Finding Joy despite the Shadow of Sadness

 The Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021 has forced everyone in the world to live with a shadow cast over their lives.  Sometimes that shadow has become greater with the loss of a family member or friend.  Even for those who have not experienced that kind of loss and grief directly, life has become more circumscribed with social-distancing and other restriction for safety.  We all need to be able to find a kind of joy -- even if only a small hidden joy -- despite the pandemic. That is why I found the following article from Wisdom in Leaves five years ago uplifting.  I hope it can also be so for you. It was titled "Laughing Beneath the Meteors."

~ ~ ~

What was it about the written reminiscence that made it so appealing?  Why could I so easily identify with the firsthand experience that was being described, and with the inner feeling the writer remembered?  It was a recollection by a poet in his twenties, thinking back to an occasion of nighttime camaraderie with peers:

"Some day I must tell how we sang, shouted, whistled, and danced through the dark lanes....  and how we laughed till the meteors showered round us,

 and we fell calm under the winter stars.

 And some of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time.

 And seeing it so far above us, and feeling the good road so safe beneath us,

 we praised God with louder whistling...."

As I read this recollection, I almost wished I were there myself.  The cool night air.  The feeling of relaxation among friends.  The happiness and contentment.  The star-filled sky above.  The wonder of a sudden meteor shower.

Even as relaxing and restorative as those things were, there was also a deeper layer that gently emerged.  It seemed to have to do with that experience young people can have when they feel their youthful idealism beginning to be channeled into the paths of their individual identities:

"[S]ome of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time."

I felt as if I knew those subjective emotions because I had experienced them myself at that stage of adolescence:  The paradox of joyful freedom despite not knowing what the future will hold. The only thing I had not experienced as such was the meteor shower.  But I still felt as if I could understand the meaning of what the author described.  Today, in our U.S. popular culture, such things as meteors get mentioned mostly in the form of the fear that a massive asteroid might hit the Earth, bringing devastation.  Modern science also tells us that our sun will eventually burn out, bringing death to the Earth.  Terrifying scenarios caused by uncontrollable events in outer space abound (guaranteeing work for screenwriters of disaster movies).  In contrast, the young poet remembers laughing with his companions as the meteors rained down.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

The reminiscence has a power of its own.  But it is given added poignancy by knowing that it was written by the British poet Wilfred Owen, who died at the age of 25, fighting in World War I.  Owen's war poems have a sensitivity of feeling not unlike that which is revealed in this reminiscence, shared by letter with a friend the year before Owen was killed in battle.

