Flowers appear at the graves of our dearly departed. Flowers appear on the doorsteps of those who are grieving. Flowers appear at the sites of unspeakable tragedies – flowers, mountains of flowers, spring up amidst the tears.

It is our instinctive practice to make offerings of beauty where there is pain and loss and suffering and hardship. These offerings of beauty are not attempting to erase the experience of pain. They are in fact acts of reaching out to embrace each other through hardship. Making little offerings of beauty are ways to bring love and care and solidarity, where we may be otherwise at a total loss, and retreat into isolation, powerless to do or change anything about the distress and fear and loss with someone we care about, even strangers.

Finding beauty, making beauty, sharing beauty through experiences of hardship is an exercise of faith. It is a spiritual practice. I urge us to honor this as an offering. Making offerings of beauty is a way of honoring the reality of suffering, expressing love through pain and hardship, and keeping our view open to the truth that beauty and goodness still yet survives, by the grace of God.

Last week I shared about the practice of service: daily direct acts of service for others, for the greater good, however modest, are good not only in and of themselves, but good as well as ways that in the face of the temptation to despair, we can keep the faith in our God of love who embraces and transcends this often broken and brutal – and beautiful – world.

Today I offer the practice of beauty: finding beauty, making beauty, sharing beauty however we can. In daily ways, in simple ways, in grand, outrageous ways. The practice of beauty is a way that anyone can keep the faith through thick and thin.

Our faith, after all, is a resurrection faith, one that finds heartbreakingly transcendent beauty in something as ugly and unbearable as a cross. For we know that through Christ God sees and embraces the world’s pain and nurses resurrected life out of the grave. 

This kind of beauty is the opposite of superficial.

Just think of the music that moves you the most deeply, that is the most breathtakingly beautiful. I’m willing to bet it’s not just bubblegum pop. I’m willing to bet it brings tears, tears that are deeper than words, drawing out both our most profound sadness and most exultant joy. 

“Music at its best,” in the words of the Christian philosopher Cornell West, “is the grand archaeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time (with the most temporal of the arts) our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us – beyond language – to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.”

We know it when we witness it, when a great work of art is drawing from the depths of being fully awake and fully feeling through all the agony and ecstasy of life in this exquisite and uncertain world.

Hear John Coltrane’s “Love Supreme” and you know it: he’s playing out from those depths. Hear Brandi Carlile’s “The Joke,” and you know it: she’s singing out from those depths. Hear Pablo Casals playing Bach’s Cello Suites, or read aloud a passage of James Baldwin, or stand before a Renoir, or witness dancers pouring themselves out through an Alvin Ailey choreography … and you know it, these are transfigurations of the depths of human experience. “Deep calls to deep” as the Psalmist sings.

What works of art stir this in you?

We are blessed with an overabundance of great acts from those who have wrung beauty from the brief and heartbreaking passage of life. 

So can we. We don’t have to be virtuosos to do it. We just have to be sincere enough, or desperate enough.

Find beauty where ever you can.

Make beauty, however you can.

Share beauty with whomever you can.

We just have to let a moment of beauty catch us and bring us to our knees. We just have to put our heart into the work of sawing and whittling and sanding away to make something true and good. We just have to be willing to pull someone else in with whom to share that beauty and say “Look! Look! Wow.”

This is good for our hearts, however it is for us to do so, to find or make or share moments of beauty in whatever time we are given, however brief.

“God has made everything beautiful in its time,” sings the Book of Ecclesiastes, “And God has set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Ecclesiastes 3:9-14)

All things pass, all things change and flow away. There can be so much pain in this world, so much blindness, futility, brutality, vengeance, bitterness, so many distorted priorities, so many deluded attempts to find happiness at other people’s expense, and at our own, seeking satisfaction where you just can’t get no satisfaction.

Yet every morning, the God of all creation says anew, “Let there be song to fill the air.” And tiny songbirds call out their clear notes with all the strength of their tough and fragile bodies. 

So, for the love of God, find beauty wherever you can.

Make beauty, however you can.

Share beauty with whomever you can.

This is a spiritual practice, an exercise of faith. 

I encourage you to make it a practice.

Last week after hearing the sermon, several of you shared with me that you renewed a practice of service to others and to the greater good, in small and doable and habitual ways, like picking up litter. You can start small, even with appreciating what you already do. The reports have been this is good for the soul. Make it doable, make it regular, as a practice. Something bigger will grow.

The practice I encourage for this week is the practice of beauty. It can be small, it can be big, but make it regular. Find beauty wherever you can. Make beauty, however you can. Share beauty with whomever you can. You can start small, even with appreciating what you already do. Make it doable, make it regular, as a practice. Something bigger will grow.

“The loveliness is everywhere,”writes the Scottish poet Kenneth White:
the loveliness is everywhere

even

in the ugliest

and most hostile environment

the loveliness is everywhere

at the turning of a corner

in the eyes

and on the lips

of a stranger

in the empty areas

where there is no place for hope

and only death

invites the heart

the loveliness is there

it emerges

incomprehensible

inexplicable

it rises in its own reality

and what we must learn is

how to receive it

into ours.

So the old hymn is true:

 “My life flows on in endless song;
   Above earth’s lamentation,
  I catch the sweet, tho’ far-off hymn
   That hails a new creation;
  Thro’ all the tumult and the strife
   I hear the music ringing;
  It finds an echo in my soul—
   How can I keep from singing?”

Thanks be to God.