August 30, 2009

Beauty in the Ordinary

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister

Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

READING          

Ecclesiastes 1:1-9

Utter futility! – said Koheleth –

Utter futility! All is futile!

What real value is there for all the gains one makes beneath the sun?

One generation goes, another comes,

But the earth remains the same forever.

The sun rises, and the sun sets –

And glides back to where it rises.

Southward blowing, turning northward,

Ever turning blows the wind;

On its rounds the wind returns.

All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full;

To the place from which they flow, the streams flow back again.

All such things are wearisome:

No man can ever state them;

The eye never has enough of seeing,

Nor the ear enough of hearing.

Only that shall happen which has happened,

Only that occur which has occurred;

There is nothing new beneath the sun! 

SERMON             

I have always been known as the early riser in our family. So, this past summer when Debbie and I gathered for about a week with our children in a rented house in Wisconsin I was the one who naturally took on the duty of looking after our granddaughter, Eliza, when she woke up bright and early each morning.             

At first Eliza wasn’t quite sure that she wanted to leave the arms of her parents, who were hoping for a little more shut-eye courtesy of grandpa. But quickly we found a rhythm that worked. I would take her into my arms and say, “Let’s see what’s happening in the world!” Then I would carry her out the screen door and into the garden in the yard and a meadow nearby. At 15 months, Eliza was just beginning to master walking, so she would wriggle to be let down and explore. Then, hand in hand we would walk along and see what we could see.              

There was no telling what would draw her attention. There were some bright purple flowers that always seemed to catch her eye, but sometimes it would be a dried husk or a chunk of wood. Each time her response was the same: Her eyes would fix on the object and then she would bend to look closer, tentatively reaching out a hand to touch it.             

Eliza wasn’t talking at the time, but she was so expressive that it hardly mattered. As she touched or grasped the thing she would coo, sometimes adding a little chuckle. And I would describe it – “Isn’t that pretty? Purple!” or “oh, so soft,” or “that’s prickly, isn’t it?” We would spend a good half hour or more exploring the yard before she was ready to head back inside for some breakfast.             

My morning excursions with Eliza were a kind of grounding for me on that trip. For while there was certainly great beauty around us there on Door County in the form of scenic views and arty towns nestled along quiet harbors, she helped remind me that it was all part of a deeper beauty that was shot through everything around me as well as the beauty of each of us in that small house endeavoring in our own ways to weave stronger the bonds of love.             

What scholars believe they know about the author of Ecclesiastes and the circumstances under which that book of the Hebrew scriptures was written suggests that it is pitched especially well to our culture. Though Ecclesiastes is classically attributed to Solomon, the language of the book places it much later, at a time when Palestine was ruled by Persia. The innovation that Persia brought to the region that is said to have transformed it is the standardization of currency. This, in turn, is said to have spawned an explosion of commerce and the mercantile culture that accompanies it.             

This change, scholars say, created a kind of entrepreneurial, up-by-the-bootstraps sensibility among the people for the first time in that region, promising even the poor that they could improve their station through investment and work. At the same time, though, the economy was so volatile that anyone seeking to make their fortune in this way ran huge risks, and financial ruin was not far away.Elsewhere in Ecclesiastes, the author complains that people had been caught in culture where acquisition became an end in itself, that people came to love money for its own sake and thought it to be the answer to all problems. It was a culture of inveterate strivers who toiled incessantly in the hope of attaining pleasure and wealth.             

Sound at all familiar? The crushing recession we’ve endured for the last year has certainly taken the wind out of the sails of our consumer culture, but there is no reason to believe it has been displaced. Even in hard times, we are still inclined to measure success by our busyness, our net worth, the pile of goods we can lay claim to.             

And even when we can’t add to our pile, there is a drive to stand out, to be noticed. Only then do you count. We must be done up, dressed up, pumped up, find some way to alter this so very ordinary presence that we bring into the world. We must learn to be clever, smart, charming, provocative. We must achieve stellar things.             

In verses following the one you heard, Koheleth recites all that he did in pursuit of achievement and wealth: “I multiplied my possessions,” he writes, “I built myself houses and planted vineyards. I acquired livestock and land and amassed silver and gold.” And yet, for all that, he says, he found it all like “pursuit of the wind.” The verdict of Ecclesiastes on all of this is clear. In the Christian Bible the author’s words are translated as “Vanity! All is vanity!” But the translation in the Jewish Tanakh steers clear of the implication of pride and conceit and focuses instead on its pointlessness. “Utter futility” is the judgment that Koheleth offers.Translated literally, the Hebrew word used here means “air, or breath,” conveying the notion that all these concerns are fleeting, without substance. Like froth, they contribute nothing and lead to no lasting good. The sun passes from season to season, the wind blows, the streams flow, and yet what real value do we find for all the froth that has occupied our minds? We have lost touch with those rhythms, the deep rhythms of our existence and regard them as wearisome, the day to day, as in Shakespeare, that proceeds in its petty pace. It is this, the ordinary, that we seek to escape, and yet we cannot.                

