Over the past several years we have encouraged church boards to ‘dig deeper wells’ of meaning and mutual understanding that can nurture their leadership in the midst of complexity and ambiguity. And then this week, author Seth Godin gave some nicely related advice: “Dig your well before you are thirsty.”
We have talked about digging your board’s well as you anticipate thirst for clarity, mission, connection, depth, strategic thinking, and service. In this Easter season, how about the thirst for beauty? How does your church board dig a well to quench your thirst for beauty, and what does that have to do with your ministry? Beauty may not be on your board’s ready-to-go list of priorities, but perhaps in this time we should all reconsider the power of beauty to quench a deep thirst in our communal life and in our own souls.
Pope Francis spoke often of the need for beauty. Three years ago, addressing a French group dedicated to supporting artists, he said:
Beauty can touch in everyone what is universal – especially the thirst for God – crossing the limits of language and culture … In the difficult current context that the world is experiencing, in which sadness and distress sometimes seem to have the upper hand, your mission is more necessary than ever, because beauty is always a source of joy, putting us in touch with divine goodness … Contact with beauty lifts us up, always, beauty makes us look beyond. By inspiring and sustaining faith, it is a way to go to the Lord.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spends precious little time on operational suggestions, doctrinal questions and answers, or cut and dried measures of ministry vitality. What Jesus invites us to do, instead, is to look at the lilies of the field. We doubt if there is any church board that has a “committee on beauty.” But given the state of the world right now, we might ask, why not?
In his poem “White Peonies,” American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts describes an encounter with flowers, an encounter that seems to do exactly what Pope Francis was talking about. It feeds the poet’s longing, turns his sadness into beauty, and calls forth a kind of prayer.
White Peonies
by Reginald Dwayne Betts
This is how it happens, one morning
The ground is only the ground, & then
Green shoots through the rich brown loam.
I learned the word loam when I was starving
For something: fools would call it love,
& I would say it was a time machine, longing
For some days, months, years, when the sorrows
Didn’t bloom like this thing from the ground
That I can barely name. Tell me how these
Peonies have migrated from Asia to my garden,
Have found their way into my line of vision
Despite prison & all the suffering I don’t speak.
It all happens so sudden is what I mean to say,
When sadness becomes a beauty before your
Eyes so startling you ask friends what to name
The flower before you. I admit, I’ve pretended
To be g-d. To give a name to this thing that gives
Me joy. I called it Sunday, & then called it
After my firstborn. Have you ever been so rattled
By the unexpected that you wanted someone’s
Blessing to name the thing? The peonies are so
Lovely they frighten me. They grow on thin stems
Longer than my arms with blooms heavier
Than the stalks. But isn’t it always so? The beauty
Of the world so hefty we fear the world
Cannot stand it? & yet, why would we not want
To pray when we notice? Why do we forget that
Naming is the first kind of prayer, even as the white
Flowers turn into scented oil against my skin.
When was the last time you encountered something beautiful? What was it? What did you feel in response?
How, according to Pope Francis, is beauty “a way to the Lord?”
What lines stand out to you in Betts’ poem?
What happens in his encounter with the white peonies?
What does Betts mean when he says that “naming is the first kind of prayer?” (Why do we forget that?)
When was the last time your church board drank in beauty? How did it change your work?
What could you do together, as a church board, to dig a well to quench your thirst for beauty . . before you get thirsty?
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