To me, the reminiscence, even as brief as it is, conveys an experience of belonging.  The combination of the companionship of friends and the surrounding realm of Nature convey a sense of ultimate belonging.  Wilfred Owen is now gone.  But nighttime is still cooler than the day. Overhead, there are still stars.  And there is still, I am sure, at least one more shooting star ready to be seen as it pierces the air
we breath.

~~~

Have you ever experienced a moment of deep contentment while you were in Nature?

(Owen's reminiscence is quoted in "Memoir (1931)" by Edmund Blunden,

in the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, © 1963.  p. 172.)

(The photograph of Owen is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

Sunsets and Time

 How do you bring a successful TV series to an end before it is canceled or, perhaps even worse, before it loses its glow?  That was the challenge the PBS producers of the Inspector Morse mystery series had to deal with.  The grumpy, somewhat elderly detective Morse had warmed his way into so many viewer's hearts that the writers had to figure out an acceptable way of having him die in the last show, rather than leaving viewers hanging with an open-ended story line.  But how could the death be handled delicately?  Interestingly, part of the writers solution was to use a touching scene at sunset (days before Morse's demise) to reflect upon the meaning of human mortality.

Sunsets have on a number of occasions been a means for writers to touch on the challenge of perishability.  And also to touch on truths about time -- for, after all, nothing can stop that incorrigible movement of the sun in the sky, day after day.  Sometimes the sunset metaphor can be pessimistic.  Such as when the late-19th-century writer H.G. Wells, in his book The Time Machine, has his lead character journey to the years 802,701 and beyond.  There he encounters a dystopian world and "the sunset of mankind."

But to me it is in a way ironical that a sunset should become the metaphor for a dark vision of the future.  Even though it is true that sunsets proceed the darkness of night, I have found that when people do have an emotional reaction to sunsets, they almost invariably find them to be beautiful.  That is noteworthy because we live in an age in which we often dismiss beauty as being something merely subjective—something merely "in the eye of the beholder."  However, the writer Crispin Sartwell points out regarding our judgments about beauty that:

"Though different persons can of course differ in particular judgments,
 it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a remarkable extent:
 it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny that
 a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful."

What did Sartwell choose as one of his two examples to demonstrate that judgments of beauty are not merely subjective?  A sunset!

Nevertheless, our urbanized and technologized lives make it harder to enjoy sunsets.  Buildings can block our view.  And prime-time TV draws us indoors to watch an electronic screen rather than look out a window.

Beyond its beautiful colors, there is something else we might gain from watching a sunset.  In our modern, technologized lives, time has become mathematical -- broken up into smaller and smaller measured units.  Even though today's clocks (being more often electronic instead of mechanical) no longer produce the sound of "tick, tock, tick, tock," they still measure off the seconds.  Almost every computer carries a mathematical representation of the current time in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.  But the mathematical model for time is artificial because we do not actually experience time as equal tiny units.  Instead, we experience events that have a duration. If we did not experience duration, we would not be able to hear the melody of a line of music; we would hear only separate notes. If we did not experience duration, we would not be able to make sense of a spoken sentence; we would hear only isolated words one after another.

Thus it is that watching a sunset, besides slowing us down, can bring us back to the way that our lives are a part of the natural world.  For, as the environmental and spiritual writer Bill McKibben wrote:

"The most fascinating thing about dusk 
  is the lack of demarcation.

 It’s one long smooth transition."

~ ~ ~

(Do you remember watching a sunset?  When?  Where?  What was it like?)

(The quotation by Sartwell is from his entry on “Beauty” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. © 2016. pp. 1 & 2.)(The quotation by McKibben is from his book The Age of Missing Information, © 1992, p. 148.)

Yearning for Something Better

"We pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful,
even though the false, the nasty, and the messy 

might have been just as useful to our genes."

What was it that attracted me to this statement by the contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton?  In part, it was my knowing that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty have been held by Christianity to be the three classic avenues through which we come to know God.  But something more immediate influenced me, something about human society today.  In a world in which we are told by some people not that there are additional facts but that there are "alternative facts," and told by still others that "truth isn't truth," it can be hard to find our bearings.  Hard to restore our grounding.  Scruton's statement reminded me that there is something within us that yearns for something better.

My responses to Scruton's words began to resonate with the picture on the cover of Scruton's book The Soul of the World.  It was a painting by the great 17th-century master Nicolas Poussin titled "Landscape with a Calm."  That painting (see below) does indeed convey an air of calm, with a herder and animals in the foreground, still water and sheep in mid-ground, and a gentle slope and stable architecture in the background.  A diffused sunlight bonds all the elements together.

Researching in an art book, I found out that although Poussin lived in the era of effusive baroque art, there was in Poussin a "conscious attempt to suppress feeling....[Nevertheless,] his paintings are hardly ever cold or lifeless."  That is because there is in them, even if it is subtle, "an emotional tension -- a tension developed between the imaginative force of the informing idea and the strict discipline of the means used to control and express it."  Poussin sought with his landscape paintings to convey more than a landscape.  He sought to convey not the surface complexity (or possible chaos) of the world but to hint at enduring truths obscured by our human disorders.  Even in his twenties, he had written:

