Theology has much to say about the attributes of God, omnipotence, omniscience, love, justice, and so on, but what about the appearance of God? In the Christian scripture we’re told , “No man hath seen God at any time” (John 1: 18). Yet in Genesis, Jacob says, “I have seen God face to face” (Genesis 32:30). When I think about the divine countenance I think of ultimate beauty, or rather, when I’m in the presence of great beauty: art, music, poetry, beautiful people, nature, I feel I am catching a glimpse of something divine.
Watch a video of this worship service
We are talking about the places where we find meaning in life, this winter season.
It’s the question of “What are you living for?” in the words of Victor Frankl.
Frankl was himself riffing on an observation of Friedrich Nietzsche who observed that with a strong enough “why” a person can endure with the most challenging “how.”
In the words of what I call the three spiritual questions, this is the second question, “Why does it matter?” What difference does it make? Why bother?
And because living is, after all, something of a bother: you have to feed yourself and clothe yourself, and house yourself, and all that probably means that you have to work somewhere, and pay your taxes, and take your car to get smog-checked, and suffer through various illnesses, and so on, well, why do it?
If there is no ultimate meaning in life, then, as Victor Frankl asks, “what are you living for?”
But the fact that we do go on, again and again, day after day, suffering the bother of living, is proof that at some level we do believe our lives have meaning.
We are living for something.
Maybe we never thought about the meaning of our life in grand philosophical terms. But we do go on every day looking for some satisfaction. Maybe we think the simple things we actually are living for aren’t really that worthy, except in a small way, and only for us.
But I think the truth is, that what you may think is a simple reason to get out of bed, does connect you to a small handful of very large sources of meaning, which I call the ultimates, that live in the realm of divinity. I think that if you follow down the path of exploring why you like the things in life that you like, you will eventually find yourself in those biggest, universal categories, that you share with the philosophers and the theologians.
“I just want to have fun,” you say.
But what makes something fun for you?
Or is it simply the category of fun itself that attracts you and you don’t care what makes the fun?
And why is fun important to you? What about fun attracts you? Is it because of the way fun makes you feel? Or the fact that fun bonds you to other people when you have fun together? Or maybe fun is just another word for pleasure for you, and what really brings you pleasure is something else.
I like a nice meal. Or a nice bottle of wine. Or I like to travel. Or I like to read a good novel. Or I like to make a difference in the world. Or I like to hold hands with my girlfriend. Or I like to take the dogs at the animal shelter for walks.
But why? Why is that important to you? Why is that a worthy way to spend your life?
Eventually, once you winnow down from your starting place to the deepest, broadest, most general and inclusive term you can get to, you arrive at an ultimate: a category of values that need no justification, they simply are worthy in and of themselves.
We started, two weeks ago, with an ultimate that I described as a sense of rightness. If you started by naming your satisfaction in life as something like, “I just enjoy having my house in order. I like having my checkbook balanced. I like when I prepare for a trip that I know I’ve prepared for every contingency.” If that’s worthy to you, then you might be a person oriented toward the ultimate of “perfection.”
You might say propriety. You might harbor a spiritual sense that the universe is a place of order. The divine order translates into our human minds as correct, or proper, right, or even righteous. And that, when we act against the order of the universe we are out of place. We’re awkward, wrong, disordered, what religious folks would call, sin, or evil. The rebellion of the angel Satan that got him thrown out of the perfection of heaven. The disobedience of Adam and Eve that got them expelled from Eden. People who are moved by this ultimate are seeking to find their proper place in the system, to work within the physical and moral laws and to work to help other people and things find their perfect place, as well.
Last week, we talked about a second ultimate, the ultimate of service. If you see yourself in that Carole King song, “You just call, out my name, and you know, wherever I am, I’ll come running and running and running” then you might be a person oriented toward the ultimate of service.
All considerations of meaning direct the choices we make in life in order to serve something larger than ourselves. For these second types of people, it is the service itself that makes the meaning. The universe is an interdependent system of mutual service, where every part relies on the others and supports them in return. So we help, we give, we care. Every small act of service contributes to the great support system that sustains us all.
Today, I want to talk about a third ultimate: the ultimate of beauty.
Beauty is, in classical thought, one of the three transcendentals, along with truth, and goodness.
