THOUGHTS ON BEAUTY
In the story of Rapunzel, we are given a portrait of the young woman, taken to an inaccessible tower. Alone there, she sings out of her loneliness. The beauty of her singing rings out through the forest and reaches and attracts a young prince. The image suggests that in solitude, even if lonely, a person is able to return to the core of themselves. That core is beautiful, illustrated by the beauty of her voice.

The beauty of the song echoes the beauty of her soul, heart, or spirit. It is this beauty that can also touch the heart of another, and evoke a response from that place in us that has never been wounded, as Meister Eckhart has written. John Keats concludes his poem, Ode to a Grecian Urn, with the words, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

What seems to be affirmed in these words is the beauty of music, as well as that of all the arts, and also of nature. These in turn are a reflection of the beauty of the human heart. More than that, they are an avenue to the heart of a person. If we are open, beauty can reach beyond all our defenses and wounds to the beauty of the person hidden or hiding behind them. It is a way of saying that our identity is in our sacred beauty, not in our wounds.

Yet in the story of Rapunzel, it is only after he passes through pain, loss, and struggle, that the young man is able to come to see truly and to be healed. In the story of Sleeping Beauty, the young man must also pass through a hedge of thorns at the right time and with the right motives, not in a grasping or aggressive way. His response is evoked by someone who is sleeping. It is called forth, it seems, by who someone is, not by what they have or do. The beauty that is in each of us, and by which call forth the beauty in one another, is deeper than, yet may be hidden behind the thorns of hurt, fear, or hostility.

In another poem, Ode to a Nightingale, Keats appears to contrast the beauty of the bird’s song with the awareness of the brevity of life. His poem raises a perennial question: Does the reality of death take a way the meaning of life?

Susan Cain offers a response in a thoughtful book, Bitter-Sweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. “Bittersweet is about the recognition of the both/and of life–that light and dark, birth and death, bitter and sweet, are forever paired. We need both to accept that reality and also in some way transcend it. This is our inmost longing which can be seen as a longing for home. …We need to transform the sorrows of life into something that nourishes the soul, otherwise we will inflict them on others. She concludes: “This idea–of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love–is the heart of this book.”

She refers to the music of Leonard Cohen as an example. Two lines of his song, Anthem, come to mind: “There is a crack, a crack in everything./ That’s how the light gets in.” He also sings of a “cold and lonely hallelujah.” A black spiritual echoes the same words: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Glory, Hallelujah.” The thought here is that light can emerge from darkness, joy can flow from sorrow. As Viktor Frankl maintained, our life can be meaningful, no matter what the circumstances.

Cain concludes: “We’re drawn to the sublime domains, like music, art, and medicine, not only because they’re beautiful and healing, but also because they’re a manifestation of love, or divinity, or whatever you want to call it. … These are just manifestations of the perfect and beautiful world, of the people we long to be with, the place we want to be. … We’ve come into this world with a sense of exile from our true home, that we feel the pain of separation from the state in which we loved and were loved beyond measure, and that the sweet pain of longing helps us return there, We crave beauty because it reminds us of that home, it calls us to that journey.”

Perhaps, as John Keats understood, the fundamental and deepest truth about life is beauty. It is the beauty of the universe that shines through in the beauty of a sunset. It is the beauty of a song or a painting. It is the beauty of the light that shines through in the crack in everything. It is the beauty of a sleeping child. It is the beauty of a person that ever remains, however obscured by hurt or fear or hostility. It is the beauty of the place in each of us that has never been wounded. It is the beauty of home when we unveil it within ourselves or with another.

Religious Studies scholar, Frederick Streng, has written that beauty is the perfect expression of what is, and that the various forms of art reveal the most profound dimension of existence. “At the heart of artistic effort,” he says, “is the concern to expose and express what it means to be human at its most profound level.” Group of Seven painter, Lawren Harris, observes in a similar vein: “I try to get to the summit of my soul, and paint from there, there where the universe sings.”

May each of you find your way into your own heart and discover its beauty. May you also be given entry into the heart of another, and even the heart of the universe, and be gratefully overwhelmed with its beauty.”
Norman King, January 31, 2025

When we observe infants and small children, we may notice their efforts to learn to crawl, to walk to talk, to learn. They exhibit a tremendous drive, however unconsciously, to grow and develop in all these ways. We may also notice how they respond to smiles, to affection, to genuine caring, and how they shy away from coldness, indifference, and hostility.

