A sermon preached in the round by Shantida, John Lagerquist and Rev. Diane Teichert
Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church
May 1, 2011
Shantida- Part One:
I have worked in retail most of my life. You know, “cashiering” mostly, what is called “customer service.” I am an intelligent fellow and not especially extroverted. I try to maximize “life” in my job. Thankfully jobs have been in boutique settings without Giant or Wal-Mart-size customer loads coming before me.
I greet the customer eye to eye and try not to have an agenda in my mind. Be available to this person before me. I might say a simple greeting or something like, “Thank you for smiling,” if I see that’s true. Or “Pretty scarf,” or “I like your tie.” Something pleasant and mildly or obliquely complimentary to the person before me. It’s not deep or even especially personal but it sets a pleasant tone over and above the register-ringing-chargecard-exchanging-signing-bagging-receipt-handing-taking – the banal formalities of the occasion. Pleasantries of human contact can turn these mundane acts into a dance.
What pleases me and so surprises me is how often people open up and respond with more warmth than was offered them. The smile comes or gets bigger. “My late husband gave me the scarf” one woman once shared. Her face showed lingering pain and grief but also that sweet poignancy that comes from release and from sharing.
I think this work practice is beautiful. People are beautiful, they can be, they want to be. But it comes like a flash, in a moment, unpredictably. I can’t make it happen. What I can do is be open and available and maybe take the lead with my own smile. Isn’t a smile, anyone’s smile, right up there among the most beautiful experiences in life?
John Lagerquist – Part One:
I have worked with the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra since 1984. In all that time I can’t recall ever going to work and not experiencing at least one moment of beauty. Usually there are many. The best part for me, besides doing what I love and getting paid for it too, is sharing what I care about. For me, nothing beats the feeling I get when a favorite passage is coming and I imagine someone in the audience hearing it for the first time.
I’m going to share such a passage with you all today. It’s from The Nutcracker. Now, I’ve played this ballet at least 500 times. One might well think that I’ve grown sick to death of it. But, I haven’t.
The excerpt you are about to hear is the place in which the guests have all gone home from the Christmas party. The clock strikes midnight, and suddenly the Christmas Tree starts to grow. It grows and grows as Clara runs frantically, ecstatically around it and the music swells with tremendous power.
I can never get through this spot without choking up a bit, as I always imagine someone, a child, say, hearing this music for the first time, maybe even hearing an orchestra live for the first time. Then I remember my first time, and I hope that the first-timers in the audience get as excited as I got, and still get.
Yes, the music is beautiful if we’re doing our job. But, even more beautiful is what that music can do when it’s offered freely and received like-wise. It can change one’s life.
Rev. Diane Teichert – Part One:
There are many kinds of beauty. Shantida talked about beauty in the interactions between people and John talked about beauty in music. I’m going to talk about visual beauty.
Shantida is a photographer. He goes out walking in natural settings and takes the most exquisite shots of what meets his eye: from the smallest blooming violet to a meandering tributary of the Anacostia River. He has been sending his beautiful photos via email to one of our members, Marie Gore, during the past year when she has stayed close to home because her husband has been ill.
She wrote an evocative email message back to him, which he shared with John and me. She gave us permission to read it today and also permission to show you the painting to which she refers. Serendipitously, she was able to be here today because her son is visiting from Georgia this week and is keeping his dad company this morning. Marie, will you stand up so people can see who you are?
Here is what she wrote to Shantida:
“My favorites are the photos you sent on March 2nd. They are so beautiful—and give the promise of spring and renewal. I particularly like the stream with the sun shining through the trees. I could look at that all day.
Years ago, when we lived in England, I asked an artist friend to do a painting of a nearby forest for me. She called me one day and said, “I think I have your painting.” It has been hanging over by buffet in the dining room ever since. I never get tired of looking at it – and see something different every time. I guess there’s an element of mystery in wondering what’s on the other side. If you could walk all the way through the trees.”
This is a thing of beauty, created by a painter, an artist, of a scene of natural beauty. The painting invites the viewer into the beauty it depicts. As Marie says, you could walk all the way through the trees. You could walk in beauty there.
Shantida – Part Two:
Three things occur to me about beauty. First, it is ineffable, which means that it cannot be spoken, it cannot be contained or expressed by the cognitive, verbal mind. Beauty is an experience of my whole self and cannot be wholly channeled into or through words. I can talk about beauty and what I say may be true but it will never be the experience of beauty. I can certainly create beauty with words: much of human culture is literature.
