This Refulgent Summer
In this time of strife in our country and world, it's easy to get caught up, impassioned and overwhelmed.
It's easy to be the cynic.
It's easy to call out on all the wrongdoing.
It's easy to think you are right and everyone and everything else is wrong.
It's harder to hold on to what is good ... to pay attention to the beauty all around.
Rev. Lyn Cox shares this relevant and timely message of refulgence ... the shining part of this world that we might be less apt to see if we aren't paying attention.
Listen the sermon on the right sidebar or read the transcript below.
-- UUCY Communications Team
This Refulgent Summer
Adapted for the UU Congregation of York
By Rev. Lyn Cox
Presented on June 24, 2016
Reading: The Divinity School Address
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse.
I. Introduction: The Challenge
“The heart knoweth”, says Emerson. “The whole human family is bathed with the element of love like a fine ether.” Joys and sorrows, injustices and reconciliations, all together form this world, “in which our senses converse.”
It surprises me that I am inclined to agree, given that I was almost destined to be a cynic. I was born six blocks from the White House during the Watergate investigation. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. I heard traffic reports pretty much every week about someone’s rally or candlelight vigil or festival to raise awareness and funds for an important cause. And I noticed that, somehow – even though there was a constant stream of voices clamoring to be heard in Washington – somehow the Post and the Star and then the Times continued to come up with bad news, as if nothing was getting better.
Growing up near DC had its good moments and its tough moments, and it didn’t affect everyone the same way, but for me there were certainly when the evidence indicated that nothing mattered. Some days, it seemed like organizing for justice was futile, and that the only thing I could do was speak up for myself.
My first public witness event was the Rally for Women’s Lives in 1995. Being friends with congressional interns and clinic escorts and peer educators had pushed me over from cynicism to believing that putting hands and feet on your beliefs made a difference. The sun was so bright that day, the speeches so resonant, the people so filled with life, that one was constrained to respect that this world had yet some perfection in it. The feeling didn’t last forever. I still have bouts of despair and cynicism. Some days caring about the world seems futile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet, social critic, and Unitarian minister, knew about this empty feeling. He referred to it in his “Divinity School Address” in 1838. He said that when we lose inspiration, something is missing from our observation of the world.
Miracles, prophecy, poetry; the ideal life, the holy life, exist as ancient history merely; they are not in the belief, nor in the aspiration of society; but, when suggested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful, as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.
Emerson said that all people have divine nature, and that being open to that divine nature gives a person the intuition to recognize truth because it resonates with what is eternal. Being aware of this connection leads a person to revel in beauty, to lead a moral life, and to actively remove the barriers that hide divine nature in others. Without this awareness, the world seems flat, “comic or pitiful.” When this awareness or, as he puts it, intuition is active, the world seems poetic.
Emerson and the other Transcendentalists of the mid-1800’s believed in creating literature and art and education that would awaken people to this intuition. They agitated against slavery and for women’s rights because of their belief in the unfolding powers of the divine within every person.
Many of the Transcendentalists were Unitarians. They weren’t perfect, but they were remarkable. For better or for worse, these are our ancestors. They knew as many of you know that working for education and for beauty and for justice is both tough and spiritual. Emerson hints at some ways to deal with that. He would be the first to tell you, though, that each person should discover wisdom anew. Tradition is good if it invokes what the soul knows to be true. For instance, we have discovered since the 1830’s that using “man” to mean “humanity” does not reflect the unfolding divinity in all people. I will leave Emerson’s quotes intact and hope that we can hear them with new understanding.
Unitarian Universalist tradition calls us to both be in love with the world and to seek ways to relieve suffering, to incite change for the better. There is a danger, on the one hand, of being infatuated with the world until we become complacent, unable to see the injustices that require our attention. On the other hand, there is the danger of being so focused on creating change that we fall out of love with the world as it is. We might become cynical or burned out.
Somewhere in the center of our living faith, we can find a balance between loving what is and reaching together for what can be. Our own inner voices and collective wisdom are important in meeting this challenge, and we can find suggestions in the literature of our heritage that may be helpful. Let us be present to beauty and let us be present to truth.
II. Be Present to Beauty
The beauty of this summer has several times brought me back into communion with the present, back to life when I was busy making other plans.
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life …
I was walking with my partner and talking about this sermon, losing my breath in the heat of the day and the exertion of the walk and the excitement about Transcendentalism. Just as we crested the hill, I realized that I was making a passionate point about being present to beauty in the world and was completely oblivious to my surroundings. I took a deep breath. A blue sky waited, receptive as still waters, ready to receive my admiration. We walked past a graveyard that brings families together across centuries, its well-kept grass rustling with memories.
