive abundance. Much comes from nothing. All of these aphorisms are, like parables, inversions and subversions of societal expectations. They ...

This poem causes me to think about incarnation. It seems to be a good thing to ponder as we prepare for the Sabbath.   “Two Countries” by Naomi Shihab Nye Listen Skin remembers how long the years grow when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel of singleness, feather lost from the tail of a bird, swirling onto a step, swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather. Skin ate, walked, slept by itself, knew how to raise a see-you-later hand. But skin felt it was never seen, never known as a land on the map, nose like a city, hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope. Skin had hope, that’s what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road. Love means you breathe in two countries. And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass, deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own. Even now, when skin is not alone, it remembers being alone and thanks something larger that there are travele...

Tanglewood “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” – Aldous Huxley “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence in between.” –  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart I would like to spend some time thinking about Beauty in its various shapes and forms. When I consider the beauty of music I am jolted away from reliance on my eyes and to some extent even my cognition and I enter a world not only of deep listening but one in which memory is keenly evoked. Music never seems to come alone; it enters my soul, reverberates and loosens tight defenses revealing times and places once gone.  The Doobie Brothers, Little Feet, James Taylor and Loggins and Messina transport me to Williams College with or without Christopher Robin. Mozart locates me more specifically in Currier Hall and Music 101 as I focus on Prof. Shainman’s trumpet finger moving up and down reflexively. La Traviata puts white gloves on my 10 year old hands and takes me ...

Sometimes there is a topic which consumes me, like Beauty, for which I cannot find words or thoughts which improve on others. Moreover these words resonate with me deeply. And so I offer this quote in its entirety. I will be reading it again and again with you especially looking for “intriguing asymmetries” which evoke and invoke beauty. Perhaps today we can be a community of presence holding each other in the embrace of Beauty and engae in a harvest: BEAUTY is the harvest of presence, the evanescent moment of seeing or hearing on the outside what already lives far inside us; the eyes, the ears or the imagination suddenly become a bridge between the here and the there, between then and now, between the inside and the outside; beauty is the conversation between what we think is happening outside in the world and what is just about to occur far inside. Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting; the self forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling or ...

We are too often fooled into thinking it is up to us, that we have control. (whatever ‘It’ is) Beauty, however, is not up to us. We cannot, like magicians, make it appear on cue. We must prepare our selves, our souls and bodies, to receive this Mystery. What is up to us is the preparation and the reflection of Beauty into the world. John O’Donohue says: “When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. Beauty is mysterious, a slow presence who waits for the ready, expectant heart.” (The Invisible Embrace Beauty) This speaks to me of the orientation we might seek in order to meet this “slow presence”. I suspect it will be barely perceptible and majestic! Like a sunrise! On Sabbath walks I often find myself pausing to reorient my thoughts and my stride. I tell myself I am not trying to “accomplish” anything and I am often met with internal resistance. But when I surrender, the other side of awakening to Beauty, I am surprised by Beauty, just as CS Lewis ...

“The majesty of Beauty is its gracious wholesomeness.” These words from John O’Donohue seem to create ripples of meaning for me, especially the words “gracious” and “wholesomeness”.  What is gracious wholesomeness? For me it triggers two essential theological concepts yet numinous ones. Grace is unexplained unmerited gift. We are gracious when we channel that gift which is part love, part mercy, part kindness.  Wholesomeness connotes wholeness which in turn connotes holiness. I suppose there is a fullness and completeness to Beauty which is gift and mystery and sacred.  When we become aware of grace, when we recognize the holy, we touch or are touched by something luminous and mysterious. We engage it sacramentally by pausing, noting, bowing, remembering this invisible power. Authentic gestures which acknowledge Beauty are in themselves gracious and whole. They also hold us in a liminal space for whatever period of time, less to capture, more to embrace.  ...

We lost a great man this past weekend. John Lewis’ legacy will live on and become even more important and poignant in these times of hopefully breaking down and deconstructing systemic racism. Much of his persistent work led the way and certainly bridged the Civil Rights Movement with Black Lives Matter. The essence of his theology and positivity and forgiveness creates a beautiful and powerful stream of living water which refreshes, again and again. If Beauty is the Embrace of Love and Life offered to all creation then Beauty is what John Lewis is. (a riff on Rumi) I offer some of his beautiful and prophetic thoughts: “Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with goodness. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overco...

Blessed be God who animates our lives and calls us to radical hope and uncommon courage in these times. AMEN I offer the words of Sister Joan Chittister, social activist and prophet:   “In all my years of traveling around the world, one thing has been present in every region, everywhere. One thing has stood out and convinced me of the the certain triumph of the great human gamble on equality and justice. Everywhere there are people who, despite finding themselves mired in periods of national darkness or personal marginalization refuse to give up the thought of a better future or givein to the allurements of a deteriorating present. They never lose hope that the values they learned in the best of times or the courage It takes to reclaim their world from the worst of times are worth the commitment of their lives. These people, the best of ourselves, are legion and they are everywhere. It is the unwavering faith, the open hearts, and the piercing courage of people from ev...