Beauty as Well as Bread
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For many years, I spent most Monday evenings in the basement of All Souls Church in New York City, where their fellowship hall, nicknamed “Friendship Hall,” was transformed into a dining room for over 300 guests.
Some of the guests were experiencing homelessness or had marginal housing. Some were couch surfing with friends or family or living in shelters, with little privacy, harshly regimented schedules and constant threats of violence or theft. These guests were largely invisible to most members of the wealthy Upper East Side congregation, though some of them lived side-by-side in crowded, rent controlled apartments, or close by in single room occupancies.
All Souls was famous for having the best soup kitchen in town. I once got in a cab across town and started chatting about where I worked, only to have the driver share rave reviews about the chicken and the jazz pianist. This positive reputation wasn’t based only on the abundant, freshly prepared food and drink, but also in the radical hospitality that the volunteers, many from the congregation, provided.
At the end of every Monday night, guests spilled out into the All Souls courtyard to smoke and chat. Many lingered in the garden as long as they could. Others went their separate ways and began to blend back into the city landscape once again.
I always took the subway home. On the platform, I started to recognize our guests. I remember the first time I noticed a gentleman who had recently dined at the church. He was dressed in tattered clothes and set himself apart from the crowd. What first caught my eye was a yellow plastic bag bulging with the take-out containers provided for leftovers that each guest was offered.
What I noticed next was a bouquet of flowers, stems carefully wrapped in another plastic bag, the same kind that held the take-out containers. Not just any flowers, but unmistakably the church chancel dedication flowers, beautifully varied in color and texture and arranged by a loving hand and careful eye.
I remembered that on Monday afternoons, along with ensuring that each table was meticulously set, an All Souls volunteer creatively disassembled the two enormous vases of Sunday chancel flowers, rearranging them into two dozen smaller vases, one for each table.
I’m not sure why, but frankly, I was surprised. I’m not proud to say that at first a question arose in my mind, Why would a hungry homeless person want to take flowers home with him? What would he do with them?
As quickly as that thought came and went, heavily laden with my own judgments and assumptions, another feeling overtook me. Once I could set aside my class-based prejudices I was moved that the guest had taken time to wrap the flowers to enjoy and bring home. Everyone needs beauty, I said to myself. Of course, everyone deserves beauty.
Beauty makes a difference in people’s lives, if only for a few brief moments. I imagined the bouquet somehow providing a balm against the harshness of the life to which he returned. Just as the food nourished his body, the beauty of the flowers nourished his soul.
After that day, I began to see each week that many of the guests treasured the flowers as much as the food. Two young sisters delighted in taking the flowers with them at the end of the meal, quarreling over who got the prettiest ones. A woman with long beautiful hair tucked azaleas into her braid.
Each week I watched as, like clockwork, an older woman stayed until the last moments of the evening, then traveled from table to table gathering the remaining bouquets together into one large arrangement. I asked her if she liked to have the flowers in her home. “Of course, what else would I do with them?” she replied curtly in a heavy German accent. What else, indeed, but enjoy them? Why did I even need to ask why?
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
These words were written by naturalist John Muir in his 1912 book, The Yosemite. He described beauty as a “hunger” shared by every person, from wealth or poverty.
Muir was right. Beauty is a fundamental human need. We seek out beauty, delight in beauty and need to create it in our lives. I know this is true in my own life. I come from a long line of gardeners, farmers and florists. Every spring in New York City, I would haul pots of flowers and herbs and vegetable starts up three flights of stairs to my tiny fire escape to make a garden. I rushed to the farmers market every Saturday to buy fresh flowers, and delighted in my walks to the Botanic Gardens. Beauty is not a luxury, but a necessity.
I think this is what Unitarian minister Norbert Čapek was thinking about when he created the flower communion nearly a hundred years ago in Prague. Most of his members had come from the Roman Catholic Church, and while they were eager for a new religious community, they did not feel comfortable with the bread and wine of the Catholic communion ritual. Still, Čapek felt that the bread and wine ritual bonded members to their faith and to each other.
In a time not unlike today, with extremism and authoritarianism on the rise, he looked for a substitute symbol in the peace of the pastoral countryside, undisrupted by human conflict. No wars were fought in the name of the flower, no hatred or oppression, no bigotry or harshness. To Čapek, flowers represented pure, boundless innocence, and the temporary but vivid pleasure of color and fragrance.
Čapek felt that beautiful flowers would challenge his members to discover the same sense of beauty in each other, even—and especially—because of their differences. While it is easy to see beauty in a flower, seeing the beauty of another person is more difficult. And yet that is what our task is as a religious community—to bring out one another’s beauty and to celebrate it.
Von Ogden Vogt, 20th century Unitarian theologian, knew this well—he called beauty one of “three liberal religious absolutes, alongside truth and goodness.” Truth begets beauty, which begets goodness, and vice versa. He wrote:
Anything beautiful is an end product, and the joy we have of it an end in itself. But our satisfaction is not enough. The sense of beauty calls us to look and see the object in itself. It says, “See this flower…, see this person, they are beautiful in themselves.” It says, “See this person—not see this voter, this customer, this employer, this saleslady—but rather, see this person, as [they are] is in and for [themselves].”
All those Monday nights spent at the All Souls soup kitchen taught me this well. As we chatted about the flowers, I began to really see the beauty of the guests as they were nourished in body and soul. Our common humanity eclipsed the separateness of our lives.
Our charge is not only to see beauty in the flowers, but also to see beauty in one another—friend, family and comrade, sometimes obscured by the common rhythms of our day-to-day. The thing about beauty is that it is meant to be shared. I think about our members who gather up the beauty of their yards every week to create flower arrangements for church every Sunday, or those whose ministry is to make incredible bouquets, and then give them away only for the pleasure and delight it brings others.
Beauty is not meant to be kept to ourselves. We must take the beauty of our beloved community out into the world to share it with others who so badly need deep and soulful nourishment. We must take it to the polls as we exercise our role as citizens advocating for a return to civility and politics of human rights and human dignity. We must take it out into the sanctuaries of nature as we celebrate and revel in the brief but bountiful blossoming
of summer.
- Beauty as Well as Bread - June 1, 2018
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