As one of the three transcendentals: the good, the true, and the beautiful, beauty is an essential quality of being. All existing things are beautiful. Our spirits grow as we develop the ability to appreciate even the parts of existence from which we might otherwise be tempted to turn away.
I don’t know whether I can tell this story in church…
But what are you going to do, fire me?
Last Friday, I had a book I needed to return to the library, a novel by Philip Roth I had finished. I live downtown. The LA Central Library is seven blocks from my apartment. It was a lovely day. I walked over to the library, enjoying the sun, and the walk. Feeling good.
At the library, I chose a book to read next, Jospeh Conrad’s Nostromo. And then I returned the Roth and checked out the Conrad.
Leaving the library, I turned down fifth street toward home.
Fifth street between Pershing Square and Skid Row, is called, “The Run” because folks who spend the night in Skid Row, or in one of the shelters, or SRO hotels around that neighborhood, will spread down fifth street to spend the day in Pershing Square. So fifth street is always filled during the day with folks hanging out on the sidewalks. Sitting in chairs in front of the buildings. Playing boom boxes. Smoking. Selling items of suspicious origin from folding tables. And, let’s be honest, selling drugs and using drugs, fairly openly. Almost all the retail spaces are empty because the shoplifting makes it too expensive to keep a store open.
It doesn’t feel dangerous, to me. But it’s not pretty.
It’s ugly.
So I walked quickly down fifth street, eager to get home.
Between and Broadway and Spring, I see a guy sitting on the sidewalk in a chair set against the side of a building. I’ve seen this man before. He’s a regular. He’s got a little tent beside his chair where he sleeps at night, spreading out over the sidewalk. He’s also got his long legs and barefeet extended straight out across the walkway. Folks are manuevering around him. And he’s just oblivious to the inconvenience he’s causing, enjoying the sun. And also enjoying an enormous marijuana cigarette, with a cloud of smoke around his head, and the smell, thick, up and down the block.
As I walk past him, I give him a look, judging him for the pot, and the rudeness of taking up so much space on the public right of way.
And the guy, catches my look, and he says to me, pointedly, as I pass him, “Have a nice day. Sir.” With a significant pause before the “Sir”, to make sure I heard it sarcastically, as he intended.
I didn’t answer. I felt a little ashamed for judging him. And a little embarrassed for being called out about it. So I kept my head down, and hurried along.
And then, now that I was a little past him. The guy screamed behind me, super loud, without even a pretense of sarcastic politeness, “HAVE A NICE FUCKING DAY. SIR!”
So I offended him.
And he disgusted me.
I enjoyed my moment of self-righteousness applying my superior notions of proper public behavior, which he then ruined by embarrassing me, and frightening me, a little.
He was enjoying his little portion of sunshine and a smoke, which I then ruined for him with my sneer.
My judgment wasn’t specifically against this guy. It was a judgment against the whole circumstance of life these days. Downtown Los Angeles: all the closed-up retail spaces, the graffiti, the drug use, the folks out of work and out of housing, camped out on the sidewalk, the whole fifth street scene, which isn’t the beautiful city I want to live in.
And this guy’s anger at me, wasn’t really at me, either. He doesn’t know me. But I happened to be that day’s anonymous representative of the kind of social judgment he receives every day, and maybe the internalized shame he feels about his condition, every day.
All he wanted for himself was what he wished me, a nice fucking day. A day when he could be at peace, without folks like me harshing the little high he can make for himself.
And that’s really what I wanted, too, what he wished for me without really meaning it: a nice day, a nice walk through a nice neighborhood without having to smell or see, or step around the actual ugliness of the actual day.
Why can’t we have nice things?
Why can’t we have nice days? Beautiful things? Pleasant smells? Friendly smiles from people who truly wish us well? Clean streets, and good books, and comfortable places to live? Good jobs that respect our talents and fulfill our sense of purpose, and pay us well? Safe places to relax? Public spaces that we share generously with care and respect?
Why is that so hard?
Or maybe the question should be, because a beautiful day is so hard to achieve, and because we’re so good at ruining beauty for each other even when we’re able to achieve something beautiful briefly, how do we live happily in the world we have?
But to complicate what I think is the spiritual goal even further, how do we live happily in the world we have now, without abandoning our mission to make a better world tomorrow? It would be wrong to settle for less than the beauty possible. But that means constantly judging the shortcomings we suffer daily. So how do we love this day, this real world, which is the only world we actually live in, while holding on to a vision of something better and while coping with the inevitable dissatisfaction we must feel when we measure the distance between what is and the beauty that could be?
Barbara J. Pescan, in the words of our Call to Worship, reminds us of the beauty of the earth. “This spinning blue green ball,” she says. And then adds the exclamation, “Yes!” Because who cannot shout our affirmation at the beauty of the earth?
On the Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, I come into the church office, my commute from downtown starts with a two block walk to the subway station at Pershing Square. I pay my senior discount fare of 35 cents. That’s nice.
I ride the B line to the Universal City station. Then I transfer (for free) to the number 240 bus that comes up Ventura Blvd. I get off the bus at Whitsett Avenue.
