Beauty Abounds

It is a great temptation nowadays to respond to the “outrage of the day”. (Just in the last week free speech and due process rights have been trampled, and the Trump administration has openly ignored the judiciary. Outrage enough.) Responding to the outrage of the day does gain us something – a sense of (moral or political) superiority, us-versus-them (with “us” being in the right), or the rush that comes from the dopamine or adrenalin that releases in our brains as we read about or watch the latest scandal.

We need news sources that will give us the facts and the deeper-lying causes for and implications of those facts as our civilization heads toward collapse due to overshoot. But news that only seeks to fuel outrage – and that’s what most of it is nowadays as it lures us to click further – leads to despair.

Within the ugliness that is around us, beauty abounds. It is most obvious in the nature which surrounds every one of us – even the most cemented-in urban dweller. The bird building her nest, the small flower poking up between the concrete cracks, the crooked tree…all the way to the majestic mountain peaks or ocean vastness.

And beauty is found in people also. On one level that beauty is close by and obvious: friendship, familial intimacy, volunteerism, art, sport. Yet we still struggle to come free of what Australian aboriginal writer Alexis Wright calls the “mindset of colonization” so that we can move into the liberation she calls "sovereignty of mind”:

“When you move into the realm of your own sovereignty of mind by shielding yourself from the kinds of interferences that rob you of the ability to think straight, that sap your spirit, or block you from seeing and making your own judgment, then you are able to govern your own spirit and imagination.” (pg 215)

McLaren speaks of this process as an inward migration. “We withdraw our consent from what is going on around us based on a story and set of values we no longer love. And while our neighbors carry on buying and selling, burning and profiting, extracting and exploiting, celebrating record-high profits and trying to ignore record-high temperatures, we create what Seamus Heaney called ‘a country of the mind’." (pgs 215-6)

As we move from the “mindset of colonization” to a new set of values, a new story, a new way of life, we look for those who have gone before us and/or are making the same journey themselves.

Perhaps that is part of what Jesus meant when he spoke of “whenever two or three of you gather in my name, there I am”. “You don’t need me physically present to tell the beautiful story (of God’s kingdom). You can tell it yourselves, even just two or three of you can gather together, embodying my way of being in the world. You can be cells of resistance, outposts of transformation, seedbeds of beauty.”[1] (pg 216)

“All around the world, small groups of people are becoming modern-day Noahs, preserving in their backyards and basements pockets of Eden, so species that would surely go extinct otherwise will survive another day. They’re adding to the beauty of the world, beauty that will outlast them as individuals and that may outlast us as a civilization, or even us as a species.” (pg 217)

We must separate ourselves from the “daily deluge of ugliness…in part because one of the best ways of weakening it is to withdraw attention from it…Every time ugliness presents itself, after noticing it, grieving it, and feeling furious about it, you commit yourself to fighting the ugly with the practice of the beautiful and the joyful, celebrating and  adding to the beauty that abounds, the goodness in the world that is worth fighting for.” (pg 218)

In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass, “It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because my head is in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” (pg 220)

[1] Thanks to Ash Barker for the seedbed image. See his new book No Wastelands: How to Grow Seedbeds of Shalom in Your Neighborhood. https://seedbeds.org

(For all posts in this series on Life After Doom, click here or on the Life After Doom box below)