I mean beauty is a slightly different way, but let’s begin there.
If you think about the world around us, the world appears to be filled with physical objects. We know now, from modern physics that reality is more like transitory flashes of energy rather than lasting particles. But at the first degree of observation the world seems to be a material thing, available to be perceived by our senses.
We see, feel, hear, smell, and sometimes taste, the world.
And different parts of the world affect our senses differently. Some things are soft, some are hard. Some are small or large. Some noises are loud, others are soft. Smells can be stinky or pleasant. All depending on the underlying differences in the material of the things themselves.
The question of transcendentals asks whether there is some essence behind the differences of the things in the material universe that defines existence itself. What is the nature of being?
All existing thing exist. So what does it mean for a thing to exist? What is the nature of being itself, in its most general and immaterial, rather than particular and material state?
Well, we aren’t going to perceive that transcendental nature by our physical senses. So the philosophers noticed that human beings have three other senses by which we access the immaterial parts of the world.
We have a sense of reason. We have logic, argument, discussion. We can think about ideas, even though ideas don’t exist in a material way.
We have a sense of morality. We seem to grasp intuitively, and very often even across cultural differences that some things are right and others are wrong.
And we have an emotional sense. We feel sad. We feel happy. We feel love. We can be inspired, or feel despair, or feel anger, or feel heartbreak.
In Greek, these three human senses by which we access the immaterial world are called:
Logos (reason)
Ethos (morality)
And pathos (emotions)
Those three categories include both a negative side as well as a positive side, but when we lift them to their most positive manifestations, Logos, or reason, exemplifies itself as truth; Ethos, or morality, exemplifies itself as goodness; and pathos, or emotion, in its most positive and general state, exemplifies as beauty.
The classical philosophers debated this question, of course. Some of them proposed other transcendentals, or rejected some of these.
In later centuries the debate over what constitutes ultimate reality was picked up by Christian theologians. Christian theologians settled the list of three transcendentals as the good, the true, and the beautiful, and, being religiously minded, attributed these qualities to the divine nature of God. God, for the Christian theologian, is that which is absolute truth, perfect goodness, and complete beauty.
The universe, in this theology, is formed from these transcendent hallmarks of divine existence. And then in human lives, we honor and seek the true, the good, and the beautiful, because we are spiritually drawn toward re-making that state that we lost in the myth of the fall.
And so, in the way that I have been talking about, beauty is one of those ultimate qualities, that needs no justification beyond itself because it lies behind everything else. And recognizing beauty, seeking beauty, making beauty, honoring beauty, can provide meaning in life, for those who are attuned to this goal.
Why does it matter?
Because it’s beautiful.
Why does Mahler’s ninth symphony matter? Because it’s beautiful.
Why does the large mural Jackson Pollack painted for Peggy Guggenheim’s entryway in her New York townhouse matter? Because it’s beautiful.
Why does hiking in Yosemite matter? Why does setting an elegant table matter? Why does the spiral of a Nautilus shell, or an elegant mathematical proof, or the cut of a dress in the latest Paris fashion matter?
Because it’s beautiful.
Why does a generous selfless act of charity, or the heroic sacrifice of a soldier protecting a stranger, or a brave voice speaking out for justice, matter? Because it’s beautiful.
Those things are also good, and true. The three always reflect and contain each other. What’s beautiful is true. What’s true is good. What’s good is beautiful.
I know for me, I never feel more in the presence of the divine, then I do when I am experiencing beauty.
I had such an experience this last summer.
Just before I came to be your minister, in August, Jim and I took a long-awaited and eagerly-anticipated trip to Italy. Our primary motivation was to visit the Biennale, the every-other year, international art festival in Venice. We were there for a week, also four days in Florence, and another week in Rome.
We planned the whole trip around seeing art. The Biennale, in Venice, and of course, the city of Venice itself. A remarkable show devoted to the sculptor Donatello in Florence. And, of course, the city of Florence itself. In Rome, the Vatican museum, the Sistine Chapel, the smaller museums around the city, the Caravaggios scattered among little churches, the marvelous fountains, the revelation, for me, of the Bernini sculptures at the Borghese gallery. And, of course, the city of Rome itself.