"My nature leads me to seek out and cherish things that are well ordered,
shunning confusion which is as contrary and menacing to me
as dark shadows are to the light of day."

There it was: Echoing down from centuries ago, a statement of Poussin that there was also in his nature a yearning for an orderly, truthful dimension that lies beneath the visible surface of this too-often darkened world.

Moreover, isn't the yearning within us for some stable ground a yearning for more than truth? Isn't it also a yearning for something we can trust?  And for people we can trust?  (The chief cause of broken friendships is betrayal.)  If the yearning is for more than truth, it would be a yearning also for goodness in our relationships to the world.  And a yearning for a kind of beauty that is not always visible to our physical eyes.  Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

~ ~ ~

Is there a way you try to restore your bearings in a world in which, it seems, "anything goes"?

(The quotes by Scruton are from The Soul of the World, © 2014, pp. 5 & 6.)

(The quotes by and about Poussin are from The Age of Baroque by Michael Kitson
in the series Landmarks of the World’s Art, © 1966 p. 73.)

A Crocus in the Snow

It is a classic subject for nature photographers:  a vividly purple flower
 in the midst of white snow. Why is that image appealing to us?

Part of its appeal comes from its aesthetic beauty -- so much so that it demonstrates what have long been held to be some of the identifying characteristics of beauty.  One of those is that beauty is created when some features that might otherwise be experienced as being in conflict are instead held together in harmony.  In this case, the intensity of purple contrasts with the absence of color in the snow; yet the two are held in harmony.  The contemporary professor of religion Steven R. Guthrie, explaining this aspect of classical Western thought regarding beauty, writes that, "In Plato's dialogues... harmony in this sense is not uniformity or unanimity but the beauty that emerges from different elements in right relationship.... It is, in Dante's words, 'an order' from 'things disparate.' "

Most people like the image of the crocus in the snow.  That favorable emotional response points to another aspect that the Western philosophical and theological traditions have identified as being a characteristic of beauty.  Namely, that something beautiful creates a resonance within us that is pleasing.  In that regard, Guthrie explains that " [Thomas] Aquinas draws our attention to the immediate impression that beautiful things make upon our senses."

In the case of the crocus in the snow, however, those who find the image beautiful are often responding to more than the aesthetic beauty of purple against white.  A purple blotch on a white background would not elicit the same emotions that the flower does.  What also resonates within us in the case of the crocus, even if unconsciously, is the contrast between the new life of the emerging flower and the surrounding cold snow of winter -- the season in which most plants die back.  This additional form of contrast is also a dimension of the image's beauty that is pleasing to us.  Not only is the tension between purple and white held together, but life and death are held together in a moment of harmony when the crocus emerges out of the snow.  The 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, in his poem praising God, expressed how the crocus stands out from other plants around it.  He wrote:

"The laurels with the winter strive;

The crocus burnishes alive

     Upon the snow-clad earth."

The moment of plant-nativity displayed by the crocus can thus evoke within us that enduring quality of hope that sustains our human existence.  Gandhi once wrote:

"I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds
 all together, that creates, dissolves, and re-creates.... And is this power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent. For I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists.
 Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light."

It is through our human capacity to not only resonate when experiencing aesthetic beauty but also respond to symbols that we can open ourselves to the transcendent dimension of reality.  The crocus in the snow reveals to us more than the survival capability of a specific flower.  It points to the Ultimate Ground of all existence.  And in that Ground are the "flower-bulbs" and "seeds" of all that can be.  There is an Indian saying that:

"All the flowers of all the tomorrows
 are in the seeds of today."

The real challenge can be spotting those "seeds" and nurturing them.  Sometimes we cannot even see them at all.  But even when we cannot perceive them, we can hope, and like Gandhi we can have faith that they are there despite being hidden beneath the snow.

~ ~ ~

(What do you hope for?  Can you see any way you might contribute to that future growth of something good?)

(The Steven R. Guthrie quotation is from his book Creator Spirit:
 The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human, © 2011. pp. 201-202 & 205.)

(The lines by Christopher Smart are from "A Song to David,"
 taken from Encompassing Nature, ed. Robert M. Torrance, © 1998, p. 1015.)

(The Gandhi quotation is from his Young India, 11-10-28, as quoted in Gleanings from
 the writings of Mahatma Gandhi bearing on God, God-Realization and the Godly way, ed. R. K. Prabhu.)

A Better Question about Beauty

If anywhere today the matter of beauty comes up for discussion, almost inevitably someone asks, "Is beauty just in the eye of the beholder?"  (Sometimes, that question will be simply implied by someone repeating the stock phrase that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder.")  In our heavily scientific age, that phrase -- "eye of the beholder" -- casts a cloud of suspicion over beauty.  Modern science seeks empirical observations that can be made by multiple scientists.  In contrast, two people observing the same object can disagree about whether that object is beautiful.  And so, there is an air of suspicion about whether beauty is "really out there" or is just something our minds project upon the world.  Beauty is not easily nailed down.