Recently, we spoke of loneliness and solitude. On the one hand, loneliness involves a sense of disconnection and not belonging. On the other hand, creative solitude is the experience of being quietly at home with ourselves in a safe and silence space. In the beginnings of solitude, there may be a sense of uneasiness. Gordon Cosby has expressed it well, in a manner akin to that of Henri Nouwen. “Silence,” he writes, “will put us in touch with yearnings, anxieties, pain, despair, envy, competition, and a host of other feelings that need to be put into words if we are to move toward a place of centeredness and come into possession of our lives. The fact is that most of us have an incredible amount of unfaced suffering in our histories that has to be looked at and worked through.”

Dag Hammarskjold has written strikingly of this experience of silence in solitude in his journal, Markings. “The longest journey is the journey inwards; of one who has chosen their destiny, who has started upon the quest for the source of their being.”

In this journey within solitude, we may ask what lies beneath the array of feelings, the mindsets, the presuppositions, all the cultural baggage that has been imposed by our background, our society, our culture. The above example of the child suggests that it is perhaps a profound longing from our inmost core. The experience of the child may also reveal the nature of this longing. It appears to be a longing for life itself, for its unfolding in growth; a longing for understanding and meaning; a longing for love. Perhaps it may be summed up as a longing for home, a longing to be at home to ourselves, which in turn makes possible being at home to one another..

Keeping busy, running to externals, losing ourselves in distractions, is a way of running from ourselves, of being, so to speak, homeless. It may well be rooted in fear, a fear that to journey within may uncover only emptiness. Yet, if we have a sacred worth, we need not fear who we are, or look to an outside authority to rescue us from ourselves, or tell us what to do. Rather we may gradually make the discovery that who we are at our inmost core is of worth and trustworthy. This uncovering may require the clearing away of the debris of imposed and inauthentic images and scripts and worldviews.

This understanding is, I believe, the core of the Narcissus story, It is the challenge to discover an image of ourselves as lovable. It seems also to be the heart of the story of the Prodigal Son. After many wrong turns, he discovers a sacredness within himself, one that is deeper and remains despite any brokenness. As Meister Eckhardt puts it:”There is a place is us that has never been wounded.”

We may then look to others, including literature, music, and the other arts, not to tell us what to do, but to help us discover, or rather uncover, and name who we are. As we noted, there is an immense longing within us: for awareness, love, meaning, beauty, and so much else. It may also be described as a longing for home: a longing to be present to who we truly are and to one another as we all truly are.

Our very sacredness can instill in us the hope that this longing is not in vain, that our lives do have a lasting meaning, a lasting worth and purpose. In this sense that meaning is to struggle gradually to move beyond fear to love, beyond despair to hope, beyond resentment to gratitude. In this process, we are especially assisted by those who genuinely care.

May you come to find a home within yourselves, and so also, become a home to one another.
Norman King, August 29, 2024.

Two striking issues in our time are a pervasive loneliness and an absence of solitude. Both of these tend to undermine our sense of worth. Both are also made worse by the excessive even addictive use of cell phones. Two personal experiences illustrate the difference between a painful loneliness and a more tranquil solitude. I recall going to conferences in an unfamiliar city and hotel. Sitting in that hotel room, empty of any connections or warmth, felt very lonely. On other occasions, I would find myself in my own home, when others who lived there and with whom my life was bound up, were absent. It was an enjoyable time alone, not just as a welcome relief, but because there was an atmosphere of familiarity, warmth and presence.

As an example of loneliness, there comes to mind an all too common situation. A while ago, I saw four people in a restaurant, apparently two parents and their teenage children. All were on their cell phones and no one was looking at or speaking to anyone else at the table. They are texting someone else. It has been reported that young people today are lonelier than ever before. One element here is that in cell phone contact, what is missing is tangible physical presence. In case of texting, contact by sight or voice or body language is absent–everything that gives colour and nuance. It is these forms of tangible presence elements alleviate unnecessary loneliness

Certainly, there is an inevitable loneliness that is part of the human condition. If lived with recognition and acceptance, this inescapable loneliness can lead to greater awareness, sensitivity, and compassion. Yet there is also a debilitating loneliness that comes from isolation, from lack of human presence, from lack of tangible human caring, given and received. Even small gestures of kindness to a teller in a bank, a cashier in a supermarket, or a stranger met casually, can alleviate that kind of loneliness. Even more important is tangible contact with someone close. Another key factor is intimate conversation in which we allow entrance to our vulnerability. In every case the overcoming of escapable loneliness in ourselves and others calls for tangible caring presence.