But in particular, I felt, standing before Michelangelo’s statue of David, in the Academia in Florence, the sense that I was looking at something beyond human, something otherworldly in its magnificence, transcendent, or because there is no other word for this quality, “divine.”
It’s strange to have that feeling, because in some ways, Michelangelo’s David is so completely human. It’s a product of the high Renaissance, which was devoted to glorification of the human figure and human potential. It’s a work of human hands. The subject matter is a human man. And though David is a person in the Bible, his slaughter of Goliath isn’t a religious story, it’s a war story: a human story.
And yet it is so skillfully made and so awesome in its scale. So humbling in Michelangelo’s mastery of his art: that giant hand, the placement of the legs and the turn of the torso. The emotion in the eyes. The stillness captured in the midst of movement. The beauty of the figure. The beauty of the marble. The beauty of the carving. The beauty of it all.
The beauty.
It feels a thing divine.
In the Bible, in the Christian scriptures, at the beginning of the Gospel of John, John writes, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1:18).
That’s how I feel. I haven’t seen God. I don’t believe in a God who could be seen. But I feel that the immaterial divine is sometimes made known to me through things I can see and hear, and feel and smell and taste. I don’t experience divinity through Jesus as a Christian would. The quality of divinity is more pervasive than that, and less specific.
I see divinity in some things large or small, universally recognized as awesome, like Michelangelo’s David, or Yosemite Valley. Or local delights, like the tree in our courtyard or the kindness of the volunteers at our Tuesday morning drop-in program. For me, especially I’m drawn to the beauty of art, and literature, and music.
But in every case, when I’m feeling connected to the divine, it is beauty I’m experiencing.
Now I love pointing out, as often as I can, the places where the Bible contradicts itself. So although John says that no one has ever seen God, Jacob says, in Genesis, that he has seen God face to face.
This comes in the famous scene where Jacob is wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32). He is staying alone on the bank of the Jabbock river, which flows into the Jordan River. He’s alone because he’s sent all of his livestock and everyone else in his camp ahead of him, hoping to make peace with his brother Esau, whom Jacob had cheated earlier, before Jacob himself has to meet Esau and face his brother’s anger.
While he’s spending the night there, a mysterious man comes upon Jacob and wrestles with him. He’s called a man in Genesis, but he’s identified as an angel in the book of Hosea (another Bible contradiction). There’s no explanation for why they wrestle. You don’t know whether they fight because of an argument, or wrestle just for fun. But they wrestle determinedly all night, neither overcoming the other, until, at daybreak, the mysterious man dislocates Jacob’s hip socket, just by touching it. Then he asks Jacob to let him go.
And Jacob says, “I won’t let you go, unless you bless me.” So the man blesses Jacob by giving him a new name.
Jacob, means “grabber”. Names in the Bible are often keys to a person’s character. Jacob had taken something that belonged to his brother. Now, on his way back to his brother, Jacob wrestles all night. Maybe he wrestles with his conscience. Maybe he wrestles with the dark side of his nature because he’s feeling guilty and wants to be better. The mysterious man changes Jacob’s name to Israel, which means, “wrestles with God”. And Jacob, now Israel, names the place where the encounter took place, Peniel, which means, “Face of God.”
Finding meaning in life, requires wrestling with ourselves. It requires struggling. It requires going beyond the nihilism that claims nothing matters, or the selfish nature or the immature that thinks only our own satisfaction matters. Finding meaning in life requires coming into relationship with the something larger than ourselves that is the realm of worth and value.
Finding meaning in life requires answering the call that the feminist poet Starhawk named in our Call to Worship:
“I who am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters, I call upon your soul to arise and come unto Me. For I am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe. From Me all things proceed and unto Me they must return.”
Finding meaning in life requires finding the thing that lifts your heart, that makes your spirit sing, that humbles you with its greatness, but extends an invitation to come, enjoy, participate.
It might be great, as in great art, or spectacular vistas. Or it might be small, as in “dew-wet grasses all about your feet, in birds, in sunshine, childish faces sweet”, “a flower blooming at your door.”
“In wonder workings or some bush a flame,
we look for Truth and fancy it concealed
but in earth’s common things it stands revealed,
while grass and flowers and stars spell out the name.”