Making a Beautiful Life
A SERMON BY REV LINDA HART
There’s a great cartoon series that I’ve missed since the creator stopped making new cartoons. Originally called Bloom County, I’ve seen occasional strips that relate to one character or another. Of all the characters, my favourite was always Opus, a penguin who was both the epitome of a loser and the sage of the series. In one comic strip, he’s talking with Auggie, a young man who is also a recurring character. They are sitting outside on a hill gazing at a starry sky. Auggie is in a tshirt and shorts. Opus, rarely appropriately dressed, has on an overcoat, what appears to be a fur hat and is carrying an umbrella.
Opus begins, ‘Auggie, old buddy, do you ever wonder how all of this came to be?’ Auggie responds, ‘You don’t believe in God, Opus?’ ‘I’m a penguin,’ he replies, ‘we’re not sure what we believe.’ ‘Except,’ he continues, ‘purpose. We believe in having purpose. Also lots of squid.’
‘That’s ridiculous. If you think this is all just a cosmic accident, you’re left purposeless.’ Auggie seems adamant. ‘I’m not purposeless,’ Opus objects.
‘Yeah, well, if we really are merely atoms bumping around by chance there’s little hope for finding meaning in life.’ Auggie yawns. He’s lying down and looking sleepy. ‘Ah, life’s meaning,’ says Opus to himself as Auggie is falls asleep on the hillside, curled into a small ball on the ground. Opus is holding out his hand – um, flipper – looking at the sky, and we cannot help but note that it is beginning to rain.
He tucks the furry hat under Auggie’s sleeping head. ‘Maybe it’s not so much found...’
He drapes the coat over Auggie’s curled up body, ‘As it is...’
In the final frame we see the rain pouring down, Auggie snuggled in the coat and his smiling face nuzzled into the hat with Opus holding the opened umbrella over him, as he sits in the rain. ‘As it is made,’ he finishes.
Aside from the squid bit, I think I could be a bit of a penguin, too.
But it’s not always so clear or so easy to sort out what the meaning of life, what the purpose of it all is.
Have you ever had one of those days? The kind that have you wondering what the point of any of it is? Have you ever found yourself in a moment when you simply couldn’t find the reason for anything that you had ever done in your whole entire life? What did any of it matter? I’ve had a few of those moments.
They arise in diverse circumstances. Maybe for you it was in a time of loss, when someone died or left, and nothing made sense anymore. If there was a plan, it wasn’t one you’d care to be a part of.
Or maybe it was another way that the world went out of control: a job ended that you hadn’t expected to, or you became ill in ways that you couldn’t have imagined. Perhaps a friend betrayed you, or worse, you discover that you had betrayed a friend unintentionally, or perhaps with a little sense of achievement. All of us have had those sorts of moments, though the details are different.
A sense of purpose can get lost even more easily than that, though, when the events of a day – just a day – shift and settle wrongly, when you can’t do a single blessed thing right no matter how much you try and God knows that you’ve tried. You’ve tried. And it’s all down to the feeling of grit in your teeth and frustration in your heart.
And here’s the thing about a lot of those moments: you carry on somehow, possibly because you don’t know how to do anything other than carrying on. I remember during a time of great difficulty a friend said, ‘I don’t know how you do it! How do you stay sane in all of it?’ And I told her just that: ‘I don’t know how to do anything else other than just put a foot in front of another and get through the day.’
I think about it like the dog in the poem I shared earlier. That we ‘swell into survival’, make it through even if we don’t see the point of it all. We just get through, living in the moment, living in the past, living however we need to, just showing up as much as we can. Until we find ourselves somewhere else without knowing how we got there. At least, that’s how I have found it to be in my life.
We know those moments, but it isn’t where we want to live, not any of us I don’t think. We don’t want – most of us at least – that purposeless kind of life.
Surely one of the functions of gatherings such as our own is to help us to understand our purpose in life, to discern the meaning.
What is the purpose? The meaning of it all? You’ll not be surprised that I’m not ready to give you the collection of answers for that question. But I do want to suggest that there is one purpose that is worth your consideration. The creation of beauty.