At the same time, if we are always on our phones visibly, our attention is always from outside in. We are not present to ourselves, we are not at home to ourselves. We are like absentee landlords in our own mind and heart. We are without the solitude that is necessary for wholeness, creativity, and meaningful relationships. Being at home to ourselves, and feeling at home with ourselves, and every dimension of ourselves is one approach to solitude.

It is a matter of time spent quietly by ourselves, in which we allow what is within to rise to the surface of our awareness. If we do so, we may notice the whole range of feelings that are present. While at first this may occasion uneasiness within us, if we attend to these feelings without judgment and with compassion, several things may arise. We may find that beneath our fear or hostility may lie a longing for understanding, love and meaning, and a trust that our hope is not n vain.

Henri Nouwen has described this experience quite eloquently. “To be calm and quiet all by yourself is hardly the same as sleeping. In fact, it means being fully awake and following with close attention every move going on inside you. …Perhaps there will be much fear and uncertainty when we first come upon this unfamiliar terrain, but slowly and surely we begin to see developing an order and a familiarity which summon our longing to stay home.

“With this new confidence, we recapture our own life afresh from within. Along with this new knowledge of our ‘inner space’ where feelings of love and hate, tenderness and pain, forgiveness and greed are separated, strengthened or reformed, there emerges the mastery of the gentle hand. . .whereby persons once again become master over their own house. …“If we do not shun silence, all this is possible. But it is not easy. Noise from the outside keeps demanding our attention and restlessness from within keeps stirring up our anxiety. … whenever you do come upon this silence, it seems as though you have received a gift, one which is promising in the true sense of the word. The promise of this silence is that new life can be born. It is this silence which is the silence of peace and prayer. . . . In this silence, you lose the feeling of being compulsive and you find yourself a person who can be himself along with other things and other people. . . . In this silence, the false pretences fade away, and you learn to see your life in its proper perspective.”

Once again, it is the uncovering of our own worth, and that of all else, as the deepest reality. This conviction, in turn, makes it possible the ability to live gradually into understanding, compassion, and justice.

Norman King., August 12, 2024

The core conviction to which I return again and again is the underlying, unerasable sacred worth or value of the person. This worth remains, though tragically we and others fail to see it in ourselves or one another. We then can readily spend our lives in a futile effort to prove a worth we don’t believe, or lash out angrily at others and a world because we don’t feel that worth.

From an early age, others can have a powerful impact, both for good or ill, on our sense of self. Two quotations express this truth profoundly. The first I thought initially was from Rumi, but, while it is in his spirit, it comes from Sarah Durham Wilson. I recently shared it on Facebook.“The way you alchemize a soulless world into a sacred world is by treating everyone as if they are sacred, until the sacred in them remembers.” The other quotation is from a 20th century psychologist. “We are not who we think we are. We are not who others think we are. We are who we think others think we are.”

The second reflects the tendency in our society to be concerned with what we believe others think of us. I once came across a humourous comment that we would worry much less about what people thought of us if we realized how seldom they did. In a book, The Five Top Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware writes that the first regret is this: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

Gabor Maté, a favourite author, comments that to speak of courage in this situation is to pass a moral judgment on ourselves. It may well be the case, however, that we were programmed as children to sacrifice our authenticity for the sake of acceptance. At the time, this action felt necessary for our survival. Yet Maté affirms that by compassionate–and not judgmental–self-inquiry, we may retrieve and learn to live more and more from our authentic self.

