Texts: Isaiah 53: 1-4a; I Corinthians 1: 28
On Marigolds, Blue Eyes, and Beauty Unheeded
A book is a pathway of marigold petals. In Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, marigold petals are placed on the ground to help the departed to find their way back to the land of the living, where they provide invaluable wisdom and counsel to those still undergoing the joys and travails of life. Several of us will witness that ceremony later this week, when we return to Cuernavaca, Mexico to renew our friendship with the Benedictine Sisters, and to experience a ritual meant not for the dead, but for the living, when ancestors and spiritual guides are called back from the recesses of memory in a world renewing ceremony.
So it shall be on the Day of the Dead. But so it is in books as well. A page, a paragraph, a sentence, a story – these too are marigold petals, leading departed spirits back into our lives. What else is the Bible if not a collection of marigold petals, inviting those ancient characters to return, and to dwell among us? Is that not the meaning, at least in part, of that phrase, “Come, Holy Spirit, Come?” Are we not, when we use such words, inviting the spiritual ancestor named Jesus to be embodied among us in all that we do? The words in all of those stories return him to us, the way they do Isaiah or Jeremiah or Paul. They serve as an invitation extended to the beyond, that says: “Return to me. Shape me. Guide me.” A book is a pathway of marigold petals, returning the departed to our lives.
In honor of that impending ceremony, I’d like to follow a pathway of petals this morning, returning to our company an author of considerable wisdom that we lost earlier this year, a loss that I haven’t so far acknowledged. I’m speaking about Toni Morrison. To encounter any of her books is to open oneself to the deep, to the wild, to the sorrowful, to the merciful, to the holy. Toni Morrison is, in my estimation, the most important North American theologian of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. When I read her, I wish to fall on my knees. And so it was with sadness that I learned of her death this past August, but also immense gratitude for the gifts she bestowed upon the world.
Over the past year, I’ve read, or in some cases reread, all of her fiction. As the Spirit moves, I’ll be dedicating a sermon here or a sermon there to several of her novels, or perhaps all of them in time, for they each have powerful spiritual and theological truths to convey. But today, it’s her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, that I would have us consider, for what it teaches about the ideals of beauty that shape and sometimes deform our lives. It is, above all, a pedagogy in the realignment of beauty that Morrison delivers in The Bluest Eye.
It’s not an accident that Morrison’s novel begins and ends with marigolds. Only now, they refuse to grow and refuse to flower. Even so, the marigolds mediate between the land of the living, and that of the dead. On one side of that divide are Claudia and her sister Frieda, growing up in the early 1940’s in an unnamed town somewhere in rural America. They live in a small house with their parents, who struggle to make ends meet. Panes of glass are cracked in the windows of their house, and cold drafts work their way inside. But the girls are loved and treasured enough to survive – maybe even to thrive, even though they are poor and black in an America, a place which values neither.
On the other side of that divide is Pecola Breedlove. Her mother is a live in nanny for a white family some miles away, and is rarely home. Her father nurses his own inner wounds with alcohol, having been cruelly shamed by the society around him. Sometimes that shame erupts into violence, as it does in an episode that sends Pecola to live for a time with Claudia and Frieda. Pecola is withdrawn, but curious, gentle, but also too trusting, and thus vulnerable to the teasing or predation of others. It causes her to retreat from the world into protective fantasies, born of the images of Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, and above all, Shirley Temple that decorate the public spaces around her. Pecola wishes to be as cute, and therefore as loved, as the white children portrayed on candy wrappers and tea cups and pictures and advertisements. Above all, Pecola wishes to have blue eyes.
Except, of course, that she does not have blue eyes. Pecola’s eyes are dark and her skin is darker. That makes her situation difficult in America, but complicating it further is the information, supplied by the narrator, that Pecola conforms to no ideals of beauty whatsoever. And so Pecola Breedlove is steadily shunned, ignored, teased, and humiliated. After an episode of terrible abuse, she becomes so damaged that she is relegated to the trash heap of her town, a specter, a ghost, barely visible to those who encounter her. Still, Pecola dreams of having blue eyes, the bluest eyes, for then, she reasons, her life would possess worth.
