In a book of pictures I once saw a beautifully ugly face. It was of a woman from somewhere in Asia. There was something appealing about this poor woman’s face that was fractured with ancient wrinkles and a magnificent smile. Her face was not one that will ever grace the cover of Madison Avenue’s magazine covers with their perfect beauty, but there was something in that grin that was more flawless than that of some gangly fashion model with air-brushed skin. There was something incredibly beautiful about seeing a smile break out onto someone’s face and seeing them giggle at something even if you have no idea what they are laughing about.No doubt you’ve seen little moments like that in your daily lives. Last November I was at my wife’s family’s house for Thanksgiving. She has a niece that was just a year old. She is a chubby little thing. The niece that is, not my wife. Little Aurora doesn’t know that much about social interactions just yet. She doesn’t know how to make a clever remark or to tell a joke that will capture everyone’s attention, yet that didn’t stop her from holding everyone’s eye captive for the whole weekend. She brought incredible joy to her audience simply by cackling at simple pleasures like riding “horseback” on her aunt or seeing her uncle make faces at her. There is something so wonderful and right about seeing a child giggle uncontrollably.
Think of all the art museums you’ve been to and the utter awe you feel at those times. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard that if you go to the Sistine Chapel in Rome you have to look at the ground. I’m sure the floor is perfectly nice, but that is not what is meant. What I’ve heard is that the efforts and skill of Michelangelo’s ceiling are just so astounding that it is more than a human mind can handle. Think of that! Something that a human being can make can be so incredible that it can only be taken in by small doses! We’re talking about the artistic equivalent of staring at the Sun!Have you ever had a moment like that? Have you ever seen a work of art, or maybe read a book, that moves you down to the core of your being? It doesn’t have to be a hoity-toity work like Da Vinci or something found in a museum. Where have you seen human craftsmanship so carefully applied that you just have to stand back in awe?I have an example that you probably won’t think of. I’ve worked in the restaurant business for something like ten years now. The most amazing thing to me about working there has nothing to do with my job at all. I wait tables. That’s really nothing more than sweet-talking people into buying more food than they want to buy. What is amazing to me is watching the cooks work when it is incredibly busy.
The next time you go to a restaurant on a Friday or Saturday night, if the place has an open kitchen where you can see the cooks, go and watch them work while you wait for your table. If it is a good kitchen you will be amazed. I remember when I was working right in front of them how efficient they can be. You’ve got five or six guys running at full speed in very close quarters while carrying around things that are literally flaming hot. They are able to keep track of all these orders and all the minutiae that go into preparing your food. When I see them get into their zone I am astonished that no one gets hurt, no one misses a step, and no one misses an order. It is a work of art.
Not all works of art are found in museums or are the product of any human mind. Some of my favorite sorts of things of beauty are to be found in the natural world. You can see there the immense glories of the stars and the planets. I have always been a bit of a space fiend so I am a little biased, but sometime go someplace far away from the city. Here in town you can see maybe ten stars in the nighttime sky. Go some place far out into the countryside and just look up into the deep, deep blackness. Look at the diamonds of brightest burning stars so far away from our eyes. Look at the Milky Way band itself as it hovers over you and around you. When I see such things I feel so very small and so very fortunate at the same time just to be able to see and enjoy them.
When I was a little boy my family traveled to Switzerland several times. There are few places on our spinning globe so wonderful just to be in than that tiny country. When would arrive my body would still be operating on North American time. While this left me in the uncomfortable position of falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon, it did afford me the opportunity of waking up before the sun first peeked out from the night. It was at those times that I saw what to this day is one my fondest memories of stunning beauty.
I would wake up early and go out on one of the many balconies. At first it would be the same twinkling majesty that I mentioned a moment ago. Then ever so gradually the blackness would slip into a pale, pink glow. After a few minutes the rose-tint would bleed into a deeper shade nearly red in its intensity. The coloring would soon drip onto the highest peaks of the mountains around me and would pour down until the heights would be ablaze with light while the valleys remained in darkness. I will never forget those times.
I truly wish that all the scenes of nature that I have seen were so inspiring. But you know as well as I do that ‘Mother Nature’ often acts in a way that is hardly nurturing. I believe it was Woody Allen who said that nature is not ‘mother.’ He said it was a restaurant where everybody eats everybody. We have all seen instances only in these past few years where the gentle hand of nature was one that smothered her children rather than one that lifted us up.
It was two and a half years ago that I was in Chicago with my family for Christmas. I don’t remember if it was late that night or early on the morning of the 26th when the reports started coming in, but I do remember that I could hardly believe what I was hearing. A massive tidal wave had swept through parts of East Asia leaving hundreds dead in its wake. A day or so after that the hundreds had turned into thousands. I couldn’t believe that as many as 7,000 people had died from a natural disaster. Soon that tragic number climbed higher and higher still. People from as far away as Somalia, Sri Lanka, and Sumatra lay dead in their homes or lost to the sea forever. It is said that around quarter of a million people lost their lives on that single day. God alone knows how many have died since from water-borne disease and malnutrition. One of the greatest natural disasters in human history had come and gone and there was no one to blame.
