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Ernesto Cardenal says that we can argue about the reason for the universe and about the meaning of the universe, but not about the beauty of the universe.
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Annie Dillard comments that “unless all ages and races… have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.” We all share beauty. It strikes us indiscriminately. It may be when our child is born into this world, or a simple flower; or a song; or a smile on a face; or a great act of courage; or a dance well done; or a child’s laugh; or a loaf of bread baking; or finding a worthy job; or a snowfall; or laughter between friends; or the death of a loved one returning to his or her Source.
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A newborn star shoots twin jets of superheated gas out from its rotation axis into space at more than 100,000 miles per hour as a sort of birth announcement to the universe. Image credit: NASA/ESA/STScI |
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There is no end of beauty for the person who is aware. Even the cracks between the sidewalk contain geometric patterns of amazing beauty. If we take pictures of them and blow up the photographs, we realize we walk on beauty every day, even when things seem ugly around us.
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The Navajo people have a prayer that deserves to be sung daily by all of us:
I walk with beauty before me
I walk with beauty behind me
I walk with beauty above me
I walk with beauty below me
I walk with beauty all around me
Your world is so beautiful, Oh God.
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Pre-modern peoples understood “God as Beauty,” but the modern era threw out the word “Beauty” as a philosophical category much less an ethical one. In addition to the Navajo prayer above, listen to these other pre-modern thinkers:
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Eckhart says: “This then is salvation, to marvel at the beauty of created things….”
Aquinas says God is a “fountain of total beauty” and “beauty itself beautifying all things.” Indeed, God who is “supersubstantial beauty, is called beauty because God bestows beauty on all created beings.”
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Greek Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart observes that beauty “is wholly elusive of definition—it never makes sense to say, ‘This is beautiful because…’—and yet it is inescapable in its force….Beauty is gloriously useless; it has no purpose but itself.” He cites Kabir who claims that all delight in beauty is adoration of God and Thomas Traherne who encourages us to “recognize creation as the mirror of God’s infinite beauty.”
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Nicholas of Cusa calls Wisdom “a supreme and terrible beauty” that can unite people of all religious differences. The Sufi tradition declares: “God is beautiful and God loves beauty.”
To forget beauty is to advance injustice. Justice heals and is beautiful; injustice is ugly. Racism turns its back on the beauty of people different from oneself. Surely, a big part of the eco destruction we call climate change is due to the fact that beauty was lost as a theological and ethical category in the modern era. Eco-destruction is ugly after all. Eco protection and restoration is beautiful.
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Indigenous Elder praying through traditional dance in Barrow, Alaska. Photo by Zeke Tucker on Unsplash. |
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Adapted from Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth, pp. 48f.
And Matthew Fox, Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God, pp. 56f.
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To view Matthew’s video, please click the image. You will be taken to today’s post on the Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox website, where you can see the meditation in a larger version and also view Comments from meditation participants and answers to questions that are posed. In this way a kind of community is developing around the DM.
If you can’t reach Matthew’s video on the website, try his YouTube channel here.
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Queries for Contemplation
Is Beauty a name for God in your language and thinking and action?
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Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
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Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God …Including the Unnameable God
Too often, notions of God have been used as a means to control and to promote a narrow worldview. In Naming the Unnameable, renowned theologian and author Matthew Fox ignites our imaginations by offering a colorful range of Divine Names gathered from scientists and poets and mystics past and present, inviting us to always begin where true spirituality begins: from experience.
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