And then I walk up Whitsett Avenue,
And it’s beautiful. The fire station. The thirty-sixth Church of Christ Scientist. The carefully tended plantings in front of the apartment buildings: lantana, geraniums, pansies, day-lillies. Not every inch of the way, but I see the beauty. I feel invigorated, happy. The grapefruit trees dropping their fat balls onto the sidewalk. I peek through the construction fence to see what the Harvard/Westlake school is doing to the old Weddington Golf and Tennis club location. And it’s beautiful.
Sometimes, for a change, instead of walking up Whitsett, I’ll veer over to Wilkinson because it’s quieter without the through traffic on Whitsett. It’s beautiful the variety of ways people have set-up their front yards: native plants, and succulents, bright green astro turf, rock gardens, fences and gates. And people walking dogs. And nannies pushing strollers. The colors people choose for their houses. It’s beautiful.
I walk gently across the back of the earth. I don’t honor the goddess, Gaia, by name, but I say yes to the beauty of the spinning blue green ball, a Spring day, a pleasant neighborhood, a refreshing walk to a pretty church building and a job I enjoy.
to come together again in this place
to remember how we can live
to remember who we are
to create how we will be.
Barbara Pescan reminds us that living now, includes remembering and creating. That’s part of this moment, too. It’s saying an enthusiastic “Yes!” to the beauty in each moment as it presents itself. And it includes our dreams and hopes for future beauty. It’s living now, in what we’ve made so far, and working now, with skill and satisfaction to create what will be.
The challenge is to hold both. If we only enjoy the present, we will fail to do the work required to make the future enjoyable. If we discount this day and only value the hoped-for better future, we’ll spend our actual days dissatisfied.
I wasn’t wrong, walking down fifth street a few days ago, to see the shortcomings of what is and wish for something better for my city. My mistake, though, as the universe helpfully reminded me through the voice of the pot-smoking man on the sidewalk, was to let my vision of a better day, distract me from the nice day I could have been having that day.
Minot Judson Savage, the author of the text we sang as our Opening Hymn, was a nineteenth century Unitarian Minister in Chicago and later New York City. His hymn text points out that beauty is available universally in both time and space. Beauty not only for the future but the present, and not just for there, but for here. Beauty wherever, and whenever, we are.
He advises:
Seek not afar for beauty; lo, it glows
in dew-wet grasses all about your feet,
Go not abroad for happiness; behold
it is a flower blooming at your door.
When theologians say that Beauty, Goodness and Truth, are the three Transcendentals, don’t misunderstand that word transcendental. The transcendent is not a distant realm that we might only hope to reach in some far time, when the universe has sufficiently evolved, and we have sufficiently matured, perhaps after death, in another world, when this ugly, mean, and false, world has dropped away.
To say that the good, the true, and the beautiful, are transcendental qualities of existence, means that they are here now, everywhere, all around us. The good, the true, and the beautiful, are the foundational qualities of all that exist. They are inherent qualities of being.
In our Bible class Wednesday evening, we read a verse where Jesus makes a similar point about the Kingdom of God. This is Luke Chapter 17, verse 20-21
“Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
Beauty, like the other transcendentals is in our midst. This doesn’t mean that every existing thing perfectly manifests the good, the true, and the beautiful. Evil exists. Illusions and lies exist. Ugliness exists. But the transcendental nature of the good, the true, and the beautiful means that they are always, everywhere, available, running through our world and our perceptions: the good through our moral sense (our ethos), the truth through our reason (our logos), beauty through our emotions (our pathos). The transcendentals call to us. They long to exist fully. They need us, and the other active agents of creation, to bring them to material reality.
Thinking that beauty is elsewhere, distant in time or geography, misses the truth that we are surrounded by it, and leads to despair. The spiritual lens we must develop is to see the beauty in the hidden places, then to work to uncover it, to let it shine.
As Minot Savage, had us sing, of another of the three transcendentals:
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.
On Whitsett Avenue, or Wilkinson Avenue, or Fifth street, beauty abounds, but imperfectly revealed.
I saw the beauty in the warm weather, and anticipated the beauty in the novel I carried, but I missed it on the sidewalk, in the people in front of me.
Yet it was there, too, if I had looked a little closer. The buildings, the buses, the bookstore.
We blame the world for hiding beauty beneath its ugly portions. But sometimes, rather, couldn’t it be us raising a barrier that the world’s beauty is lost behind? A barrier of judgment. A barrier of lack of compassion. A barrier of self-righteousness. A barrier of narrow taste and lack of imagination. A barrier of selfishness that prioritizes my own convenience and refuses to make space for the happiness of others.
An inability to see what we actually live in the midst of.
In a world that suffers enough from the mean, and the false, and the ugly, let us at least not miss what goodness, truth, and beauty there are, because we’ve turned our eyes away.
Let us instead be the ones, who having opened our eyes to the beauty of the world, enjoy it fully, help others see and know the beautiful world as we do, and work together to make it more so.