Philosophers today spin in circles asking questions about beauty.  And most modern theologians usually don't even address the matter.  Meanwhile, ordinary people throughout the world make beauty a part of their lives.  And find beauty in Nature, and are inspired by it.  They pick flowers and make art.  They listen to birds and create songs.  They are not fooled by philosophical questions.  The contemporary writer Elaine Scarry makes a critical point:

" [Beauty] seems to incite, even to require the act of replication.... It makes us draw it,
 take photographs of it, or describe it to other people."

Perhaps we would get deeper into appreciating and understanding beauty if instead of the usual question about "eye of the beholder" we asked why beauty entrances us.  And why we humans are drawn toward imitating it.

Another stock phrase that can be a stifling cliche is that "beauty is only skin-deep."  Admittedly, that phrase can remind us that we can be misled by some person's superficial beauty.  But the phrase "skin-deep" can discourage us from looking more deeply into the nature of beauty's power upon us -- including it's ability to bring us closer to our best true selves.  And its ability to draw us closer to the Divine.

Before modern times, the eighteenth-century Christian theologian Jonathan Edwards believed that beauty was an essential part of his experience of God, who was revealed through the natural world.  He wrote:

"When we are delighted with flowery meadows and
 gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that
 we only see the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ ... his love and purity."

A few contemporary theologians are beginning to wake up to the fact that in modern times their field of theology has neglected the topic of beauty.  One such writer is the contemporary religion professor Frank Burch Brown.  He emphasizes that:

"Aesthetic experience is a pervasive factor in our sense of the sacred,
  [and] in our delight in creation."

Asking the more productive question about beauty -- the one about our desire to replicate beauty -- is not just an academic matter.  It is a critical matter because we are confronted daily with so much ugliness.  Especially in the way humans often behave toward one another.  Everything from terrorists to ugly internet comments.  That gives us even greater reason to cultivate forms of beauty.

Beauty is not just something we perceive (or don't perceive).  It can also be something we do. A person can display beauty through loving and giving.  When we create beauty, and when we act in beautiful ways, we align our lives with the natural beauty in the world.  And thus transform ourselves.

~ ~ ~

What experiences of beauty in Nature linger in your memory?

(The Elaine Scarry quotation is taken from her book On Beauty and Being Just, © 1999, p. 3.)

(The Edwards quotation is taken from Open Secret by Alister E. McGrath, © 2009, p. 284.)

(The Frank Burch Brown quotation by is from “Aesthetics” in the New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology,
 Donald W. Musser & Joseph L. Price, eds. © 2003. pp. 19 & 21.)
(Both pictures are in the public domain.)

Yearning for Something Better

"We pursue the true, the good, and the beautiful,
even though the false, the nasty, and the messy 

might have been just as useful to our genes."

What was it that attracted me to this statement by the contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton?  In part, it was my knowing that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty have been held by Christianity to be the three classic avenues through which we come to know God.  But something more immediate influenced me, something about human society today.  In a world in which we are told by some people not that there are additional facts but that there are "alternative facts," and told by still others that "truth isn't truth," it can be hard to find our bearings.  Hard to restore our grounding.  Scruton's statement reminded me that there is something within us that yearns for something better.

My responses to Scruton's words began to resonate with the picture on the cover of Scruton's book The Soul of the World.  It was a painting by the great 17th-century master Nicolas Poussin titled "Landscape with a Calm."  That painting (see below) does indeed convey an air of calm, with a herder and animals in the foreground, still water and sheep in mid-ground, and a gentle slope and stable architecture in the background.  A diffused sunlight bonds all the elements together.

Researching in an art book, I found out that although Poussin lived in the era of effusive baroque art, there was in Poussin a "conscious attempt to suppress feeling....[Nevertheless,] his paintings are hardly ever cold or lifeless."  That is because there is in them, even if it is subtle, "an emotional tension -- a tension developed between the imaginative force of the informing idea and the strict discipline of the means used to control and express it."  Poussin sought with his landscape paintings to convey more than a landscape.  He sought to convey not the surface complexity (or possible chaos) of the world but to hint at enduring truths obscured by our human disorders.  Even in his twenties, he had written:

"My nature leads me to seek out and cherish things that are well ordered,
shunning confusion which is as contrary and menacing to me
as dark shadows are to the light of day."

There it was: Echoing down from centuries ago, a statement of Poussin that there was also in his nature a yearning for an orderly, truthful dimension that lies beneath the visible surface of this too-often darkened world.

Moreover, isn't the yearning within us for some stable ground a yearning for more than truth? Isn't it also a yearning for something we can trust?  And for people we can trust?  (The chief cause of broken friendships is betrayal.)  If the yearning is for more than truth, it would be a yearning also for goodness in our relationships to the world.  And a yearning for a kind of beauty that is not always visible to our physical eyes.  Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

~ ~ ~

Is there a way you try to restore your bearings in a world in which, it seems, "anything goes"?

(The quotes by Scruton are from The Soul of the World, © 2014, pp. 5 & 6.)

(The quotes by and about Poussin are from The Age of Baroque by Michael Kitson
