Saturday, November 26, 2016
All Saints' Sunday - November 6, 2016
Sermon for the Sunday
after All Saints’
Year C ~ November 6, 2016
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Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
One thing have I asked of the Lord and that
alone I seek:
To behold the fair beauty of the Lord.
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
Well, I think it’s time for a philosophical riddle: if a tree
falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, is there any sound?.
It all depends on how you define sound: in one sense there isn’t any, because sound is a perception that occurs in the
brain. Still, no one would deny that there are sound waves, would they?
By analogy, beauty is real and its
reality is independent of any perception of it, just as the sound waves are
real in the uninhabited forest. One hears that “beauty is in the eye of the
beholder.” That is only partially true, and in its partiality it is misleading
and even false. It is all that the experience of beauty can be to a philosophical
materialist, that is to those who acknowledge no reality beyond what the senses
can perceive.
Materialism rules out a priori
the notion that there is such a thing as Unseen Reality According to
this presupposition, this commitment of faith, beauty can only be in the eye of
the beholder. There is no such thing as Beauty in Reality, independent of the human experience.
I find it interesting that many
philosophers of science are nevertheless happy to admit that new theories of reality
are sometimes preferred over others, some solutions of mathematical problems
over others, because they are “more elegant” sometimes scientists even openly describe them as more “beautiful.”
What, then, is this scientific criterion of beauty, if not a recognition that
it is objective, and not merely a subjective, non-rational experience?
Following the Greeks, especially Plato,
Christianity inclines toward the view that Beauty is real, as God is real,
because Beauty is of God’s essence, independent of human experience.
Furthermore, the Saints are perfectly beautiful because they reflect the beauty
of God. As an early Church Father put it The
Glory of God is a Living human being. Beauty is real, as God is Real.
The beauty of nature reflects the
beauty of God, too. That is why we rejoice in it yet at the same time we
experience a sense of longing: a longing to unite with it which can feel like an
erotic longing to possess it. Whenever I experience something really beautiful
— like a passage of my favorite music, or a perfect autumn day with its display
of created glory, or any of the other echoes of Divine Reality that surround us — I feel longing. We are told by our
spiritual masters that this phenomenon is longing for God. When I am moved to
tears of longing over a piece of music or an autumn day, it is because I have
experienced, momentarily, the Glory of God, and felt my own separation from it.
I think the same is true when I nearly weep at the sight of Pope Francis.
Which brings me to the celebration
of All Saints Sunday. For, above all other characteristics, the Saints are
beautiful. What is more beautiful than the poor in spirit, the meek, the
merciful, the pure in heart, the hungry for justice, and even those who mourn?
Since what they mourn is suffering and death, which God has come to destroy in
the person of His Son? Is not their mourning a longing for God? Are not their tears
of repentance, that is expressions of the intense longing that comes upon us
when our consciousness is ravaged by Divine Beauty, when our mind is changed in that terrible way?
These, then, are the Saints. Today
we celebrate all of them, unknown as well as known. The great saints, the
famous ones remembered officially by the Church together with the much greater
number of incognito saints, are all reflections of Divine Beauty, of the ineffable
Reality that surrounds us. As Dostoyevsky’s character remarks, the great
tragedy of our life is that a paradise of beauty blooms around us and we fail
to see it. Or, as Leon Bloy’s title character in The Woman Who Was Poor remarks in the last line of the book, “the
only tragedy is that we are not all saints.”
True enough, but it is true because we are all called to be saints, and we have every reason to hope that we all
shall be. Today’s observance reminds us of that, and that as we are surrounded
by the Paradise of Beauty, so we are surrounded by that “great cloud of
witnesses, whom no one could number” — the unknown, hidden holy ones, who have
become like God, who through Beholding the Divine Beauty have “been conformed
to the Beauty gazed upon”, and made partakers of Divine Life.
Those who have tried to tell of
this experience have offered the analogy of a piece of iron heated by fire. The
iron’s nature is thoroughly transformed into the nature of fire, as it glows
red and then white-hot, without ceasing
to be iron. So, we hope, is the life of human consciousness, utterly
transfigured in the Divine Beauty of the Beloved.
Alleluia!
The LORD is glorious in the saints.