It was said to have been a similar sort of cultural crisis in confidence some 10 centuries ago among Taoist and Zen Buddhist communities in China that led to a movement organized around simplicity and acceptance of the natural world that came to be known by the phrase wabi sabi. This concept developed most fully in Japan, where in later centuries it evolved into the central idea in the Japanese tea ceremony.             

Wabi sabi is the blending of two seemingly unrelated concepts. Wabi suggests rustic, artless, primitive, while sabi suggests chill, lean withered. As it has evolved over time, wabi sabi has come to mean finding beauty in the imperfect, the impermanent. Rather than seeking to better what is found in the natural world, we are urged to align ourselves with it.

In keeping with Zen teaching, wabi sabi is found in the now, the evanescent moment that we live in. In the tea ceremony, elaborate preparations are made for the most pedestrian of acts, the drinking of a cup of tea. It passes in only a moment or two. Nothing of that moment endures. And yet in the awareness gained in that moment, it is said, lies the deepest wisdom.

Wabi sabi also describes a quality of things. Things having the quality of wabi sabi are humble and irregular. They don’t endure but degrade, age and corrode, and yet in the process become richer and more meaningful.

The greatness or beauty of such things is found in inconspicuous details, subtle textures and colors. Their form is organic – understated and unassuming, yet utterly simple. They are rough, even earthy, yet also intimate. They beckon a touch.

With Ecclesiastes, the ethic of wabi sabi observes that impermanence is the natural condition of all things. Things emerge from the welter of existence and then fall back into it, back into that creative source at the center of all things. And so the transitory nature of life, the emerging and returning of all things, is not a story of loss but of ongoing creative possibility.

Nothing emerges perfect, whole, or complete, but in those quirks, nicks and imperfections lie each thing’s special beauty. Our challenge is to discover them, to see the special genius or character that each thing bears.

At the same time, it is not a “Susie-sunshine” sensibility. We are forced to acknowledge the sadness that comes from accepting our own mortality and the bittersweet comfort of knowing that all things share our fate. Wabi sabi urges that we look to the rhythms of the natural world for consolation, and for guidance in conducting our lives, that we be wary of human constructs and hierarchies.

It is, in short, an ethic of the ordinary, a way of focusing our attention on the beauty that can be found around us in the simplest things and in so doing helping us understand the deeper beauty and integrity that binds together all things.

And yet, learning to embrace the ordinary is not an easy task. As the writer Cynthia Ozick puts it, “the Extraordinary is easy. And the more extraordinary (it) is, the easier it is: easy in the sense that we can almost always recognize it. . . . (It) doesn’t let you shrug your shoulders and walk away. But the Ordinary is a much harder case.”

The ordinary doesn’t insist on being noticed, and so it is easy to neglect it. The things that surround us and that we surround ourselves with fade out of focus and in time lose significant meaning. They become clutter that we stumble through. As Ozick says, “when something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.” And the Ordinary, she says, “does deserve our gratitude.”

That is because the Ordinary gives us context for our lives. It “lets us live out our humanity,” Ozick says. One consequence of this is that we should give care to what we do surround ourselves with, what comprises our “ordinary.” Will it be clutter or glitz? Will it engender gratitude, a sense of the possible, a larger and deeper connection to the world around you? “Ordinariness,” Ozick adds, “can be defined as a breathing space; the breathing space between getting born and dying.” How have you defined your space?

In the end, it is true, as Barbara Crooker writes, that “all that is glorious around us” is more than the peak moments of our lives: instances of blinding insight or being in the presence of soul-stirring beauty. The daily, the ordinary has its profundity, its intimations of wider and deeper connections, not just in the things we surround ourselves with but also in the people who are woven into our lives.

Nowhere is the effect of this perfectionism, this drive for the extraordinary, the hot, the hip, the new more pernicious than in how we are with each other. Must we ever reinvent ourselves to be acceptable in each other’s eyes? The gift of finding beauty in the ordinary is also learning to accept, even celebrate each other as we are with all our quirks and curiosities. Each of our brief lives is touched with the glorious and the pedestrian. We bear nicks and rough places from bumping up against sharp edges or unseen shoals that we never quite managed to navigate around.

And still, there is a radiance to each of us, a beauty that is our own. And there is nothing like leading a toddler by the hand through a meadow in the early morning to awaken a person to such a truth. The bright and busy world contracts to a narrow circle and with each uncertain step something new enters into view. A tentative hand reaches out to find soft or rough, bright or dull, and all of it alive with the vital tug of discovery. New, yes, and yet so very old.

It may be true, as Koheleth proclaims, that our labor promises no lasting effect, that transience is the fate of all. And yet, we are surrounded by such beauty, not just in the stunning or extraordinary but in the everyday as well, shot through everything that is. It cannot help but lift us up, spark our passions, ignite our creativity, and awaken our compassion.

In our work in this place, may we learn to know and serve such beauty in the world, among ourselves and in all living things.