in the series Landmarks of the World’s Art, © 1966 p. 73.)

Beauty: To Capture or to Create?

It's so easy to do now -- to take a photograph.  Just pull out the cellphone, aim, and press a button.  What you saw is instantly preserved.

I am old enough to remember when Polaroid demonstrated on live TV the then remarkable accomplishment of having its new camera eject a printed picture in only 60 seconds.  No more waiting until the 24 or 46 exposures were finished, taking the exposed roll of film to a store, and returning some days later after professionals had turned it into prints or slides.  Polaroid's 60-second do-it-yourself camera was so remarkable that they had to have hosts of TV shows with live audiences demonstrate the camera so viewers at home would know there was no editing or other TV trickery.

Traveling back further in the history of cameras, we would find further evidence of how comparatively easy photography can be today.  Such as the chemically treated glass plates and bottles of caustic chemicals that were once required.

Behind all these efforts, however, lies the same desire: to preserve something one has seen.  To capture it so that one might see it again.  We even once referred to "snapshots," to "shooting" a roll of film, and to "photoshoots," unconsciously preserving in our language the similarity between capturing an image and capturing a wild animal to preserve it or even try to possess it.

Most photos in the world (I think I can safely guess) are of family or friends.  Such photos help us preserve our memories.  They allow us to see (and with prints, touch) even when the faces thus preserved are far way or no longer alive.

"Orpheus and the Beasts"
by Sebastiaan Brancx

But there is another photographic urge, which was brought to my mind by a statement by a contemporary philosopher Elaine Scarry.  It is the urge to photograph something because we are struck by its beauty.  In her book On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry writes:

"[Beauty] seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication.... Beauty brings copies of itself into being.
It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.  Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances....
Beauty prompts a copy of itself."

What struck me about Scarry's statement is that she did not use that word "capture" that has been so much a part of the lexicon of photography. Instead, she employed words that suggest that beauty can inspire us to become creative ourselves.

A photograph is, in a way, an imitation of part of what was before our eye when we clicked the camera's shutter -- but often only a pale imitation of the real thing.  A photograph of a mountain is hardly the mountain itself. Scarry's statement suggests something more.  It suggests the desire not to capture just an image, nor to capture the thing itself, but the desire to create in our own life something that bears some of the same good qualities of what we have perceived as being beautiful.

Moreover, some of the qualities we can perceive as being beautiful are known not by the eye but by the heart.  The grateful heart.

It's amazingly easy to pull out the cellphone and push a button.  It's much harder to creatively imitate the caring and helpfulness and kindness we have received from other people. But that we can sometimes do so is also a remarkable thing.

~ ~

Who has inspired you with their caring, helpfulness, or kindness?

(The quotation is from On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry, © 2011, p. 3.)

The Beauty of Grace,and the Grace of Beauty

Most of us have known someone who stood out for having a special ease and courtesy in interacting with people.  Whereas most of us are uneven in our interactions, such people have a wonderful, graceful steadiness.  When we are in the presence of such people, we can feel the beauty of such grace.

There is also a grace in beauty itself.  Encountering something beautiful can allay our anxious spirits, and give us a boost in facing our next step in life.  We can encounter such beauty in a painting or a piece of music. But our experiencing grace can be even greater if the beauty is something in Nature itself.  Such as a sunset.  Or a field of wildflowers.  Such natural beauty can be more powerful because we know, at least subconsciously, that it was not constructed by human hands.  We experience such natural beauty as a gift -- something that need not have been.

However, there is an old debate:  Is what we experience as beauty really a part of the natural world itself, or is it something merely in the eye of the beholder?  Traditionally most Christian preachers have treated the beauty experienced in Nature as really being there, and as a reason for praising God the Creator.  But skeptics who insist that the beauty we sense only seems to be in Nature have as a spokesperson the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who wrote, "Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them."

That debate seems to be critical -- a debate over whether beauty is a gift from God or just an illusion.  However, could it be that such a contrast is too starkly drawn?  Instead of framing the matter as an either-or choice, could it perhaps be more insightful to explore a both-and answer?  That is to say, to explore how the grace of beauty is both in the external world and in my perception.  Beauty is experienced where the two intersect.

Even though we people are variable in our capacity for perceiving beauty, we can name recurring kinds of features in beauty.  Such as when a contrast -- such as of colors or sizes -- which could be felt as discordant is instead experienced as creating a harmony.  If such colors or objects were not really in the world, we would not exclaim, "How beautiful!"

True, my experience of beauty does depend upon an internal act of perception.  But that does not make it any less an example of grace.  Just as there is order within the external world, there is remarkable order within my sensory organs and brain, which makes possible my perception of beauty, even if it is culturally nurtured.  That such order exists in human makeup is also a grace, a gift.

The transcendent aspect of beauty has led religious thinkers to see beauty as one window into God.  The great medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas depicted God as being Ultimate Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.  And one of the sayings of Islam is:

"God is beautiful and loves beauty."