The core of that authentic self is, I believe, our sacred worth. It is the foundation that cannot be replaced. It is the underlying truth that who we are is enough. Our sacred worth precedes and does not depend on anything we do, and it can never be lost by anything we do or fail to do. Our sacred worth can only be lost sight of, or lost at the deep feeling level, and then it can be betrayed in self and others. As Gregory Baum once wrote, most of the terrible things people do is not because they love themselves too much, but because, at a deeper level, they do not love themselves at all. That is to say, they do not have an underlying sense of self-worth.

Much of my own thought and teaching and writing was a wrestling with a sense of lack of worth, of inadequacy, of not only not doing enough, but not being enough. As Maté has said, it is correlative with a sense of not being lovable or worthy of love. That is also why Thomas Moore’s interpretation of the Narcissus myth seems so powerful. He has written that the core of the story is this: unless a person uncovers an image of themselves as loveable–a death and rebirth experience–they will not be really open to give or receive love.

One line in the famous writing called “Desiderata,” I find very striking. “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” Scientist, Brian Swimme, adds that we are, literally, stardust. All the elements in our physical makeup do indeed come from the stars. As I’ve also noted before, by the very fact that we are breathing, we are part of and so belong in the whole ecosystem of earth, which, in turn, is part of the universe.

As I have mentioned so often, the pathways to uncovering our sacred self are solitude in silence, friendship and intimate conversation, and some form, however simple, of social contribution, from small kindnesses to participation in a social justice movement. These, of course require further elaboration, which we may elaborate in future reflections.

Norman King, July 29, 2024.

Lately, I have been thinking of gratitude and how important it is. Two memories come to mind immediately. One is a comment a late friend made reflecting with a sense of humour on his somewhat rebellious childhood. He said: “I’m grateful that my parents let me live.”

The other recollection was a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy is complaining to her younger brother Linus that her life is a drag, that she doesn’t get the breaks other people do, that nothing goes right for her. Linus suggests that, at times like this, she should count her blessings. That sets Lucy off on another rant and she finally asks him to name one blessing she has. To which he replies: “Well, for one thing, you have a little brother who loves you.” She then goes wailing into his arms, as he comments shyly aside: “Every now and then I say the right thing.”

In both these instances, the gentle humour brings home the source of gratitude. It is both the fundamental reality of being alive and the caring that makes life worthwhile. I think too that humour that is gentle and not derisive is an expression of hope. To see the humour in something can for example immediately dissipate a mounting anger. I recall once, at a family dinner that was becoming tense, my younger brother, Mike, spoke out with the words: “May I play through?” The tension was immediately dissolved by laughter.

The ancient practice of grace before meals is an expression of gratitude for the food that keeps us alive. It is also gratefulness for the sharing of food with those who share our lives. This again is the caring that gives meaning to our lives. The very word “grace” means gratitude, thankfulness.

Twentieth century author, G. K. Chesterton, writes with thoughtful humour about gratitude “The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful when Santa Claus put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?”

What emerges from his words is that gratitude implies a recognition of gift, and that the basic gift is life itself. Inseparably, it is recognition of the meaningfulness of that gift, which in turn is bound up with our connection with one an other. Chesterton further stresses that gratitude is the source of happiness. If we do not experience our life, our very self, as a gift, but as an accident or even a burden, we tend toward resentment, which readily flows into hostility and even destructive behaviour. Gratitude even further implies that the gift of life is a valuable gift; that we are each a being of sacred worth.

If we reflect on the billions of years of the unfolding of the universe, and the stunning reality, as scientist Brian Swimme brings out, that the stars are our ancestors, we may experience a sense of wonder and awe that we are part of an immense process, and one in which everything is connected.

Yet this awareness and conviction can be readily challenged and is quite precarious. The experience of limitations, faults, and even betrayals, in ourselves and others, can obscure our sense of underlying worth. The problems of society and the reality of climate change can also be very threatening. Having gentle time being with ourselves and being with others–solitude and friendship–are essential to uncovering our intrinsic sacred worth. Concern for ourselves and those nearest to us can also push us toward active concern for our world and our planet.

Gratefulness does not demand an unreal perfection or completeness. This awareness is expressed in the novel by Chaim Potok. A son tells his father that he is troubled by the realization of death. The father replies that something does not have to be forever to be good; it can be precious precisely because it is not forever.

