Beauty In The Inward Soul

A few years ago, my wife and I had a very poignant family experience that I know many of you have had. Patricia’s parents had made the hard decision that it was time for them to move into an assisted living situation after each of them had suffered strokes, and we spent a couple of weeks helping to pack up their family home in Seattle.

This is no easy thing to do, as many of you well know. Going through 50 years’ worth of family treasures and mementos, deciding what to keep and what to pass along. Lots of memories, lots of laughter and lots of tears in that experience.

In one cardboard box in a closet, we found a number of small notebooks written in my mother-in-law’s careful script. They were lists, numbered one-to-ten, that my mother-in-law (Sunshine was her name) got in the habit of keeping, weekly, sometimes daily, over forty years of raising her family. One list read: baby Michael’s smile this afternoon, the vivid purple sunset this evening, the color of the peonies out front, the sound of the rain on the kitchen window.

We found a boxful of notebooks filled with these lists. Sunny had made it a habit to keep a log of things that struck her as beautiful or lovely or memorable every day. For forty years she wrote down the feel of her babies’ skin, the pitch of her grandchildren’s giggles, the rainbow she saw inside Eileen’s clarinet one day, the slant of sun on her garden, the kind gesture of a neighbor’s help.

Sunny never shared these lists with anyone. They were just her own reminder, her quiet record of witness to the beauty she noticed around her every day. None of her children knew of these lists. And none of them were at all surprised by Sunny’s deliberate practice of taking beauty into her soul each day. That beauty became part of her being, and was manifest in her way of moving through life.

In what is perhaps one of the oldest recorded prayers in Western history, Plato wrote these words: “Beloved Pan, give me beauty in the inward soul, and may I have such gold as none but the temperate can carry.”

The Platonic philosophers, who had a way of reducing very complex human dynamics to their bare essentials, held that the highest Ideals of human living were three: That which is Good; that which is True; and that which is Beautiful.

Plato claimed that that the object of moral living – by which he meant intelligent living, integrated living – was always to seek conformity of our outward and inward lives with these three great Ideals. In the Greek understanding these were the three highest measures of value, and in human activity they translated into Morality, Knowledge, and Art.

How we define Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, of course, quickly leads us into some debate; but Plato, and Aristotle after him, both felt that human beings were, by nature, drawn to these three great Ideals. On some level, argued Plato, whether we know it or not, we are always attracted to incarnations of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty in the world around us and in the people around us.

In other words, Plato was saying, we may not know what Beauty is exactly, but we know it when we meet it. In a flower, in a painting, in a melody or other work of art, in Nature, in a human gesture, in another face. We are attracted to these things, said Plato, precisely because in their form they participate in the soulful Ideal called Beauty.

So, twenty-five hundred years before Freud gave a name to the sub-conscious, Plato suggested the reason we fall in love with certain persons (and not with others) is because, in some way or fashion, these particular persons bring us an experience of Beauty. Whether other people see that same beauty in our loved ones or not, we do, and it can sweep us off our feet.

What I find especially interesting in this Greek Ideal, is the notion that Beauty plays an essential role in moral living. That is something that people do not always think about or appreciate, it seems to me, when we consider questions of morality or religion or theology. We’re pretty sure that Goodness and Truth are essential ingredients, and appropriate goals, for any religious life, and most theological systems end up formulating all kinds of rules and regulations for determining what is Good and what is not; what is True and what is not.

But most theologies and most religions do not spend nearly as much energy and focus on the role Beauty plays in religious living, and the native human attraction and inward hunger that the soul has for that which is Beautiful.

Some five centuries after Plato and the Greek Philosophers were all dead, St. Paul, who was educated in the Greek tradition, would later summarize his vision of what is the heart of our human quest in these words from his letter to the Philippians:

Whatsoever things are true,

whatsoever things are honorable,

whatsoever things are just,

whatsoever things are pure,

Whatsoever things are lovely,

whatsoever things are of good report,

if there be any virtue,

if there be any praise,

think on these things.

Paul was preaching from a Greek Ideal here. But most of the great theologians of Judeo-Christian tradition are legalists, not aesthetes; they are more articulate in canon law than ever they ever are on the arts. The gospels may invite you to consider the lillies of the field, but theologians rarely do; they are much too busy dividing the saved from the unsaved, or determining where the commas go in the latest Book of Common Prayer.

And while it is undeniably true that religion itself has inspired and occasioned much of the greatest art and most beautiful works of art in the world, where and when it has been encouraged in history, art has always lived in a rather serious political tension with formal religion: when it serves religion and is governed by that service, art is blessed, quite literally.

But where it has competed with organized religion, or where it has pushed the boundaries of organized religious sensitivities – whether it be in Puritanical England or the Islamic theocracy in Iran or up against the current-day self-appointed censors at libraries or museums – art, however skillfully crafted or beautiful in form, is just as often distrusted as nourishing to moral life. At least as far as churches are concerned.

The Greek Ideal held that Beauty itself was a religious experience in the true sense. I really think Unitarian Universalists understand this. I always have people saying to me, “I haven’t been to church the last few weeks because, you know, it’s Spring time and I’m out there on my bike on Sunday morning, I need that experience!”

Tell me the truth, do you think many Catholics say things like that to their priests? No way. And likewise, some UU’s are absolutely candid in admitting that they come to church principally to experience the great music they’ll find here on Sunday morning. Do you think many people say things like that to rabbis or to Baptist ministers? Uh uh.

That’s experiencing art, Beauty, as a religious experience. The religions which have organized themselves in the time since the Greeks have tended more towards the view that Beauty or art is supplementary to religious experience, a vehicle of such experience, not its substance.

I myself am patient with such distinctions of theology only up to a point. Here is what I know and what I am willing to assert: the most beautiful human beings I have met, the most shining souls, the most luminous loving people I know all seem to have this one trait in common, whatever else distinguishes them: they are lovers of beauty; they are people who have made it their habit and their practice to take multiple forms of beauty into themselves and into their consciousness on a regular and disciplined basis. They are students of the arts and music and Nature, and appreciators of even the tiniest sparks of loveliness around them in their daily living.

The religious people I admire and most hope to emulate in my own life are not the legalists and apologists of doctrine, but those who find joy and loveliness in just being alive and being related to the earth and to all the creatures who inhabit it. Those who can sing to the arrival of a new season and marvel at the cycle of life, give thanks for a new day and another chance to get it right.

Anne Sexton’s poem, Welcome Morning, is theology to me:

There is joy in all; she writes.

In the hair I brush each morning,

in the Cannon towel, newly washed,

that I rub my body with each morning,

in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning,

in the outcry from the kettle

that heats my coffee each morning,

in the spoon and the chair

that cry “hello there, Anne”

each morning,

in the godhead of the table

that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning

All this is God,

right here in my pea-green house

each morning and I mean,

though often forget, to give thanks,

to faint down by the kitchen table

in a prayer of rejoicing

as the holy birds at the kitchen window

peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,

let me paint a thank-you on my palm

for this God, this laughter in the morning,

lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard dies young.

“Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,” Keats would sing to us in the 19th century. “That is all Ye Know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Good theology, that. Something to think about while you’re doing the dishes this week.