Spiritual Beauty
By Charles Rush
September 16, 2012
I Samuel 16: 7 and Matt. 6: 28
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practically any parent of teenage daughters can tell you, our overly image conscious culture is having deleterious effects on our girls. Last Summer we showed a film “Miss Representation” thanks to Caroline and Karen Honold that details how the media images of models that are thin like waifs has a not so subtle way of encouraging eating disorders.
Despite the fact
that we have gotten larger as a population since 1950, our mannequins have
actually shrunk by three inches at the waist and three inches around the hips.
The average height of our models has grown by a few inches, while their average
weight has dropped by several pounds.
Add to this the
fact that our boys are being socialized to the other sex by free porno that
abounds on your computer and, not surprisingly, we have a generation rising
that is far too focused on physical image. So our daughters are needlessly
anxious that they don't measure up, that they are not beautiful to other
people. It breaks your heart to hear and it is so not true.
There is nothing
wrong with physical beauty of course. At least since the Greeks, we have lifted
up the ideal physical form as something to be appreciated. But as our first
text observed profoundly, physical beauty is not enough. In fact, it becomes
eclipsed by spiritual beauty in all of us, whether we want it to or not, no
matter how much plastic surgery we might have to slow down the process of
aging.
More than that, our actual joy in life is only found when we engage
in the spiritual dimension of beauty.
“The Strange
Life of Timothy Green” is a rather poignant reflection on a couple that
discovers they cannot have children. After the tests are completed and the
doctor gives them the bad news, they return home in silence, each moving about
the house in numb isolation.
They are in the
early stages of drowning their sorrows with wine, when the husband asks his
wife if they could imagine what their child would be like for just one night.
He immediately says, ‘our child would have a great sense of humor' and he
writes that down on a pad of paper. His wife says, ‘our child would be a
musician' and the husband writes that down on another piece of paper.
Then they start
getting carried away with their hopes and dreams, the way that couples do, and
one of them says, “our child will score the winning shot”. The other one says,
“our child will help save the environment.” On and on this goes until they are
worn out.
The husband
takes this stack of hopes and dreams that they have collected and puts them in
a used cigar box. It is a big wad of papers. They stuff the box shut and walk
out back to the garden where they both love to work. It is a big, luscious
garden. The husband starts digging a hole in the middle of the night. Both of
them are pretty weepy and they take this box full of their hopes and dreams,
wetted by the tears of love that they both have for the family they long to
start, and they bury it in the garden, cover it over with dirt. They stand
there together, somewhat dazed, and hug each other in the night before they go
to bed.
In the middle of
the night, while the whole region is in the middle of a drought, a miraculous
rain falls right on their property, drenching their garden in rain, soaking the
garden in rain, until it is a mud slick. Out of the ground, comes this child
Timothy. The parents, as you might imagine, are bowled over with that kind of
surprise that we read about in the Bible. They not only can't believe that a
miracle has happened, they just can't believe that such good fortune has
happened to them. They have that slack jawed amazement that they have been so
blessed as they slowly try to figure out what this means and how they should
respond.
And isn't that
almost always the way that it is? When one of our first grandchildren was born,
Kate and I were just kind of weak with the wonder and goodness of the world. We
went to Columbia Presbyterian in New York and got to the nursery, stood there
oohing and aahing over our grandson for probably five minutes together. There
was another family right next to us, another set of grandparents doing the same
thing. We never even noticed each other, so absorbed we were in the goodness of
life, the goodness of God's wonderful world, beaming that baby the next generation
of hopes and dreams, until both
Grandfather's bumped each other and looked up. It was Ken and Sue Ballantyne
looking at one of their grandsons. So ridiculous!
But isn't that
what God wants for all of us? Isn't the ideal that every couple would really
invest their hopes and dreams, they invest their love and their better
character into their child before they are actually born so that there is this
miracle quality to every birth and these children are perfect indeed. Our love
makes them beautiful. This is the spiritual dimension of love.
We are
reflecting the way that God loves us and beautifies our world. There is this
wonderful line from scripture that ‘While we were yet sinners, Christ died for
us'. Or as my grandfather would say, ‘while you were not yet good for anything,
we loved you to your core.' How wonderful is it to have that feeling of being
loved like that? It makes us bloom. It helps us to reach beyond the ordinary.
It gives our life a special savor
Our tradition
teaches us that God loves our world like that which is why nature is so full of
beauty. The two are connected at their core, love and beauty. I think of that
line from Alice Walker that says “I
think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere
and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any
fool living in the world can see (God's) always trying to please us back.” Our
world is indeed an incubus of awe filled beauty, reflecting a transcendent love
that courses through the universe.
It is a trick of
nature that uses the inherent beauty of youth to keep us interested and focused
on propagating the species. We fall for it almost every time, like Narcissus so
captivated by his youthful reflection in the pond that he is endlessly
transfixed with himself even.
But we are also spiritual
beings. And so, to find the deeper purpose in life, nature uses our libido,
that magnetic attraction of early romance, to point us toward a love that
beautifies. Eventually this deeper spiritual love comes to transcend our youth
and it becomes a stronger, more substantive force in our lives than the blush
of early romance, wonderful as that is. The real challenge for us is to open
ourselves, or to feel confident enough to open ourselves to each other, that we explore the more transcendent
dimension of love that we can offer one another and, if we are lucky, to let it
predominate in our lives and our relationships.
That
transcendent love was wonderfully depicted in the endearing movie ‘The Notebook'.
It opens with an eighty year old husband reading a novel to his wife, who is
suffering from dementia. When the movie opens, the wife doesn't really
recognize her husband anymore, despite the fact that he comes to read to her
every day.
He is reading to
her the romance of the two of them in their college years. In fact, his wife
had written it before her dementia had advanced because the story was so
important to her that she wrote it down before she forgot the details. So he comes to her every day and eventually he
starts to read to her this story which she doesn't remember anymore. But the story
is so familiar and so comforting that every day she eventually becomes
engrossed in the story itself. She asks questions about the two young lovers
and their motives. She wants to know what comes next.
After many
twists in the plot and many trials that would keep the two young lovers apart
in the story, the young man comes after the young woman in a dramatic romantic
fashion. It looks like they will get together after all. Just at this juncture,
the husband stops reading to his wife.
His wife blinks
in recognition. She looks over at her husband, whom she doesn't normally
recognize. She says, ‘That boy was you and that girl was me.'.
He reaches over
and pulls her close. And for just a moment they make a connection. For just a
moment, love breaks on through the disease and miraculously turns back the
hands of time.
Transcendent
love has a healing, almost eternal quality to it. Our love for others can beautify
our beloved across time. And that is what happens when the spiritual dimension
of love comes to predominate. We can actually beautify our beloved across time.
That is how the spiritual dimension of our love transcends the physical alone
and creates beauty in all phases of our life, even at the extreme ends.
The spiritual
dimension of our love is so profound that all of us hope we can be swept up
into it. This is the deeper, longer lasting love that God wants for all of us
to know.
In the Gospel of
John, Jesus says, “I came that you might not only have life, but that you might
have life abundantly”. Jesus came that
we might know a deeper dimension to our love, a love that creates beauty in
others because we love it into being.
In order to
access that deeper fulfillment in the second half of our life, you have to open
yourself to loving each other in the spiritual dimension and let the spiritual
dimension of your love to predominate in the way that you live, move and have
your being.
We literally
have the power to make the world a more beautiful place like the wonderful
flash mob that filled a square in Spain with music that inspires us to a
nobler, deeper place. Release your love and create beauty in those you share
your life with. Release your love and create beauty in our world. And may you
stumble on the more fulfilling way to live. Amen.