Fragments of the thought of Plato and T. S. Eliot come to mind. Plato spoke of understanding as remembering. I think it can mean that when we come to awareness of basic truths about life–including its gift character–it is like uncovering something we already somehow knew implicitly. And remembering is perhaps less about past facts than coming home to who we truly are, especially our sacred worth. I have long appreciated as well the words of poet, T. S. Eliot. ““We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.

Grateful recognition of the simple things in life–a hot coffee or tea, a warm sun, the smile of a friend, a courtesy from a stranger, a kind word given or received, a loving or humourous memory, a piece of beautiful music, the song of a bird or the chirping of a cricket–all these can bring a quiet joy to our heart, an implicit gratitude for our life and for our home in this universe. It we are open, an underlying gratitude can ease our burdens, alleviate our self judgment, and our judgment of others, and flow into a greater openness of heart, a generosity of spirit, and a more active concern for others and our world.

May you come to experience more fully the sacredness of each of us and the preciousness of the gift of life. And may you respond more fully to the challenge is to care gently for its unfolding within and around you.

Norman King, July 11, 2024

Norman King, June 19, 2023

Last week, I spoke of our inner core, our heart, not only as our sacred centre, but also as a place of longing, a longing for beauty and love, for wisdom and compassion. We tune into this longing especially in times of silence, but also in listening to music as well as stories and other forms of art.

Many years ago, Jane Ripley and I published a book of reflective verse, prefaced with brief introductory reflections. One of these was on longing.
“Longing is the voice of love in its aching for completeness and wholeness.. Longing is the voice of our heart in its recognition that we are ever on a journey, ever pilgrims, whose words, actions, and lives, never fully embody who we long to be. Longing is the voice of our heart in its recognition that, not without a tinge of anxiety, that we wish to, yet never quite share who we are with another.

Yet, longing is not a restless dissatisfaction nor a negative judgement passed on self and others. Rather, longing is a gentle openness to embrace and share our lives as they have been and are. Longing is a gentle openness to grow beyond where we are now, to move with another on our journey, as we trust the unfolding process of life, within us, between us, and beyond us.”

Gratitude for self, one another, and for life itself, is a way to relieve some of the troubling restlessness in our longing. I recently started reading a book of the Essential Spiritual Writings of Ron Rolheiser. He writes “Gratitude is the ultimate virtue, undergirding everything else, even love. … We are mature to the degree that we are grateful.”

If we combine gratitude with longing, perhaps we may encounter an underlying sense of our own sacred worth as foundational. To have a sense that we are of value, and to come to recognize that value at a gut level, evokes a sense of gratitude. If our life and who we are is a worthwhile gift, then we may experience ourselves and our lives with gratefulness. To do so leads us also to experience the life of others and their very selves as having a sacred worth.

Yet there is at the same time a real challenge. The experience of limitations, faults, and even betrayals, in ourselves and others, can obscure that underlying worth. It can evoke resentment. It can push us to feel our lives more as a burden than a gift. It may lead us to try to pretend to be or become other than who we are. We may take on a script that is other than our own. There is also the social script with its pressure to see our worth in what we do or what we have rather than who we are. If our worth depends on doing and having, it is at best precarious and uncertain.

Having gentle time being with ourselves and being with others is essential to uncovering our underlying sacred worth. The words “being with” are identical to the word “presence” in its Latin source. It is a question of being at home to ourselves, rather than an absentee landlord in our own lives.

Gratefulness does not demand an unreal perfection or completeness. This awareness is expressed in the novel by Chaim Potok. A son tells his father that he is troubled by the realization of death. The father replies that something does not have to be forever to be good; it can be precious precisely because it is not forever.

Gratefulness may ease the restlessness of our longing, so our longing may then be felt as the unfolding of our own sacred worth and that of others, and the attempt to live out that worth. It involves the gradual realization that the love which we long to receive and give is already present in some way.

Fragments of the thought of Plato and T. S. Eliot come to mind. Plato spoke of knowledge as remembering. I think that this can mean that when we come to awareness of basic truths about life, it is like an uncovering of something we already somehow knew implicitly. And remembering is perhaps less about past facts than coming home to who we truly are. I have long appreciated as well the words of poet, T. S. Eliot. ““We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.”

May you come to experience that what you long for may already be present within you, and that a challenge is to care gently for its unfolding within and around you.

Norman King, June 5, 2023