I’ve long appreciated the work of process theology, and in some measure that is because it holds as one of the central purposes of life is to be a participant in the creation of beauty. The understanding of beauty as it is expressed in that system of thought isn’t the simple notion of what is lovely, what is pretty or is simply aesthetically pleasing. The creation of beauty for them means making complexity in the interconnections that exist in the world. Process thought holds that everything everywhere every moment is being created, and we can enhance that creation.
We do that by all the small acts that build and enhance the web that joins us one to another. As that web of the whole of life is enhanced – that is, the natural world, the quality and quantity of love, the number of lives that are lived well and deeply, the ways we make relationships across boundaries – as the whole of life is enhanced, beauty is created.
Making a beautiful life, then, has to do with pointing our hearts and hands toward building connections, and supporting life in its many facets: tending the ecology of the planet, no less than finding ways to build the meaning of lives that are difficult, no less than increasing the ways in which we acknowledge and build the connections between us all.
I am struck this week by the recognition that there is no certainty in these acts of creation. Our good works, may indeed, all seem to turn to nothing as we see the terror and loss in Japan, the threats that are ongoing not only to that country but the world. Even so, there is the immediate outpouring of compassion and care that comes at such a moment, remembering that we are more alike, more joined than we had remembered on any random Wednesday afternoon. As we’ve taken to say, ‘we are all Japan on this day’ as we are joined with the people in that land in their trouble and their grief. A new connection, perhaps. A connection enhanced.
This notion came alive to me once again whilst I was watching a short video about an organisation that I volunteered with in the US. The Pride Foundation was a tremendously healthy organisation that had the amazing capacity to draw on the strengths of people who loved the work they did, which was to provide scholarships to GLBT students and to provide small grants to organisations who worked to support that GLBT community. Celebrating their 25th year of existence, the video included students who had been funded, people who volunteered, leaders of organisations that had received grants, and a few moments with Mary Kay Wright who had been instrumental in the early creation of the Foundation. She is radiant and smiling when she says, ‘you cannot live a beautiful life without giving.’ Extolling the virtues of the Foundation, she goes on to say that they allow people to make significant gifts both with ‘their money and their hearts.’
Where do you give with your resources and with your heart? How do you make your life beautiful? That is the heart of where meaning and purpose lies for you. That is the heart of meaning in the world, as Opus suggested. It’s not so much found, he reminds us, as it is made. And it is made when we offer our hearts and hands to make the world more beautiful in all the ways we each make the world more beautiful: the gifts of time and energy we give to our friends, the donations we make to organisations that do work that we care about, the small acts of love that open the heart, the work for political change that we find the time to engage. It makes the world more beautiful. Each act. Each intention. Each moment we are giving. It makes a beautiful life.
The truth of it all, of course, is that we will fail at this a lot. We won’t live up to what we most hope. We’ll have those days and those times where there doesn’t seem to be a meaning or a purpose or anything we can point toward as hopeful. With any luck, though, we’ll have someone – maybe someone who is sitting next to you this morning, a stranger, a friend, your spouse – who can gently remind you. With any luck, there’ll be an Opus, too, who without any reason or cause, makes a purpose in tucking something soft under your head as you fall asleep, who tucks a warm coat around your legs, and holds that brolly aloft that you may be out of the rain.
May we all be so blessed.
Amen.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life
you, the beauty of what is
the beauty of what might be,
may we feel your presence in these few moments together.
Our days go by
fragmented,
small pieces of a life,
with only the thinnest of threads
to bind the pieces together.
Sometimes we feel jarred
by the events,
shaken from what we know to be
true and right.
In these quiet moments,
may we be renewed
in knowing,
that all is bound together
in a whole, a fabric of the world,
of which we are ever a part.
May our lives be as an embroidery upon
the face of the fabric,
and more, may it be woven
stitched deeply into all that is,
that each act, each moment is a part of making
beauty.
Days pass,
moments go by unnoticed,
we are shaken from our sense of
well-being and goodness.
Even then – especially then –
may we know that still it is woven,
still we are as one,
with all of creation.
So may it be.
Amen.