Morrison’s novel begins and ends with marigolds that do not bloom, a symbol of Pecola’s life itself, which does not bloom. But Morrison’s string of words between those two instances of marigolds do form a pathway, delivering Pecola Breedlove to us, that we may consider the questions posed by her life. The questions are these: how do we know what is beautiful, and what is ugly? Is beauty and its absence something innate in the world, or are those judgments culturally conditioned, taught, and reinforced? When we declare something beautiful, do we not automatically devalue its opposite? What happens when our ideals of beauty are applied to bodies, and to human lives? What if you do not conform to that ideal? What happens when ideals of beauty are racially coded, where degrees of pigmentation, or the color of one’s eyes, indicate one’s worth? Finally, this: what if an important facet of being alive and aware in the world is to expose ourselves to alternative pedagogies of beauty, to train ourselves to perceive worth and value in what is too often relegated to the garbage dump? And what if there were an entirely different mode of perception awaiting us, once we had undergone that pedagogy?
Those are some of the questions raised by Toni Morrison’s art, but by The Bluest Eye in particular. I’ve mentioned already that I consider Morrison to be a theologian of the highest magnitude, and here’s why: she’s following a line of thinking, perceiving, and acting that stands at the very center of Christian theology. The Christian story has always been a matter of revaluing that which has been reviled and discarded, relegated to the garbage bin of history. Isaiah’s famous words about the suffering servant, later applied to Jesus, set the tone for everything that followed. “He hath no form nor majesty that we should look at him,” the text says. “Nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” It continues, “He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces; he was despised, and we held him of no account.”
Those words describe not only the suffering servant, and not only Jesus, but every human life deemed unworthy by the aesthetic and moral codes of the day. They describe Pecola Breedlove, and every single child, indeed, every single human life, that fails to conform to some hallowed ideal of appearance and conduct. And they reveal that in some mysterious but powerful way, God is there – especially there. That’s a hard truth, because it runs counter to most every common understanding of God, who is usually identified with whatever is powerful, or majestic, or morally pure – or conventionally beautiful. For those invested in religion as power, or majesty, purity or beauty, that news comes as a scandal. That’s exactly what Paul is acknowledging in his letter to the Corinthians, when he writes that God chose what is lowly and despised in the world to shame the wise. In the discarded body of a man crucified on a garbage heap – Golgotha was the city dump – Christians have sensed the strange and confounding presence of God there – not in the palaces, not in the courtyards, and not in the temples. Where others see trash, or ugliness, or waste, our faith tradition says to look again, for such things may have overwhelming worth and value.
That’s something that’s hard to learn, and easy to forget. That’s because many of us have been trained to regard as beautiful or praiseworthy those values, objects, musical expressions and lives that, as often as not, originated among the aristocracy or among the one percenters. Quite often, we celebrate court values as emblems of taste and refinement, rather than interrogating what our tastes and refinements conceal.
Here is an example. Several years ago, our Tree of Life delegation visited Istanbul, where we toured the Blue Mosque and the Haggia Sophia. The Blue Mosque in particular is astounding in its immensity, its grandeur, and its majesty. It is, in a word, beautiful, at least initially. I walked around it in a kind of aesthetic stupor, marveling at its power. But I was drawn up short when one of our travelers, whose ancestry is Palestinian, observed that his people supplied the slave labor that built that structure. What I had identified as beautiful, in other words, was actually an aesthetic of the palace, of sultans, of kings, and of slavers. The Blue Mosque is a magnificent structure, to be sure, and we should marvel at it. But only up to a point. As with European cathedrals or imperial courts anywhere – dare I mention an edifice like the White House, constructed by slave labor? – its aesthetic power conceals as much as it reveals. It forgets the principle found in Isaiah, the Gospels, and the Apostle Paul, where true beauty, where God, is found among the discarded of the earth, not the mighty.