Kind, compassionate words are a high expression of beauty. But words do not define or contain beauty any more than words can fully convey a feeling.
In the second place, beauty is a fleeting experience, albeit a repeatable one. The same scene or song, the same painting or poem, may inspire the experience of beauty in me, but if I listen or watch on and on, at some point I will become sated.
Every human sense, I believe, has its own beauty. The beauty of sight and sound are obvious. The beauty of taste is Thanksgiving dinner or a fine wine. The beauty of touch includes fabrics, petting a dog or cat, and our sexuality. And, there is a beauty feeling and experience of meditation, which meditators and neuroscientists can describe. Yet every beauty has its own season. Heraclitus of Ephesus 2500 years ago proclaimed, “Everything changes.”
People who acknowledge and encourage my taking nature pictures often remark that I see beauty in small, mundane places. I attribute this “talent,” if it is that, to a sickly childhood often confined to bed and alone. I learned to stare. We all do this, I believe. Look at something long enough and some pattern, some new perspective, perhaps beauty, will appear were at first it didn’t seem to be.
Finally, I believe that beauty is as longlived as I am. Some scenes, some beautiful experiences refresh themselves repeatedly, like entering my companion-friend’s livingroom, feeling the ambience, seeing its many living plants. I used to expect that beauty’s creative possibilities would run out, be exhausted. Life now assures me that beauty is limitless, infinite – really! that as long as I live there will always be beauty available. I may not be able to visit Yosemite, I may not be able to walk the Paint Branch, but perhaps I’ll still marvel at the crabgrass in the sidewalk crack, or in some nursing home smile at the smile of a friend or enjoy the freshness of each inbreath.
John – Part Two:
It has been said that there is no place in the universe that is truly at rest. You poke it here, and it giggles there. Such is the nature of the web. The result of this tugging and pulling when available to our senses, is often beautiful.
When considering beauty as a topic, it seemed to me that there were two kinds, the natural kind that “just is”, and the kind that we creatures create and sometimes share with one another. However, in both cases, beauty turns out to be something at once outside of and deep inside of our selves that we can acknowledge and respond to. Every one of us has the need or longing for both kinds. Every one of us has the capacity to experience, and to share both kinds. Both kinds have the same effect upon us, which is to give us the opportunity to forget the “I want-can I-what if-give me-fear-futility-try harder” noise, and trade it all in for a moment of transcendence, a moment in which “I” is suspended in favor of “other”. This suspension often happens whether or not we intend it. When we do intend it, we practice a sort of love. I like to think that even when we don’t intend it, we are receiving a sort of love.
Now, this might raise a red flag for some of you. It is easy enough to accept a carefully crafted or expressed work as the offering of a caring personality, but what about the other, natural kind of beauty? Compare these two scenarios. First is the deep, silent wonder of seeing The Grand Canyon for the first time. Doesn’t the phenomenon beckon to us? Do we not respond to that call, perhaps with joy, then gratitude, and then perhaps by trying to bring the experience to someone else? Aren’t these responses more or less universal, despite the fact that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”? Now the second: I get out of bed. I smell the coffee. My soul is stirred by caffeine and the sight of the first rays of sun on the treetops. I am moved to practice. I practice making my scales beautiful. Later, a neighbor sees me in the grocery store and says, “Hey man, I never tire of hearing your morning routine”. A little something I did brings us together. We share a little appreciation, a little gratitude. Whether we’re talking about the Grand Canyon, or musicians working, something passes between the thing or event and a person. Once loosed, that “thing” has a life of its own, and it is beautiful.
We need what beauty offers and especially the way it’s offered. A thing of beauty does what it does as only it can. Beauty can’t be explained or proved or repeated. Our hallowed laws of science and economy simply do not apply. Many of us don’t, or won’t pray. Nevertheless, most of us are awed at the view of a distant galaxy from the Hubble telescope. Most of us will allow our spirits to sore when we hear Pavaroti sing “Nesun Dorma”. Many of us will admit to tearing-up when singing hymns, (I do). None of us is effected exactly the same. But we all are, and long to be, and try to be, every chance we get.
Diane-Part Two:
As you’ve probably noticed by now, this is a three-way circular conversation, a go-round in which we will each have spoken twice by the end. Each of us told a story about a kind of beauty and each of us has also tried to think deeply and speak clearly about the nature of beauty itself. What is beauty?
