Beauty

If you find a beetle in the bathtub, maybe you grab a couple of squares of toilet paper and remove it to the trashcan.  Or maybe you gently enclose it in your hands and take it outside and release it.  But do you take the time to marvel at the rainbow sheen of its pronutum?  Probably not.  

On the way to school, amidst the traffic and the complaining of the children in the car, do you notice the bougainvillea dripping with fuchsia blossoms?  

On your morning walk, or your drive to the gym, are you absorbed in the motivational music you are listening to or the page turner audio book you’ve got queued up?  Do you notice the colors of dawn and the cloud formations gracing the sky?  

Slowing down and stepping back to consider the environment of the Earth makes it clear that the intention behind our blue marble planet is more than functional.  Yes, the planet is an imaginative design of interdependent parts providing living conditions for so many species.  But there is more than systemic interdependence to the web of life and the planet that sustains it.  

We must also acknowledge that a significant characteristic of the planet is pure and simply beauty.  Beauty that is unnecessary to actual function.  But that exists nonetheless.  Maybe a message here is that we need beauty.  We are designed to appreciate beauty.  The beauty around us is for our benefit.  It meets a need within us that perhaps we did not even know about.  Perhaps all of this beauty is gifted to us out of love.  And for no other functional reason.

One of the astronauts in Samantha Harvey’s novel, Orbital, is Nell.  She is from the UK and has dreamed of going into space since childhood.  She has married a man who is a farmer.  Attached to the land of earth.  They exchange pictures every day – she from space, he from Earth.  Harvey shares the husband’s thoughts about going into space:  “Her husband says that Africa from space looks like a late Turner; those near-formless landscapes of thick impasto shot with light.  He’d told her once that if he were ever to be where she is, he’d spend his whole time in tears, helpless in the face of the earth’s bare beauty.”  [p. 125]

Here we are, on Earth everyday, intimately exposed to the beauty of the earth.  But do we see it?  Do we marvel at it?  Does it bring us to tears?  Maybe you could pay attention to the beauty you are being given today.  

Prayer:  For the beauty of the earth, for the splendor of. the skies,

    For the love which from our birth, over and around us lies,

    God of all, to you we raise, this our hymn of grateful praise.    

  For the wonder of each hour of the day and of the night,

          Hill and vale, and tree and flower, sun and moon, and stars of light,

  God of all, to you we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.  

[Words of the hymn For the Beauty of the Earth by Folliott S. Pierpoint, 1864.]

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Devotion prepared by Rev. Kim P. Wells, pastor of Lakewood United Church of Christ in St. Petersburg, FL

The devotions this Lenten season will be based on the novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey.  Orbital won the Booker Prize in 2024.  It is a beautifully written story about the experience of a group of people orbiting the Earth in a spaceship.  They see 16 sunrises and sunsets in a 24 hour period.  The book is a reflection on the experience of living together and appreciating planet Earth in a new way.