It’s a hard life we lead, no one able to stand apart from or rise above the suffering that snags us—or at least snips at our heels—in one way or other at every turn. That said, beauty exists, too, as valid and true and eternal as the suffering we endure. So at the considerable risk of editing the Buddha, I am proposing a little add-on to the First Noble Truth—“Life is suffering”—that would go something like: “Life is suffering—and beauty.” (Indeed, we can even put the two together in noting that many people suffer intensely for beauty. Another name for these people: “artists.”)
True, the capacity to appreciate beauty can be suppressed or waylaid when one is in the throes of intense physical pain or depression, but the beautiful things of the world, their sense of sacramentality we discussed here several weeks ago, also act as a balm, a healing agent, a gateway to the holy. Beauty never negates suffering, but it can often soothe and balance it in a classic yin-yang that holds all the things of this world—darkness, alienation and despair, light, communion and love—close to its bosom.
And so to the beautiful thing in front of us this day: a song of sanctity by the folk singer-songwriter Peter Mayer. In “Holy Now,” Mayer takes us from his Catholic boyhood and the priest reading the “holy word” and consecrating the “holy bread” to:
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now
If I were a scold and desiring a coffee house philosophical row, I might pursue the question of whether everything being holy effectively means that nothing in particular stands out as holy. But I am not a scold! (He states, emphatically.) (At least not today…) And the fine points of philosophical discourse pale, I firmly believe, in comparison to the elemental, rapturous beauty that comes with music as impeccably rendered as this—including the pure poetry of its lyrics.
If I may suggest a sequence of action here, click on the You Tube video first and then return to the lyrics offered below. (The clip is just under five minutes.) Music always deserves its full rendering, its full-on listen and absorption, before one attends to its constituent parts. Meanwhile, feast on this snippet of lyrical loveliness I feel compelled to help shout to the heavens:
This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
Holy Now
When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now
When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don’t happen still
But now I can’t keep track
‘Cause everything’s a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything’s a miracle
Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn’t one
When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I’m swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now
Read a questioning child’s face
And say it’s not a testament
That’d be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it’s not a sacrament
I tell you that it can’t be done
This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now
Holy Now
© Peter Mayer
www.blueboat.net
Rotating banner photos by Elizabeth Haslam, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing, see more at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Photos in text (flowers) © D.J. Ashton, all rights reserved, see more at: www.djashtonphotography.com
I read or heard it somewhere, don't know where, but it has always stuck with me: "Live your life like a prayer", and I do it now and then, however imperfectly. I'll not scold either or suggest that considering everything holy drags the sacred down to the mundane. All boats are lifted by that kind of thinking. But I will say the overuse of the word "awesome" has led to the effect that if everything is awesome, then nothing is. But I digress. In a curmudgeonly way.
There's no duality in suffering/beauty. They're just the flip side of the same coin, I reckon. And so might the Buddha. The suffering's just digging a deeper furrow from which the seeds of beauty might sprout. Nothing's original in those thoughts and I go over that well trodden ground on a regular basis. Some of it has even sunk in. And some more might still.