I’m left with the task of tying it all together, making a beautiful bow at the end! Actually, I’m going to set my sights a bit lower. I simply want to pick a few strand of thought from each of their talks and then weave them together.
In Shantida’s first time speaking, he talked about beauty in the interactions between people, as did John in his first time speaking. For Shantida, it was over the counter, as he inserts a lovely note in what is usually a bland interface with customers in the stationery store where he works. And John described how his empathy, with a child’s awe watching the Nutcracker Ballet for the first time, allows him to re-connect with the beauty of the music as he plays his flute part, for the millionth time. These stories speak to our horizontal experience of beauty, with other human beings.
In his second time speaking, John said that for both natural beauty and the beauty created by humans, beauty is at once outside of and deep inside of our selves. In theological language, this would be like saying it is both transcendent (outside of ourselves) and immanent (deep within).
So, this makes beauty three dimensional: horizontal in our experiences with each other, outside us, and within us. Three dimensionality, that’s one strand of thought. Hold that to the side.
Shantida spoke about three other aspects of the nature of beauty: it is ineffable (not to be contained or fully conveyed by words), it is fleeting, and lastly it is long-lived. Isn’t this how people tend to describe love? We say it can’t be described, and that it is of the moment, but we also know it is everlasting, surviving even death into the next generations.
Curiously similar, John likened the experience of beauty to practicing and receiving love. He said, beauty “gives us the opportunity to forget the “I want-can I-what if-give mefear-futility-try harder” noise, and trade it all in for a moment of transcendence, a moment in which “I” is suspended in favor of “other.” This suspension often happens whether or not we intend it. When we do intend it, we practice a sort of love. I like to think that even when we don’t intend it, we are receiving a sort of love.”
Beauty is like Love? Or perhaps they are alike only in that the limitations of our language in describing them are similar.
In preparing for this service, as I reflected on what John and Shantida wrote about Beauty, it occurred to me that these are also the ways in which some people speak about their experience of God. A similar three dimensionality: It cannot be explained in words – the very name Yahweh, with no consonants, conveys the ineffable, and in the Hebrew Scriptures, when Moses asks God who he should say sent him when his people ask, God is given to say, “Tell them I Am sent you.” Even the God of the Hebrew Scriptures didn’t want to be named.
Also, people experience God as a “presence” with them, around and beyond them. Transcendent. But they also experience the “God within.” Immanent. Finally, they experience God as an energy, love or the spirit of life, between themselves and other people.
Beauty is like Love is like God? By now, in my written text, I have capitalized the B in beauty, the L in love and the G in God.
It’s not that Beauty IS Love IS God. That’s not what I mean. But it does seem that there is a similar trend, some commonality in our experience of each of them. The feeling of them – the feeling of the experience of beauty and the feeling of the experience of love and the feeling of the experience of God – is similar. But hard to describe.
This takes me back to the Navajo concept of Hozho [introduced in the Together Time*], which cannot quite be translated into English, but means something like harmony, balance, beauty and wholeness. Hozho.
May we walk in beauty, before, behind, above and below. Beauty.
*TOGETHER TIME – by Diane
In a few moments we are going to sing a song about beauty. The words come from a certain tribe of Native American people called the Navajo or Dine’, who live in the southwestern part of our country.
Now I walk in beauty, Beauty is before me, Beauty is behind me, above and below me.
Can you picture yourself walking in a beautiful place, with beauty before you, beauty behind you, beauty above and beauty below you? What would such a place look like to you? Do you have a place of beauty in mind? If you would be willing to tell us what it looks like in a sentence or two, please raise your hand.
Now each of you close your eyes and picture that place. Feel yourself walking there. Feel the beauty before you, behind you, above you, and below you.
Now stay with that feeling for a minute. Feel it. The feeling of experiencing the beauty. It feels like harmony, balance, inner peace, order.
The Navajo people have a word for the feeling of the beauty. It is Hozho (pronounced Hoe-zhoe), with a little mark over each of the “o’s” . That is what this song is about.
It’s not just about walking in a pretty place or having a beautiful scene before, around and under us. It’s about walking in and with the feeling of beauty. It’s about walking in harmony, balance, and order. It’s about walking in Hozho. You can be there.
Let’s sing it now. John Lagerquist is going to teach it to us. The words are printed in your order of service, but if we listen to him well, we can learn to sing it without reading the words.