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My mom’s family is from beautiful farm in northeastern Nebraska. As a teenager, my mom and her sister, my Aunt Willa, worked the nightshift at a factory in a nearby at a plant that processed eggs. The yokes and whites were dehydrated into powder that could be used in cake mixes. As a kid, I heard many stories about “the egg-plant.” Workers wore big plastic aprons, stood at an assembly line, and cracked the eggs that came down the belt. If an egg were rotten, the worker dumped it (and there were many a rotten egg). This was not exactly a dream summer job for a teenager…
My aunt now lives on the farm where she and my mom grew up and a few years ago she pointed to the top of the south hill and told me, that on their way home after the night shift at the egg-plan, tired as they were, they would park the car at the highest point with a view of the rolling farms hills where they would pause and enjoy the sunrise. Then, they’d head home to sleep.
In 1910, a labor activist Helen Todd said in a speech, that we need “bread for all, and roses too.”
On one hand, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. (I, personally, think a lilac bush in bloom smells beautiful. I also find beauty in an inspiring speech, a line of music, a familiar voice, and kids laughing.) Beauty often seems to stir something in us. Many times it makes us feel good. But is beauty actually a need?
Our Lenten series is on different things we need: We need change and rest. We need people to be vulnerable and to advocate for one another. But beauty…is that really something we need? Here in the US, beauty is equated with luxury. Money buys access to museums, concerts and nature—they’re a luxury. In the city, wealthier neighborhoods have more green space and more trees. When cash gets tight in school districts, one of the first things to be cut is music or art. They are seen as extras. In that vein, it seems that beauty isn’t a need after all.
While our culture says that beauty is a luxury, our faith heritage disagrees. Our sacred spaces are beautiful, the acoustics are striking in our sanctuary. Scripture speaks of beauty: descendants that will outnumber the stars of the Milky Way, hospitality shared with strangers, loaves and fish in the hands of a child, thunder on the mountain, the first light of resurrection morning. Our reading from Isaiah tells of streams in the desert and a way in the wilderness. And then, there is the jar of nard in today’s gospel story.
In the story, Mary pours the ointment all over Jesus’ feet and as the perfume envelopes the room, beauty floods the space. Then, she bends over Jesus feet, and as she wipes them with her long hair, everyone falls quiet watching. That is, except Judas who takes this moment to get up on his high and mighty moral horse. “Why,” he asks, “was this perfume not sold for 300 denarii and the money given to the poor?” Who knows what was behind his question—Judas is not exactly our most noble character in the bible, but at face value, I admit, his question resonates: Why waste money on this beautiful thing when there are so many people in need?
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In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote about simple visit to a beautiful forest.
--my head bathed by the blithe air
and uplifted into infinite space,
all mean egotism vanishes…
Egotism. It’s that thing where we talk and think and focus constantly on ourselves. Egotism, (along with self-absorption and selfishenss) is a social ill that plagues us. There are a lot of reasons for it, but over the years, we’ve exaggerated the individual self. Do I have enough money? Does my body look the right way? Is my life right? We’ve become more narcissistic. (They can measure it.(1)) There’s a heightened sense of superiority, arrogance, and even entitlement. It’s a kind of sinfulness that causes us to curve in on ourselves while others’ concerns or pains or worries fade on the sidelines. There in the woods, Emerson realized, his self-absorption and "mean egoism" fades with the beauty around him.
Have you ever seen something beautiful—a big, wide open blue sky, or perhaps you’ve heard a beautiful speech or an extraordinary piece of music? And, with this, you’re transported out of your head and your problems and issues fade a little in importance. There was a philosopher named Iris Murdoch who once explained that when you see something beautiful, such as a bird lifting off, it pulls you out of yourself. Beauty, she said, “unselfs us.” (2)
A lot of our problems in our world might be connected to the sinfulness of too much self. Beauty is a way of, as she put it, non-selfing or getting out of ourselves: A little less “I” and a little more “we.” (It’s wild--neuroscientists have measured how this happens in our brains(3)).
Part of me doubts that the disciples were as self-obsessed as we are today. Martha, who was serving dinner that night (God bless her) wasn’t fine-tuning her personal brand of “Servant-Hearted Martha.” The brothers, Peter and Andrew, were not subtly checking their phones to see how many likes they were getting on those updates about Jesus the raising Lazarus from the dead. The disciple Peter, who I sometimes imagine as the impulsive resident stress ball of the group, wasn’t over in the corner biting his nails and trying to get a handle on his anxiety.
