Beauty as peace-making...

"Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do: the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."  A friend sent that to me recently on a hand-made card to mark my 30th anniversary of ordination. The quote comes from Frederick Buechner and is one of my favorites about vocation.  Living into our truest selves is not about forced sacrifice nor the lowest common denominator; rather it points to where our most profound joy can embrace and embody compassion in real life.

In his address to an arts conference, Eugene Peterson, said:  "Jobs have job descriptions. A job is an assignment to do work that can be quantified and evaluated. It is pretty easy to decided whether a job has been completed or not. It is pretty easy to tell whether a job is done well or badly. But a vocation is not a job in that sense. I can be hired to do a job, paid a fair wage if I do it, dismissed if I don't.  But I can't be hired..." into my deep gladness, right?  No, I can only live into it or ignore it.

After worship yesterday - and sometimes even in the midst of the music we were making - I experienced a deep resonance in my heart.  It was an encounter with what the late Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, liked to call the "pursuit of new epiphanies of beauty."  The holy and the human embraced, the extraordinary and the ordinary were at peace and time seemed suspended as we all shared the full beauty of the present tense.  As you know, for the past 15 years I have been ever more carefully exploring this intersection as my vocation within the church.  So it is not too shocking to confess that during this time one of the new epiphanies that came to me had to do with the way creating and responding to beauty is actually a path into peace-making in our wounded world.

Barbara Nicolosi has noted that St. Thomas Aquinas "gave a definition of the beautiful that is still helpful and relevant seven centuries later.  The beautiful, he said, is wholeness, harmony and radiance."

+ In wholeness, there is nothing missing: the lion lies down with the lamb, the Alpha is embraced by the Omega, the holy and the human are integrated along with light and darkness as the hopes and fears of all the years rest together. 

I think of Psalm 85: Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground and righteousness will look down from the sky. 

Or Isaiah 40: Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God,the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary,and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Or the gospel for this week in Mark 10:  So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,⁴⁴and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

There is nothing unnecessary in wholeness - it is shalom in the truest sense - where all that is gratuitous has been culled and all that is dross burned off so that the fullness of life works together for the shalom of every soul.  Nicolosi adds: Wholeness gives us a sense of being at rest and at home.  Indeed, "the beautiful gives us a sense of peace."  And in an era that is addicted to activity, a culture that grants meaning and value only to those who are productive, rest becomes essential to our healing.  Nourishing repose and practicing the release of our obsessions - choosing not to be defined by busyness but grace - deepens wholeness and peace within and among us all. "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest."

+ In harmony there is joy:  not anxiety, not fear and not guilt or shame.  In harmony we each have a place - a note to sing, a calling to share, a home to rest in - and we are not at peace until we settle into our place.  Singing together - or playing music with others - makes this obvious:  when we sing out of pitch - off key - or in ways that are out of sync with the others, everything hurts.  The sound is not beautiful - and we become agitated and tense.  But when we find our true place - where our notes meet their mates - the tension evaporates and is replaced by joy.  Like Buechner said:  "neither hair shirt nor soft birth will do... it is where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

Jesus said to his disciples in the gospel of John:  Rest in me - abide in me - Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing... If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become^* my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

+ In radiance there is both insight and purpose:  When something radiates it is illuminated from within. There is light and clarity shared beyond even language.  Ralph Heintzman calls this reverence and awe:  an experience or insight that connects our inside with something greater beyond yet among us, too.  And in these moments, we cannot help but respond for we ache and thirst for a deeper intimacy with the source of our longing.  Some have spoken of this thirsting as our sense of destiny - we come to know our purpose in life in response to beauty - for we are humbled and nourished by this love greater than ourselves. Psalm 42 says it best:  As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?

Nicolosi puts it like this:  Beauty actually subverts the problem of the Garden of Eden.  "Satan's temptation was, 'You shall be like gods.' Adam and Eve rejected their creaturehood. And this the perennial temptation for us: we want to be like God, we want no limits. But the beautiful makes us content with our creaturehood: 'I am small and that's ok."  We sense that we are a part of something larger than ourselves, we hunger and thirst for greater connections all while celebrating that we are not the source or origin of beauty. As Psalm 131 puts it:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

Understanding my calling as a vocation of new epiphanies in pursuit of beauty helps me avoid being coercive and manipulative.  Not always successfully, to be sure, but as a conviction.  To move towards wholeness, harmony and radiance is to share gifts with others rather than get them to do my bidding.  And this type of peace-making feels right at this moment in my life.