~~~

What are the effects of beauty upon you?  Where do you encounter beauty in Nature?

(The Hume quote is from Essays, "Of Human Tragedy," and is taken from

 Bloomsbury Treasury of Quotations, ed. John Daintith, © 1994, p. 54.)

(The Islamic saying is from the Hadith of Muslim, and is taken from
 World Scripture:  A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts.  © 1991.  p. 88.)

Can the Earth Heal?

"Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal...."

With that succinct declaration, the late 19th-century nature-writer John Muir put his own spin on what had become a conventional aphorism.  Specifically, the saying that "Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal," which had come from a poem by the Irish romantic poet Thomas Moore writing over half a century earlier.  Grammatically, Muir's substitution of the word "earth" for Moore's word "Heaven" was a simple matter.  But spiritually and theologically, that substitution leads us into complexities:  Does the Earth heal, and if so, how?

I remember as a child being shocked upon first hearing a particular Bible story about Jesus healing a blind man.  Having grown up in a church, I was accustomed to hearing stories about Jesus compassionately healing people, but this story was different.  As the narrative goes, Jesus "spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes."  (John 9:6).  Jesus's then telling the man to go wash his eyes with water from a pool did not reduce my shock, because I thought Jesus should be smarter than to put such an unsanitary substance as saliva mixed with dirt in a person's eyes.  Even as a child, I had learned not to touch my eyes when my hands were dirty.

Having now more knowledge about symbols in the culture the Bible comes from, I know that earth -- the ground -- was associated with the source of existence itself.  In one of the creation accounts in Genesis, "God formed man from the dust of the ground." (Gen. 2:7)  There is, therefore, the suggestion in the story of the blind man that Jesus's healing is also a creative act -- giving new life to the blind man!

Calypso orchid

John Muir's declaration that the earth can heal all our earthly sorrows gains added significance within his late 19th-century context.  Muir felt that too much of the Christianity of his time had become otherworldly and human-centered.  It often focused on the assurance that a person's individual soul would have a place in the afterlife, instead of rejoicing in the wonder and beauty of the natural world all around.  Muir himself had often experienced how his own spirit could be healed by immersing himself in Nature. One of those occasions occurred during an unsettled time in his life, when he had been traveling on foot for months across part of Canada, meeting very few people.  One day, after wading for hours through a swamp, exhausted and discouraged, he suddenly came upon, as he described it, "the rarest and most beautiful of the flowering plants... a Calypso borealis."  The flower's beauty broke in upon him so unexpectedly that he sat down beside it and wept, relieving a greater burden than just that one day's exhaustion.

Today, there are many people who have also experienced how turning their attention to something in Nature can be restorative, even healing.  And it doesn't require wandering for days in wilderness.  Sometimes it comes in more ordinary settings.

~~~

Has there been, or is there, an occasion on which you are restored by Nature?

(The quote by Muir about the earth, written in 1872, is from John of the Mountains, 1938. p. 99.
The quote about the flower is from his letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr in 1866)

(The quote by Thomas Moore [1779-1852] is from his "Come, Ye Disconsolate.")

(The flower photo, by Walter Siegmund, is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Some Light on Diwali and Us

In the U.S., as soon as Thanksgiving turkey is eaten, people's plans turn to what has come to be called "the holiday season."  That label, although bland, is appropriate because some of the most festive celebrations of a number of faith-traditions all fall in December:  Obviously, Christianity's Christmas.  And Judaism's Hanukkah.  Also the less known but beautiful home-ceremonies of Kwanzaa, out of African-American culture.  However, even before the December convergence of those holidays occurs, the Indian-American community has gotten a jump on celebration with the ancient festival of Diwali.  And that celebration can shed some light on those other holidays, as well as upon our human relationship with the natural world.

The name "Diwali" is derived from the Sanskrit phrase "row of lamps."  In India, there are variations depending in which region it is being celebrated, and whether the people celebrating are Hindus, Jains, or Sikhs.  But it is the lighting of small clay oil lamps that has resulted in its sometimes being referred to as "the festival of lights."

It is hard to express to someone who does not live in a city with a significant Indian population how popular Diwali is, but one Diwali gathering in the suburb of one large U.S. city drew thousands of celebrants.  One autumn, I dropped in for a vegetarian buffet at an Indian restaurant, and found myself in a crowd of people buying sweets for Diwali -- a crowd so focused on one task that it resembled Christmas shoppers.

I cannot help but notice that all four of the latter-fall or early-winter festivals I have mentioned involve the lighting of candles or oil lamps:  The four weekly Advent candles before Christmas. The eight daily-lit candles of the Jewish menorah.  The Kwanzaa candles representing different virtues.  And the oil lamps of Diwali.

No matter which way we celebrate "the holiday season," as we call it, and no matter which way we celebrate the multi-layered meanings of symbols about light and darkness, one thing will certainly remain true.  Tomorrow, the sun will rise; and in the Northern Hemisphere in the weeks following the winter solstice, the days will grow longer again.  That phenomenon has occurred for over 4 billion years, which calculates out to 1.46 trillion days.  Moreover, scientists tell us the sun will pull that trick of rising for billions of years still to come.

Although the return of light and the human need for illumination, both physical and spiritual, are the most obvious symbols of our four late-year holidays, I have come to think that there is another component as well: Namely, beauty.  The candles we light don't merely illuminate the room we are in.  (If that was all we needed, we could just turn on the overhead fluorescents.)  The candles we light, especially if in a dimmed or darkened rooms, are like the pinpoints of stars in a black velvet sky. The contrast of light and dark creates a harmony of contrasts we can experience as being beautiful.  Moreover, when we light those holiday candles, just as when we look out into the depths of a dark, starlit sky, we can feel a depth to our lives, and a depth in all of human existence.

