A Reflection from The Rev. David Hoster
Dear People of St. James’,
If you’re like me, the news these days is oppressive to the soul. Too many conspiracy theories, too much meanness and intimidation, all of it saturated in lies—where will our spirits find enough air to breathe as malign public discourse invades even our private spaces? The ease of mendacity clogs the wheels of our natural optimism.
I found guidance for these times in the writing of Zbigniew Herbert, the unofficial poet of the Polish Solidarity Movement. Herbert fought Nazis with the Polish resistance, then endured decades in opposition to the Communist regime in Poland. He has the credentials to say what he says.
Resistance, he tells us, “didn’t require great character/we had a shred of the necessary courage/but fundamentally it was a matter of taste.” Character and courage—the things you and I might think are essential—all OK enough…but fundamentally it was a matter of taste. Such is the curious wisdom from decades of experience under the worst totalitarian regimes of the last century.
Totalitarianism is ugly and thrives on ugliness. Totalitarianism triumphs by suppressing our sense of essential human beauty and replacing it with something made ugly for ugly uses. “A home-brewed Mephisto in a Lenin jacket,” Herbert writes, “sent Aurora’s grandchildren into the field/boys with potato faces/very ugly girls with red hands.” To counter Mephisto in a Lenin jacket, he tells us, we must recover Aurora’s image of those “rose-skinned” children at the dawn of their lives. We must engage the beauty of their souls.
The crucifixion tells us that ugly forces, set to crush the human spirit and separate us from God, are perennial. They may recede for a time, but they never go away. A kind of peacetime may have lulled you and me into believing that fundamental change had occurred in civil rights in our country, but Jesus’ cross tells us we should not be shocked by the resurgence of an uncivil ugliness that some knew was there all along. What we must remember, and take to heart, is beauty enough to make us weep, for instance, in the faces of the men and women marching across Pettus Bridge while instruments of ugliness, sufficient unto death, gathered against them.
“Yes, taste,” Herbert writes, “in which there are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience.” Ethics grows from our sense of soul-deep beauty, not from our fighting ugliness with its own ugly weapons. Taking to heart anger, bitterness, despair and revenge just gives us potato faces and red hands. Seeing to the heart of beauty in the crucifixion of Jesus, and in every other crucifixion, sets us free and restores our goodness.
Totalitarianism tries to trick us into surrendering our faith in the soul’s beauty. Totalitarianism tries hard to make human beauty seem powerless, vain and worthless. Strength of weaponry, the language of intimidation and the power of the lie are the ugly things that suppress people. Yet, the beauty of the human soul prevails.
Millions of people watched on television that day, and thought, How can they turn truncheons, dogs and fire hoses against people simply walking toward freedom? For the first time, black faces looked beautiful to people sunk in status quo. They saw both beauty and ugliness on their television screens, made their choice, and our country changed and moved forward. Beauty and nobility changed us. Violence and cruelty failed to sustain a dying order.
How, then, shall we make soul-deep beauty manifest today? Where will Herbert’s “fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience” lead us to bare our faces and wake up the consciences of people drummed comatose by the assault of daily news? How shall we be Isaiah’s “bruised reed that is not broken, the smoldering wick that will not snuff out,”—beautiful words that still move us across three thousand years of unremitting, yet never fully dominant, horror.
Taste and beauty—not strength and domination—that’s who God created us to be. Reach deep, revive your soul, and show Aurora’s ”rose-skinned” face to the world.
The Rev. David Hoster
