Journal of Sacred Work

To be separated from beauty to is lose touch with our humanity. 
To know beauty is to know pain.
To know neither is to linger in the flat half-light of indifference.
– Erie Chapman

   For a few moments, leave your current reality and enter the mystical world of the Navajo. Among the most moving of the many fine Navajo traditions is a special ritual called the Blessing Way. A person who is sick or deeply unhappy is thought to have lost their sense of beauty. The goal of the ceremony is to restore this gift to the individual and thus to return them to life’s balance. Accordingly, the chanting ceremony involves very beautiful things including plants, songs and paintings.
   To associate dis-ease with a loss of beauty is one of the most powerful understandings of the human conditions I have ever encountered. It reinforces the fact that we can each be physically well but not healed and the parallel truth that we can be physically injured, but spiritually well. The Navajo understand the role of beauty in all of this. Do the rest of us?…

   It is not enough to introduce physical beauty into our lives. For beauty to work her magic on us, we must also be open to contemplating the gift – to savoring the color of the sky (whatever it might be) – to allowing music to penetrate the skin of our souls. This requires us to slow our pace. That is why the Blessing Way ceremony may last for several nights.
   Today, I only ask that you take a short time to cultivate the beauty around you. And as you make this effort, I hope it may help you to begin to experience beauty all day long – in the faces of your co-workers, in the way light crosses the floor below a window, in the sound of another’s voice.

   To experience the beauty of a Rembrandt (1606-1669), we need to do more than collect information about the subject of one of his paintings. If you click on this image, you will discover a painting called "The Philosopher in Meditation." But you will also experience, if you are present to the painting, a circular-staired room lit only by windowlight. You will have the chance to engage with a centuries old image.
   We need to slow our pace long enough to absorb the way the artist uses light – to accept his invitation to enter the painting with him. To live in a 17th century room for a few moments of our lives – to touch the edge of Rembrandt’s genius.
   When I first heard rap music, it was so foreign to my ears that I blocked whatever beauty it might have for me. In order for me to recognize its gifts, I needed to let go of my fixed notion that only classical European music represented the zenith of sound’s expression and everything else was not worth my attention.
   What the Navajo’s Blessing Way seeks to do is to reawaken our appreciation of beauty wherever it
may appear – to know that in loving contemplation, we can experience the best images life has to offer.
   Caregivers often work in a world of cold flourscent lights, overhead paging, and floods of paper work. In an effort to shield themselves from the suffering around them, some may unwittingly cut themselves off from the elegant light and sounds around them.
   My obsession with photography has helped me to isolate elements of beauty within my own field of vision – the soft wrinkles in the sleeve of a shirt, the slant of light on someone’s hair, the texture of my own fingers on the keyboard of my computer. We can live our whole lives missing these elements of beauty unless we pause, reflect, and allow our scarred hearts to heal in the beauty that is always around us. This is the wisdom of the Blessing Way and it is something we can choose to integrate into our own life experience.
   A focus on poetry has enabled me to appreciate the remarkable way that poets use language. Consider the image of the human heart. In hospitals, we check the pattern of her beats, calibrate how these beats appear in the wave patterns of an EKG, saw open a patient’s chest to repair a heart’s dysfunction.
   How does a poet consider the human heart?
   Here is a poem by Campbell McGrath that appeared recently in The New Yorker. If you choose to read it, do so at a slow pace. Reflect on how he surprises you with his opening lines. Consider the startling way he describes something familiar to us in a way so powerful that a true reading of this poem may change your view of the world.

  The Human Heart

We construct it from tin and ambergris and clay,
   ochre, graph paper, a funnel
   of ghosts, whirlpool
in a downspout full of midsummer rain.

It is, for all its freedom and obstinance,
   an artifact of human agency
   in its maverick intricacy,
its chaos reflected in earthly circumstance,

its appetites mirrored by a hungry world
   like the lights of the casino
   in the cayote’s eye. Old
as the odor of almonds in the hills around Solano,

filigreed and chancelled with flavor of blood oranges,
   fashioned from moonlight,
   yarn, nacre, cordite,
shaped and assembled valve by valve, flange by flange,

and finished with the carnal fire of interstellar dust.
   We build the human heart
   and lock it in its chest
and hope that what we have made can save us.

   Of all the arresting images in this astonishing poem, I lift out only two to illustrate the power and pain of beauty and the importance of ceremonies like the Blessing Way. The first is McGrath’s phrase, the lights of the casino in the cayote’s eye.
   To be able to conjure an analogy so searing is to be in touch with beauty itself. Imagine a coyote as an image of our own loneliness. Imagine him roving the outskirts of a Nevada city in a moonless night, the animal amazement of bright light reflected in the eyes of his loneliness. Are we not this coyote, starring at the bright lights of the world with a cetain amazement and a profound loneliness?
   The second image I offer from this poem is it’s defining closing stanza.
   We build the human heart
   and lock it in its chest
and hope that what we have made can save us.
   Can what we have built in our own hearts save us? Can we find the courage to reach beyond the lights of the world to grasp the hand of love?
   The quality of our life depends upon our ability to reach beyond the nature of ourselves to touch the hem of God. When we do so (or when we at least strive to do so) we have opened the edge of our own souls. We have entered the living water of Love’s grace. And we have received the gift the Navajo – and life itself – seek to offer. We have been crowned with the grace of the Blessing Way.

-Erie Chapman