~~~

Do you have a particular, special memory of one of these four celebrations?

(The photograph of Diwali decorations is by Subharnab Majumdar

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

“Music, ‘Arabian nights,’ and Darwin”

It is sometimes the small, unexpected details that catch my eye when I am reading history or biography.  So it was when I was reading part of Gertrude Himmelfarb's book Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution.  I have read a number of books about the response to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.  But my attention was caught by what the British novelist George Eliot wrote in her diary on the evening of the very day Darwin's revolutionary book was published.  Describing how she had occupied herself that very evening, Eliot wrote:  "music, 'Arabian nights,' and Darwin."  What a combination of evening activities and reading before turning into bed!

George Eliot

George Eliot (a woman who wrote under that pseudonym) is most known for her somewhat psychological novels.  But she was also part of a movement of intellectuals who could no longer find credible the church's theological descriptions of the world.  To many such intellectuals, the church's theological concepts could no longer illuminate life.

When I was in college, I read an English translation made by George Eliot of Feuerbach's difficult book The Essence of Christianity, which was part of those 19th-century struggles. Feuerbach maintained that statements about God were actually just projections of human beings' own ideal image of themselves.

However, when I think of George Eliot's writings, what comes to mind are not those difficult religious struggles of the 19th century, but instead a coincidental conjunction I once experienced between Nature and Eliot's novel Silus Marner.

My high-school English class was reading together part of the novel in class.  Our English class was held in one of the wood, portable buildings that had been set up because the student body had grown larger than the main brick building.  Most students did not like having a class in one of those wood "shacks," but I did.  I liked the way the shacks (without air-conditioning) had windows on both sides of the classroom, thus allowing more air and sunlight to flow in.

On the particular day I remember, we were reading a passage in which the outcast Silus Marner experiences what seems to him a miracle.  While he is in a catatonic state, a small child with radiant golden hair crawls into his house through the open door, thus seeming to Silus to appear suddenly when he awakes.  He feels as if he has been graced with a gift from God upon seeing the child, which seemed to have a wonderful glow about it.

Although I knew the scene was contrived, the beauty of that scene seemed to stand out even more brightly to me because, as we read it, I was so aware of the sunlight right there at that moment, shining beautifully into our classroom.

~~~

Have you read a novel or story in which a scene was uncannily real to you?  Why?

(The painting of Eliot is in the public domain

because its copyright has expired.)

Humane Beauty, Japanese Style

Water.  Stone.  Plants.  Wood.  With those four simple building blocks, the Japanese create traditional Japanese gardens.  Although using only four basic elements, they create a multitude of beautiful effects.  As they create those gardens (a tradition that dates back a thousand years), they provide what could be a course in the principles of aesthetics.  The gardens also provide what could be considered a lesson in our human relationship to Nature.

A basic principle of beauty -- any kind of beauty -- is that it brings into harmony what might be otherwise experienced as being conflicting.  As you stroll through a Japanese garden, you indeed experience a peace, a harmony, even as your eyes are filled with a variety of contrasting textures and shapes:  Stone path, soft grass.  Trickling water, hard rock.  Carved wood bridge, straight pine tree.  Great overhanging willow tree, a tiny splay of small stones.

The plants, walkways, bridges, pools of water, and occasional benches or buildings are arranged not only to provide a heightened experience of picturesque effects, but also so as to slow you down as you stroll through the garden.  I have had the pleasure of visiting a half-dozen Japanese gardens in the U.S.  I admire what the landscape designers have accomplished, even when the moisture and moss that are a feature in gardens in Japan are not available due to a drier climate.

Besides providing numerous lessons in aesthetics, my experiences in exploring Japanese gardens has led me to musings about our human relationships with Nature.  Certainly, designers of Japanese gardens and the people who frequent them display a love for Nature.  Nevertheless, the effects are clearly contrived, even when they are designed to feel natural.  There is not a weed anywhere (even though the hard-working people who maintain the garden are usually out of sight).  Because of this cultivated character, it seems to me that Japanese gardens can speak only partway to our human relationship with Nature.  They certainly cannot speak to our relationship with wilderness -- which by definition is land not cultivated for human use.  There is little sense of the otherness of Nature, or of its value in its own right, apart from human enjoyment.  Nor is there much of the predatory component within Nature.  (Even the koi fish are like giant pet goldfish, with food dispensers in some gardens so that human visitors can feed them.)

Despite those limitations, I would prefer that Nature be loved in this way than not at all.  Also, it would be wonderful if every U.S. city had a Japanese garden as a place for rest and renewal in the often hard and often stressful urban landscape.

In the final analysis, though, Japanese gardens are not a complete home for humans, but are instead places for us to occasionally visit.  They are a refined home for the cultivated koi.  If I had any doubt about that, it was removed by the sign on one garden's fish-food dispenser by the koi pond.  It read:  "Please don't feed the squirrels or other wildlife."

