Last week, we extended the invitation to take time to allow God’s gift of awe to take root in our souls, to pause and revel in the moments which touch our spirits and help calm our spirits. We know that if we just look up, we have moments every day which can still remind us of the awesomeness of the one who created this incredible gift of life, this very planet which we call home and the vast cosmos of which we are barely a speck. Each day, moments of beauty come into our lives as a gift, if we can pause to appreciate them. John O’Donohue shared this lovely reflection in his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. He wrote, “We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we are awakened and emerge to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.” – John O’Donohue, Let us pray, O Holy One, guide us to see with new eyes the marvels around us each day. May your gifts continue to provide joy and sustenance for us. May the beauty which surrounds us in the intricacies of a hummingbird or a piece of music, words crafted in a poem or the touch of a friend, help to heal our spirits and give us peace. Amen.
In 1997, the film Contact was released in theaters. It was a science fiction drama based upon the 1985 novel by Carl Sagan. In the film, the main character whose name is Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) is a scientist who finds evidence of extraterrestrial life and is chosen to make first contact. The film explores larger questions about life and meaning and whether in fact there is intelligent life somewhere in the cosmos. Ellie befriends a man named Palmer Joss, who is a theologian and a humanitarian, an author of books about the lack of meaning in our lives. He finds it remarkable that despite an increased standard of living and incredible technology, we feel so much more distant from each other and are still searching for the meaning that is absent in our lives. At one point, he shares his conversion experience with her. He describes his troubled childhood and his first experience with God:
Joss explained, “I had … an experience. Of belonging. Of unconditional love. And for the first time in my life I wasn’t terrified, and I wasn’t alone.” As a scientist, Ellie asks whether it actually happened or it was simply because some part of him needed to believe it. And he responds, “For the first time I had to consider the possibility that intellect, as wonderful as it is, is not the only way of comprehending the universe. That it was too small and inadequate a tool to deal with what it was faced with.” The film grapples with the intersection between faith and science, as well as the contradictions, and the ways we all try to make sense of the world.
Later, Ellie is chosen to travel into space to explore the possibility of communicating with other life. As she looks out the windows and witnesses an indescribable celestial light show, she attempts to describe her experience to the scientists on the ground. The view is so beautiful that she finds herself overcome with emotion and awe. She says, it is “Some… celestial event… no… no words, no words… to describe it. Poetry! They should’ve sent a poet. So beautiful… beautiful… so beautiful, so beautiful. I had no idea.”
Our first readings this morning are drawn from two different traditions—the wisdom tradition and the Psalms. The psalms–when read from beginning to end–take the reader on a journey through th history of the Israelite people from the reign of David/Solomon, through the exile, and ends in the post-exilic period. The individual psalms themselves don’t have a singular author. David Anderson wrote in his book Out of the Depths, “the book of Psalms reflects Israel’s new sense of identity and new understanding of the sovereignty of God in a time when the whole question of kingship had to be reconsidered.”
The book of Job comes from the wisdom tradition. Most of us know the book of Job as the story of a man whose faith is tested by tremendous adversity. We might understand it as an allegory for understanding why suffering happens in life. It poses a question, and explores the answer through the story itself, the reflections of Job, his friends and others, and the definitive answer from God at the end. In our reading, Job isn’t speaking. Instead it is a man named Elihu, son of Barachel the Buzite from the clan of Ram.
Our Psalm reading is a prayer of yearning. The psalmist desires a single thing: to dwell. To gaze. To meditate. And the psalmist believes that the best place for such bliss is in the Temple. There are many lovely places in which we may dwell—and many of them aren’t buildings. When we dwell in beauty, we give room for our hurts to heal. When we gaze on beauty, we make room for our hearts to be inspired. When we meditate in the presence of beauty, we remove the noise that can distract. What is that place of beauty for you? Is there a place where you feel surrounded by the beauty, the grace of God in such a way that peace and inspiration find their way into your soul?
Elihu’s words in Job this morning are the beginning of a monologue through which introduce important wisdom. He offers a new way of understanding Job’s plight as well as a beautiful truth, that the Spirit of God is what made us. The breath of Shaddai gives us life. What is a more beautiful truth than that, whether we are in the prime of our own lives or approaching its end? This week includes a reflection on the frailty and limits of life. As we come to understand that life can indeed be short, we often develop a deeper appreciation of the beauty of precious days. We ache and we yearn because we know, at some point, we will transition into the great mystery awaiting us after we die. Perhaps it is this important idea that each of us only have so many days upon this earth that makes everything in life so much more beautiful. We may think of the things which we might call “achingly beautiful,” those moments which evoke a deep feeling within us- a sense of something so precious that we want it to last forever–from the plump cheeks of a newborn to the wrinkled face of an elder.
In Matthew’s readings this morning, we are reminded that Jesus surely “considered the lilies of the field” as he invited others to appreciate the beauty in life. In the accounts of the Gospels, Jesus saw and experienced the beauty and the fragility of life. It was his deep empathy for others that leads him to the achingly beautiful moments of self-giving that lie at end of his human life. John O’Donohue reminds us to consider the moments of beauty between birth and death. As Christians, we believe that our God came in human form to experience the pathos and beauty of life alongside us. Imagine… as Jesus lived this human life, he smelled the food in the market stalls, he touched the water of his baptism and felt the fabric of his robes, he saw the smooth faces of the young and the wrinkled faces of hard-working people. He heard the voices of folks from near and far. All of his senses, like ours, were engaged with the world. That, in and of itself, is something awe-filled to consider. We can miss the fact that in being human, Jesus experienced so many real experiences of this world, both on a sensory and an emotional level. And that was exactly the gift of his choosing to come among us in human form… for the Divine One to know us, to know life, to know our pain and our wonder. All of it blessed. All of it beautiful.