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life …
Direct experience with beauty in the world comes whether we are equipped with words or not. There are moments when a flash of beauty invokes awe and wonder, and the memory of that moment is repeated over and over, until it becomes a prayer.
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life …
“Refulgent” is a delicious word. It means “shiny.” Not just shiny in the sense that a new penny is shiny, but bright with an intensive force. Shiny in the sense that the grass was so intensely green that it was shiny. Bright like the shine of students on their graduation day.
Even without the distractions of mundane tasks, it’s hard to stay present to beauty all the time because there’s only so much refulgence a person can take. Too much shine can be glaring. Emerson suggests that beauty provides relief from itself.
The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn.
Even so, nonstop awareness of the refulgent summer will quickly lead to a realization: it’s hot. And kind of smelly in some places. And there are cracks in the sidewalk that I’m going to trip on if I’m always looking at the sky. Then what? What happens to being in love with the world when something less poetically inspiring comes across our awakened senses?
It would seem that being open to beauty where I don’t expect it means being open to seeing things I might have wished to ignore. On a good day, all of these experiences lead me to an unconditional love for the world. Beauty that is visual, tactile, auditory, kinetic, tasty, fragrant, all kinds of beauty can lead me into falling in love with the world. The spiritual work is to maintain a mature love for the world, one that sees the hidden beauty as well as the obvious. Mature love sees the flaws and the challenges as well as the growth potential. I believe that it’s this kind of mature love that Emerson is praising in the refulgent beauty of summer. This mature love will help sustain a life of justice, equity, and compassion.
III. Be Present to Truth
Being present to beauty is one strategy for balancing love for the world and engagement for positive change in the world. Another strategy is being present to truth. Truth can be upsetting. It has been a difficult summer to be a human being. We have witnessed murders by and of police officers. For some of our neighbors, drawing the breath of life is not a luxury they continue to be afforded. We have grieved with Latinx and LGBTQ siblings in Orlando. We have held each other in fear and sympathy following terror attacks in Istanbul, Iraq, Nice, and many other places. We have watched the effects of climate disruption play out at the farmer’s market and in world migration. All the while, our coping resources have been engaged with the same life events they always have, deaths and divorces and diagnoses, distance from those we love, a drifting sense of purpose. How do we hold all of this truth? How do we stay anchored to the high ends of being?
Fighting back seems like one option. Channel the anger against what’s wrong with concrete action. I have certainly been motivated to act by outrage before. Sometimes those actions were positive, like writing a letter to my senator. Sometimes being outraged didn’t leave me enough mental energy to do much more than scream, which may or may not be effective, depending on the circumstances.
A steady diet of outrage and despair makes it hard to sustain the kinds of actions that have the most impact, like helping to suggest a piece of legislation, lobby for votes, lose, lobby for votes again the next year, and eventually win. Uninterrupted outrage makes it impossible to trust other people enough to organize effectively for change.
Somewhere in our response to the fullness of truth, there must be room for creativity. Somewhere in our response must be the acknowledgement that beauty persists. Listen to the spoken word poets who are out marching in the streets as they spin syllables into being. Watch the murals go up in response to a community tragedy. Hold on to the splendor of people continuing to care for one another.
Being present to truth means continuing to be receptive to it, in all of its surprising forms. This is part of what Transcendentalism was about – that the human ability to experience truth is shaped by the Transcendent. When people are open to being surprised by truth, the theory goes, they are open to what is essential and Divine.
What I’m really talking about here is hope. Sometimes truth leads to outrage, but there is also the truth that love grows, that beauty persists, and that hope is a lived experience.
Truth can’t just sit there. It has to be spoken, sung, and acted upon. Emerson wrote about that in the Divinity School Address.
If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told: somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas; sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music…
Being fully present to the truth involves equal parts observation and action. The complete truth is that we have both wholeness and brokenness. Actively appreciating the wholeness and seeking healing for the brokenness – hope in action – helps keep that truth from going stale. And, as Emerson points out, once we are fully present to the complete truth, we cannot help but share it.
V. Conclusion
Unitarian Universalism has a great gift to offer the world. It isn’t ours exclusively, but it’s still pretty nifty. At the root, we have no conflict between science and faith, or between the present and the possible. The theories and findings of science bring delight. Being fully present with our neighbors – in times of joy and times of sorrow – being present with one another brings peace, even if we don’t have easy answers about the meaning of joy or sorrow. Even when there is brokenness, we can love the current world and also the possible world.
Be present to beauty, the obvious and the hidden. Be present to truth, even when it contradicts itself. Through these, may we become present to the faith that is kept between people in community. May the traditions of our ancestors and the revelations of your own soul sustain you.
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