In the words of the poem by Kenneth Patton:
Smell the air; it’s good.
It’s your air.
Your lungs grew in the breathing of it.
Take a drink of cool water.
It’s yours to bubble through every cell of your being.
Stand in the wind and sun. . . .
It’s all yours, the fields, the clouds, the sky.
The same life that is in me runs through all the earth.
Pull up the slender blade of grass.
Nibble the white tip.
Take life into your living body.
Run down the hill.
Jolt your bones a little.
Stretch your muscles.
Heave the air in and out of your lungs. . . . (Hudson 1962)
How long has it been since we’ve done these things? Perhaps not all of us are still able to. But there is an undeniable loveliness and beauty in this world of ours. It is ours, it is our home. We may travel to other planets, but this will always be our home, just as our hometown is always special. It is our paradise, our Garden of Eden from the first rays of the morning light and the stirring of the birds, through the new day, to the quiet and peace of night.
Life has other loveliness, the loveliness we find in human beings. People are lovely to look upon, and there is a deeper loveliness yet that is within them. We delight in children, we cherish our babies, but armfuls of tomorrow. We find in our husbands, wives and partners the deepest loveliness of all, the loveliness of loyalty and trust and acceptance. We take each other as we are, with our imperfections and failures as well as good qualities, but if our hearts are at all open to each other, we see unmistakably inscribed on the other soul an image of loveliness beyond compare. In our parents, we can or should find a loveliness that springs from their devotion and care for us, from their giving us the greatest gift of all, life itself. In our many friends is the loveliness of trusted companionship with whom we can be ourselves, to whom we can reveal our deepest secrets. In old age, there is an honored loveliness of wisdom and patient acceptance, the sanctity of serenity and peace.
It is as Patton said: “We feed our eyes upon the mystery and revelation in the faces of our brothers and sisters, we seek to know the wistfulness of the very young and the very old, the wistfulness of men in all times of life” (Patton 2015). So, there is a beauty in people, life has loveliness here also.
Finally, we can turn what to what might appear the least obvious place to look for loveliness, and that is within ourselves. Each of us may possess an image of loveliness within. As someone once said, “I pray that I may be lovely . . . within!” There may be within us reserves of compassion and strength, honor and courage. We may meet life without fear, and live life with joy and exuberance that wells up from deep within. We sometimes do things that are not very lovely, and we may not feel lovely within all the time, but what we are within may shine forth with glory and radiance. I like the way Rabbi Tagore put it in a prayer we sometimes use:
Our true life lies in a great depth within us. Our restlessness and weakness are in reality merely the stirrings of the surface. That is why each day we may retire in silence far into the quiet depths of our spirit and experience the real strength within us. If we do this our words and actions will come to be real also. (Tagore 1943)
There is the loveliness that may be within our souls, if we can only nurture it, and learn to look for it there.
So, life has loveliness, beauty and abundance to harvest. A splendor that we can only begin to garner. But there is one hard, cold fact that we come up against, and as religious liberals it is important that we learn to cope with it as do other religions and that is that although life has loveliness, life is not necessarily always lovely! And perhaps here is the key to Sarah Teasdale’s words “to sell.” The truth of the matter is life’s loveliness is not always free and the price we might have to pay is the possibility of losing it. Some of these things that are freely given may be repossessed at any time; we do not pay for them in advance and therefore are assured of them; we buy them, so to speak, on a time plan. The mistake we must not make as other churches do is thinking that the good things are taken away and we are visited by misfortune because of personal delinquency in meeting payments, because of guilt or sin, and therefore God repossesses them. This is the story of Job. It doesn’t happen because of cosmic control and correction. It just happens. It is a fact that life has loveliness, and also a fact that life is not always lovely. In losing some of the lovely things we pay a price, and in that sense, we can say with Sarah Teasdale “life has loveliness to sell.”
How do we pay this price, how do we lose some of these lovely things in the course of life? I think you know as well as I. As we grow older, we are able to appreciate fewer of our physical and natural interests; our eyesight dims and our hearing fails. We meet other disappointments. People sometimes fail and disappoint us or do unlovely things to one another: man’s inhumanity to man. We go through such prolonged suffering and difficulty that something happens to us, and we are not as lovely as we once were before. Yes, life has loveliness, but we must not forget that it is loveliness to sell, and this may mean eventually paying a price.
One of the best contemporary examples of the fineness and loveliness of life and the price that we must sometimes pay in losing it, is the story of John Glenn. He was a national, world hero, of superb physical, mental and psychological condition, a man of brilliance, a man of humility, a man whose personality warmed all who met him. The first man from the free world to step upon the threshold of space and return. A man who at the height of fame resigned his post in the space program to run for the Senate in Ohio. Thousands of John Glenn buttons and bumper stickers were in warehouses; the campaign had begun; people were giving him promising support. What happened? A man who had literally traveled into space, went through two world wars, flew 149 combat missions having his plane hit 12 times by ack-ack fire, who never suffered an injury through all of this—slipped on a rug in his bathroom and struck his head on the bathtub causing severe brain damage.
So, life has loveliness, but is not always free; there may be a price exacted from each of us and we should know this in advance and be prepared for it, so that when that day comes we will be ready. And of course, each of us must eventually pay the dearest price for life’s loveliness when we face our final hour. This is the way of life, the Tao of the Chinese, and that is something we must find a way of facing with a measure of serenity and acceptance.
Do we then end on a note of pessimism? No, we would not. We would be reminded of the glories of life that we have mentioned. I would ask only that as religious liberals we also learn how to cope with the lack of loveliness we sometimes experience. One thing that can be said is that life has a kind of justice to it: it can take no more away from us than has given us in the first place. It is for us to cherish and be sustained by what is lovely, and not to be diminished or defeated by what is unlovely.
11. Sermon delivered by the author at the Church of the Reconciliation Unitarian Universalist, Utica, New York on October 18, 1964.
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