Hello friends,
This is Mark Gladman,
Also known as Brother Frederick James,
Your friendly neighbourhood monk in dogs.
Welcome back.
As we continue our series,
God is is.
We're on day 21.
Today we're going to sit with the idea that God is beauty.
And as we begin to die.
And still ourselves,
I'm just going to offer some questions with a little bit of silence for you to think about what they might mean to you.
Let's just take a nice deep breath in.
And out.
And let's ponder some of these things.
Why does beauty.
.
.
Stop us.
Why does music sometimes move us before we understand what it's saying?
Why can the sight of the ocean?
Make us feel both incredibly small and more fully alive.
Why does a painting sometimes seem to open a window into something we can't quite put our finger on?
Why does a piece of poetry or a song lyric stay with us for years?
And why does a sunset make us pause?
Even when we've seen.
Hundreds of them.
I think beauty does something to us.
That explanation can't.
Beauty draws us beyond ourselves,
Doesn't it?
It interrupts our usual patterns.
Asks us to stop.
Or consuming the world,
And instead receive it.
And I think that's.
.
.
One reason that beauty.
.
.
Can feel like revelation.
Beauty tells us something and then.
Sometimes it gives us something.
It gives us a moment of wonder,
A sense of depth,
A feeling.
That reality is more than its usefulness.
More than its measurable value,
More than what we can extract from it.
Beauty reminds us that the world is more than a resource.
The world is a gift.
And,
As we've noted already,
Of God's love.
Maybe beauty is one of the ways love becomes visible.
Now,
I'm not saying everything that's beautiful is a direct message from God,
But I think beauty can awaken us to a world that's more spacious and mysterious and more alive than we've often cared to remember.
I think beauty has this beautiful power to return us to attention,
And of course,
Attention returns us to love.
Have a think about the difference between looking at something and truly seeing it.
We can look at a tree.
Without seeing it.
I mean,
We can hear music without receiving it.
We can walk beside the ocean without allowing it to truly touch us.
We can encounter someone else and not really notice them.
But beauty interrupts that.
It breaks into that distracted existence and says,
Stop,
Look again,
Because there's more here than you thought.
I think maybe this is why beauty.
.
.
Is so closely connected to worship.
Worship at its deepest.
Isn't performing a particular religious ritual or singing particular songs.
It's the awakening of wonder.
It's the recognition that we're not self-made,
Self-contained or self-sufficient beings.
We are receivers.
And because we're receivers,
We live by gift,
That gift of life and breath.
And beauty reminds us of this.
But I think there's a danger here as well.
We can turn beauty into an escape,
Can't we?
We can use beautiful things to avoid the pain of the world.
Admire the sunset,
But we ignore the person sitting beside us.
We can love the sacred music.
And remain completely indifferent to the suffering that's going on around us.
We can become captivated by the beautiful.
But often forget how to love.
But I think genuine beauty really should send us back into love with greater tenderness.
Because if beauty opens our eyes,
Then I think we begin to see differently.
The tired person,
The neglected place,
The wounded body,
Our fragile earth.
The ordinary face,
The small act of kindness.
Beauty is something that teaches us to recognise value where we might otherwise miss it and overlook it.
And this is why beauty and justice,
I think.
Go side by side to see beauty.
Is to recognize that something matters and to recognize that something matters.
Is to become more attentive to how that thing is treated.
So whatever it happens to be,
The world,
People,
Bodies,
Creation,
Suddenly they're not useful.
Everything carries a depth that exceeds.
Any notion of usefulness.
And I think that dip.
.
.
Is one of the ways that we get a glimpse of God.
Inexhaustible beauty.
In which everything lives.
God is beauty and God is more.
More than every sunset and every song,
More than every work of art,
More than every moment of wonder.
Each of these are small little openings through which the light of love and God shines in.
A moment when the world catches our attention,
When we stop trying to master reality in some way.
A moment when we remember that we're part of something beautiful together and maybe just for a moment we begin to see not just the beauty but the love in which that beauty lives.
And may grace,
Peace and love be with us and hold us as we encounter the awe and wonder and mystery of this beautiful place and the beautiful people and the beautiful life that we are privileged to live and walk in today and every day.
Amen.
Until tomorrow,
Friends.
May you see beauty.
Wherever you turn and recognize that spark of the divine.
That you might encounter there.
Till tomorrow.
Bye for now.
