Beauty Anyway

It poured rain today, Easter Sunday, drenching everything here in Nashville into a soggy mess. In some places there were severe weather watches. Some of my friends up north still have snow. As far as I know, the Easter Sunday churches weren’t packed, because they weren’t supposed

to be open. Christians who celebrate Easter today and those who will be celebrating Orthodox Easter next week, like Jews recently celebrating Passover, are compelled to keep their observances at home.

And whether or not we individually subscribe to a religious observance right now, this time of year feels like a pivot point for lots of us, as we step for real into spring, new beginnings, stirred by pretty days. Still, right now especially, we’re all terribly...uncertain about what comes next.

Because it’s Easter, I can’t help but think about what historians believe life was like for the folks who eventually became Christians in the earliest times, in the last millenium’s first decades and centuries. For the most part, those folks were Jews (and some Gentiles and others) who had, according to the various stories circulating around the Mediterranean in those days, experienced and witnessed some remarkable things while hanging out with this weird carpenter turned radical rabbi/street preacher. Or if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes, they’d heard the tales. Their own customs and religious practices as Jews had been suppressed and surveilled by the Romans. Their holiest temple had been destroyed, rebuilt, and then destroyed again. Many of their families had lived centuries as refugees far from their ancestral homelands, and some of them living in and around Jerusalem were themselves refugees from other territories. The local and imperial governments couldn’t agree on laws; currency markets were shaky, income inequality crushed the working people, xenophobia thrived, little wars were breaking out all over, and health care sucked. You can see why a street preacher, or even a story about a street preacher with an optimistic message might have gained some traction with that crowd.

That story isn’t one to which most Americans today subscribe, though. It doesn’t bring people comfort in the way it might have even just a few generations ago, and there are lots of good reasons for that, which I won’t get into here. Let’s just say the cruelties inflicted on others in the name of that radical rabbi/street preacher have pretty much discredited most institutions trying to stake a claim on his story.

And yet some people have faith. It might not be a religious faith, but they believe in goodness.

They believe in beauty. They believe in the power of a seed to germinate into something beautiful, something edible, something tall and shady, something wild. And now, now is the time for sowing, friends. Get your beauty planted, people; we’re going to need it in the coming days.

Humans crave beauty. It’s one of the reasons I take so many pictures of flowers. It’s why we paint, or sing, or write poems, or dance. Beauty is its own life force. I think that’s one reason so many cancer patients turn to art when they fall ill, when they are dying. In the ugliness of illness, in the destruction of our bodily temples, we reach for good, and we long for beauty.

It’s my third Easter since diagnosis; my third year of snapping pictures of blooms, of dealing with pollen allergies. It’s my first living with threat of coronavirus. I can’t see far enough into the future to know how that one is going to end, so I’m going to try doing what has worked for me in dealing with cancer. Train my eye on the beautiful and pull it in. That doesn’t mean I’m not acknowledging or caring for the things that are not beautiful; I live with a hideous disease deep inside my body and see awfulness in my community every day. It’s grim stuff and it needs fixing. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t have beauty anyway.