While Mary’s gift of the lavish ointment that anointed Jesus was generous and admirable, I’m not sure that her act of moral beauty needed to pull them out of an individualized world-view the way beauty needs to pull us out of ours in this day and age.
And, beauty can shake us out of our egoism. Beauty, art, nature, music, a sunset at the top of the hill—all of it--can pull us out of ourselves. So, do we need beauty? Yes. We do.
But why? Let’s take one more turn with this idea because I wonder if beauty does something more in this bible reading and if it can do something more for us today. But I’m going to have to tell you another story first, to show you what I mean:
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In 1931, a young man named Charles Black Junior was headed to a dance in Austin, Texas, his hometown. He was 16 years old. Charles was from an easy side of the city and attended the great school of Austin High. As he walked down the street with his buddy, he was struck still by the sound of a trumpet player. (I first heard this story in an interview with Sarah Lewis (4). Lewis is an art historian and professor. She’s Black. Charles, in this story, is White. Later, I searched for Lewis’ written version of the story.)
So Charles hears this musician there on the street. Lewis writes that, “The trumpet player, a jazz musician, performed largely with his eyes closed, sounding out notes, ideas, laments, sonnets that had never before existed…His music sounded like an utter transcendence.” Charles is listening there on the street with his buddy who was a “good ole’ boy” from Austin High. His friend also senses the power of this music and the way it “rumbled the ground underneath him,” as Lewis put it. His friend finally shakes his head, Lewis writes, “as if clearing it and as if prying himself out of a trance.” The friend mutters a racial epithet and walks away. Charles, meanwhile, continues listening and becomes certain that he was in the presence of a genius. Indeed he was: The trumpet player was 30 year old Louis Armstrong.
In that moment, the music cracks something in Charles’ mind or heart: As Lewis explained it, here you’ve got this teenage White kid who, up until this point, thinks the whole segregated world around him is set up correctly and he sees genius in this Black man on the street. It is beyond words. Sarah Lewis calls the music, and this beauty, an “asthetic force.” It completely blew Charles’ mind. It turned him upside down and changed his life trajectory. Some years later, after law school, he went on to work with Thurgood Marshall (the first Black supreme court justice) to write the winning brief in Brown vs. the Board of Education (which led to desegregation of schools.) And, apparently, every year until he died, he hosted a Louis Armstrong listening night.
I don’t want to get too far away from our bible story, but, I can’t help but wonder if Mary pouring that nard out was as arresting of a moment as this one on the street corner in Austin.
It turns out that beauty not only gets us out of ourselves, it can blow our minds and change us. Sarah Lewis said that beauty “slips in the back door of our rational thought and gets us to see the world differently.” Just when we think we’ve got it all figured out, Beauty can zoom us out. We see a bigger world than our small minds. We see systems and connections. Beauty unselfs us.
In her book, The Unseen Truth (5),” Lewis wrote about the way James Baldwin had said that artistic photographs could change people. People didn’t understand at the time. But, it proved true: the “asthetic force” of photos changed people. There were pictures of the civil rights movement, or of the war in Vietnam—often with their jarring, painful beauty--that were transformative. There was that gorgeous photo, “The Blue Green Marble” taken in 1972 of our planet earth hanging there in the darkness of space. The beauty of that photo astonished, dazzled and shocked us. It blew our minds. It catalyzed movements.
It is not so much what beauty is, but what it does to us.
That evening, long ago in ancient Galilee, What did the beauty of the scent of nard, and the moral beauty of Mary’s gift of service, do to the people gathered there? What does it do to us?
That moment there mattered—Jesus told Judas as much. Did it crystalize the truth that Jesus’ message and life was bigger than the individual moment? That God’s goodness would liberate people—all people—from bondage? That even in the midst of selfish, horrific, greedy and sinful systems, that love would prevail? Did beauty convict them? Give them courage? As the events of the terrible next week would unfolded starting with Jesus magnificent ride through the waving palms and then, in the terror of his arrest and crucifixion, the scent of that gift of nard would linger on Jesus body and in Mary’s hair. Would the beauty continue to remind them all of God’s goodness, dream and aliveness even when all seemed lost? Did beauty change them? give them courage? Commitment? Connection? I wonder.
“Give the people bread, but give them roses.” Seek beauty out, let it soften your spirits and inspire your actions. Fight for it. Open yourselves to it. Slow down for it. Search for it in the biggest and smallest places: in the sunsets, and the speeches, and the paintings, and the spring season that is coming back to life. For beauty leads us to see ourselves and the world differently. More than that—it leads us to—live differently.