Closer to home, this past year’s quiet storm season could easily beguile us into forgetting the devastation we saw in our own backyard just last year. I remember watching the early reports of the incipient hurricane Katrina as she boiled up from the south Atlantic and churned her way across to our shores. With all the wonders of our most magnificent technology there was nothing we could do to stop a major city from being wiped out.
Neither our compassion nor our power could do anything to stop the devastation. We all wanted something or someone to blame. Everyone from local municipal officials to the President of the United States was strung up in the minds of the entire world as we demanded an answer as to why it could have happened. We knew that this sort of thing was not supposed to happen. How can a natural thing be bad?
A few paragraphs back I mentioned how amazing it is to see what can happen when you have a group of skilled human souls. I think it impresses us all to see a master with his craft. But what is our reaction when we see a master at his craft when that craft is destruction? How do we respond when we see great effort and skill poured into something revolting? We’d all be more comfortable thinking that great skill and great intelligence were somehow mutually exclusive to great evil. Tragically, we’d all be fooling ourselves if we thought that this was so. We’ve all seen too much to think that this is so.
Think for a moment of these past 100 years. How much effort was put into butchering millions and millions? We all know of the Nazis and their death camps. We’ve seen enough documentaries to each teach a class on the horrors that went on during those sickening years. At least for me I think that I have seen so many such things that I lose touch with the reality that happened. I forget how very much care was put into making the death machines do their deadly deeds. I forget that they had to arrange train schedules to bring the supplies of gas into the camps. I forget that someone built those morbid showers knowing how impure a purpose they had.
I see the amazing technical ability of the German people put to such a use and something inside me screams that something good has been twisted. I look at those events, as well as the horrifyingly common fellow examples, and I don’t know what to do or to say. Just as there is something wondrous about watching a group of skilled people work towards something beautiful, there is something ugly about seeing that same sort of intelligence warped into an amazing horror.
You can see this same sort of ugliness with the same sort of people that I spoke of so glowingly at the start. I don’t mean the great evil that otherwise beautiful people can create. That is what I was referring to just before. I mean you can see the effect of such ugliness in the lives on the receiving end of such works. Think again of the beauty of seeing a little child at play. There is to me a joy simply in watching little kids play.
Sometimes I think I’d like just going to a playground to take pleasure in the uncomplicated joy of a three year old slipping down a slide. But I don’t go hang out at playgrounds watching little kids. It isn’t because there would be anything wrong with me doing so as such. However, you know as well as I do why I can’t do that. I cannot enjoy the simple pleasures of children at play because there are men who look like me and talk like me who take pleasure in children. They take pleasure in children in a way that makes the most stern of us grow sick as little else can.
Have you ever spoken to someone who was abused as a child? That’s a silly question. Unless you’ve never met more than two people you have met someone who is forever marred. The stats tell us that something like one out of every three girls you meet and one out of every four or five boys has been stained by the most twisted of desires. Speaking to such a one is heartbreaking. You can see their very soul shattered. Women who will never grow to trust a man, while they will always be desperate to do just that. Males who never quite become men, but you cannot call them boys because their innocence was ripped from their spirits long ago.
There is not a one among you who will look at such a situation and say to me, “That’s okay. It’s just a part of life.” Every one of you will have seen in your life someone who will never be okay because of what someone has done to them. You have all seen someone who will never quite recover from that death in the family early in life. You have all watched as someone crumpled under the weight of a sickness that only gets worse.
We all have that one thing that angers us to no end. We might not have seen much grief in our own lives or even in the lives of those we know. But I’d bet that there is something for each of you that makes you want to scream at the top of your lungs that something isn’t right. Something is not the way it is supposed to be! You don’t have to be told by some abstract philosophy or some religious text that for an adult to pour out his sexual desires on a child is wrong. You don’t need me up here to tell you that human ingenuity should be used to help others and not to devise more and creative ways to inflict pain in those around you. You don’t need some intellectual justification to be sick to your stomach when you see body after body after body floating in the waters of New Orleans or Indonesia.
Think of these things. The next time you hear some self-confessed expert tell you that it is arrogant to make moral judgments, think about these things. The next time you hear some egghead tell you that each culture determines its own standards of morality, think about these things. Remember that those folks living up in their ivory towers or their monasteries have isolated themselves by layers of arguments or repeated mantras from the nastiness that we all live in. Remember that there is such a thing as beauty and such a thing as evil and that we cannot ignore the existence of either just because they make us uncomfortable.
