I don’t know about you but when I get to this time in our cycle of seasons I find myself starved for the beauty of colour … I have feasted on white long enough … and while I’m sure that brown must have its unsung beauties, I’m dreaming of all those shades of green that are coming … not to mention the reds, yellow and orange waiting to break through the ground in the colourfest of spring.
But I don’t think it’s just a spring thing to be hungry for beauty … Our appetite for beauty is endless … and that’s one of the great gifts of being spiritual beings in a human experience. We have an insatiable appetite for beauty.
When I think about beauty, I think of sunrise painting the sky red … or the intricacy of a flower’s face … or the moon rising through the darkness and reflecting light on the lake … I think of the places where water dramatically meets land … or the places where land rising to meet the sky … I think of human creations in art and architecture … I think of the wonders of an ancient civilization …
When you think of beauty, what comes to mind for you?
When we think of beauty, we don’t generally think of broken glass … and yet one of the very few times we find the word beautiful in the writings of our tradition is in a story of broken glass. Near the end of his life, as the authorities plotted to kill him for fueling revolutionary ideas of a beloved community of equals (a vision that terrifies those who benefit from the inequity) Jesus found sanctuary in a home in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem. Mark’s places this story in the home of Simon whom he identified as a leper … one who would not have been considered ‘beautiful’
It was an ugly and brutal time … An anonymous woman claims a place at the dinner table beside or behind Jesus and breaks a container over his head drenching him in an expensive oil … a gesture to state the obvious. Their noses couldn’t miss the elephant in the living room: the stench of death was inevitable … we all know what is coming and we are powerless to change it … we know what is and we have no army, no weapons, no plan of action … all we have is love … our conviction that there is another way … our beautiful hope that there is an alternative to violence, inequity and oppression … another world is possible.
Along with the sound of breaking glass there was the release of a fragrant scent into the fear, the defeat, the brooding dark of a troubled time when the deadly alliance of political and religious forces will do anything to silence dissent with violence and spin fear into hate.
As she breaks her glass, the stench of fear and death was infused with the aroma of love. Some said it was a waste but he said it was a beautiful thing. Jesus celebrated her gesture of beauty and received it as her gift of doing what she could. She wasn’t paralyzed by her fear … she didn’t avoid the obvious … she didn’t try to pretend death wasn’t in the air … she didn’t stay away because she didn’t know what to say … She came with her broken glass … her bouquet of flowers … her card of compassion … her version of a casserole … her gesture of beauty. It was beauty born of brokenness … of a heart broken open to the pain of the moment … it was the instinct of an expansive heart … it didn’t come out a constricted and fearful heart … it was a gift of accompaniment … an expression of presence in the face of being powerless to change the circumstances.
She brought some beauty to his life in a time that was not awash in beauty … a time that knew its share of ugliness. This story reminds us that beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder … that beauty isn’t reserved solely for the natural world and its wonders … it is within each of us to create beauty … to express beauty. The food we provide to another as an expression of caring is a beautiful thing … the flowers we bring in the face of sadness or gladness is a beautiful thing … the affection we share, the tears we wipe from another’s eyes, the comfort we offer by our presence is a beautiful thing … the hand we take and hold … the phone call we make to express concern, the email we send, the tasks we take on to assist another: the grass we cut, the snow we shovel, the dishes we wash, the house we clean for another is a beautiful thing … the music we create … the music we make … the words we cobble together … the art and craft of our living and loving …is a beautiful thing Whenever the glass of our hearts shatters as we are broken open (with empathy) and do whatever is within our power to do, it is a beautiful thing.
No doubt, our eyes, ears, and noses enable us to appreciate beauty. But I wonder if it doesn’t take hearts to create beauty … hearts with the courage to face being unlucky … being shattered … hearts that have learned the truth of which the poets speak … hearts that have learned that beauty is not an industry … nor is it a luxury … but it comes from deep inside us … and is often born of loss …
This is a time to consider how we, too, might anoint pain with beauty … how we might honour the beauty in broken things … broken bodies … broken spirits … broken dreams … broken hopes … a shelf of broken treasures … how we might be sighted for the beauties that shimmer through the shards …
-Nancy Steeves
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