~~~

Have you ever visited a Japanese garden?  What do you remember about it?

The Harmony of Feathers

Even since I was a boy, I've picked up feathers.  I do not go about intentionally trying to find them, nor do I have any large or scientifically-arranged collection.  But ever since I was a child, I've had the habit of picking up that occasional feather I've come across on the ground.  In a way, it seemed to me such a waste to leave such a polished finished product just lying on the ground, unappreciated.  In another way, possessing a feather felt a bit like having a talisman because it seemed to be like a free and lucky find.

Humans have appreciated the beauty of birds' feathers since before recorded history.  Both native Americans and some Pacific cultures incorporated feathers into their ritual dress.  As I examine even a single one of my relatively simple feathers from a Blue Jay or Mockingbird, I can see why:  The feather's combination of rigidity and softness to the touch.  The feather's simple elegance of design with a striking contrast of colors.

Walt Whitman

Thinking about this matter of found feathers, the phrase that comes to my mind is "designedly dropped."  It's a phrase Walt Whitman uses as he reflects on the wonder of a handful of grass brought to him by a child who asks the child's perennial question, "What is this?"  Whitman, confessing to the reader that he cannot say ultimately what grass is (so wondrous it seems), contents himself with imaginative musings about what this natural object from the Creator might be.  This is where Whitman likens the Nature-object to God's initialed handkerchief "designedly dropped,  /  Bearing the owner's name... that we may see and remark, and say Whose?"

To me, this mystery of feathers (or of a blade of grass) goes right to the heart of our spiritual relation to Nature.  There is a paradox:  I know that God did not intentionally drop that feather on the path along which I was about to walk so that I might find it.  And I know that the symmetrical tidiness of the rows of thin branches projecting from a feather's stem was not created so that I might marvel.  Nor were the colored designs created in order that I might enjoy their beauty.

Nevertheless, our human brains and cultures evolved so that we might engage the world in a way that unites our minds and hearts with the fascinating features of the world.  I think one hymn writer spoke to this when that hymnist wrote of "the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight."

~~~

As a child, did you collect any objects from Nature?  Do you do so now?

(The lines from the hymn are from
  "For the Beauty of the Earth," lyrics by Folliott Sandford Pierpoint, 1864.)

(Portrait of Walt Whitman is in public domain because its copyright has expired.)

The Painted Morning Sky

"You, whose day it is, make it beautiful.

Get out your rainbow colors

so it will be beautiful."

                                 -- A Nootka morning prayer

I think this prayer could be the universal wish of humankind at morning.  Not specifically that the sky at sunrise be beautifully colored, but that the coming day be a good one (especially if yesterday went terrible).

This Nootka prayer seems to me, however, to be a prayer not merely for good fortune in the new day, but actually for a beautifully colored sunrise.  Several decades ago, when I learned some techniques of photography (before today's digital cameras), I learned how sunrises are usually softer in color, and have more pink and blue light, in contrast with the fiery reds and oranges of sunsets.  The Nootka prayer could thus be heard as a wish for a beautiful pastel-colored sky at dawn.

I would like to catch a bit of that pastel softness and harmony and take it into myself for the day.

There also seems to me to be in the Nootka prayer the suggestion that each new day carries within itself new divine promise.

Frequently when I suggest the idea that God can be known through Nature, the response I get from many people is, "But Nature can be violent!"  (I must admit I do have to bite my tongue a bit and avoid responding, "You think Nature can be violent -- did you watch the TV news last night to see what people have been doing?")

However, just as we learn how to discern the Spirit of God at work in human society, so also might we learn to discern things about God as we observe, contemplate, and learn how to interpret what Christianity often called the "book of Nature."

For example, in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus wants to point to some place where we have experienced the most demanding kind of behavior -- the challenge to"Love your enemies" -- Jesus does not turn to any saintly human beings. Instead, Jesus points to our experience of something inanimate in Nature:  the reliable sun, saying, "your Father in heaven... makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (Matt. 5: 44-45).  That is an example of discerning a deeper reality, God's faithfulness, in the natural rising of the sun.  Similar to the way the Nootka verse seems to rejoice with its prayer offered to God as the sun rises.

The rising of the sun is the most frequent of the reliable cycles of Nature in which we place the cycles of our own lives.

~~~

What can noticing Nature bring to your day?