Here is another example. Years ago, when I was a student there, I was showing a friend the grounds of Yale Divinity School. Those of you who have visited know, perhaps, that it’s modeled on Thomas Jefferson’s famous Lawn at the University of Virginia, which is itself modeled on Greek and Roman ideals of structure and form and beauty. The arches and columns of Yale Divinity School, like the University of Virginia, are the architectural vocabulary of power. My friend, older than me, and wiser, was unimpressed. “Wasn’t Jesus crucified by the Romans,” he wondered? “Was his life not a scandal to the Greeks?” He was noticing, in other words, a profound disconnect between the ideal of beauty celebrated on that campus and the theology it claims to represent. There too, a profound forgetfulness is enacted, where the scandal of the Christian story, and its pedagogy of alternative beauty, is replaced with a visual story of refinement and good aesthetic taste. It’s a struggle we share in the beauty of our own Meetinghouse.
We need alternative pedagogies that shake us from our aesthetic slumber. Which brings me back to Toni Morrison, and to The Bluest Eye. At the end of the novel, one of the story’s narrators, Claudia, delivers a judgment upon herself, and her town, for her complicity in Pecola Breedlove’s demise. “We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness…her simplicity decorated us, her pain made us glow with health,” Claudia says. And then she continues, using the words we spoke in our unison reading. It was all a fantasy, she says. “We were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth.” Meanwhile, Pecola Breedlove had become a ragpicker on the town garbage heap. For her, it is much, much, much, too late, Claudia concludes.
Those are damning words. They’re damning because they describe what many churches, communities, towns, and whole societies stand in danger of becoming. We would do well to memorize those words, lest we too trade our strength, freedom, compassion, goodness and intellect for the empty simulacra of such qualities.
But those words are not only damning. I believe they’re also marigold petals, inviting the discarded and the forsaken back into the world. They create a pathway that restores to life all of the Christs, all of the Pecolas, all of the lost ones relegated to the trash heap of history and culture. All of them – those racially coded as inferior, those deemed mentally or physically deficient, those too old or used up, those categorized as drains upon our economy, those deemed illegal or undocumented – they all stand upon the pile with Christ, with Pecola, and they beckon. “Do you not see our humanity,” they say? Can you not perceive that we too are God’s beloved children? Can you not learn to love what we love, celebrate what we celebrate, value what we value?” The petals bring those from the land of death closer to the land of the living, allowing us to perceive the wideness of God’s creation, and the depth of God’s embrace.
In the early pages of the novel, Claudia lies sick in bed, and in a feverish fog between sleeping and dreaming, she feels a Presence, a Someone, who might be her mother, but might just as well be God. “Love,” she says, “thick and dark as syrup, eased up into the cracked window. I could smell it, taste it, everywhere in that house,” she recounts. “It coated my chest, along with the salve…and in the night, feet padded into the room, hands repined the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn,” she says, “I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.”
Somebody with hands, who does not want a child to die. I believe in such a Presence. I believe that Presence extends itself to Claudia, but also to Pecola and all of those like her. I believe the great tragedy of the novel, and its heavy weight of judgment, consists of a failure to incarnate that Presence, to be the hands and feet that Presence, God, requires in order to exist. The Presence does extend to Pecola, it is meant for her, but it cannot reach her, for no one becomes hands and feet for her. No one can see past the veil of beauty, or its supposed absence, to perceive the treasure that is her life.
That’s where you come in. That’s where we all come in. We are the hands. We are the feet. We are the ones who must incarnate that Presence, wherever we go, and with whomever we meet. Not only that, we are the ones tasked with undoing the codes of beauty that render some valuable, and others not, codes that are still firmly in place. We are the ones tasked with building an expansive understanding of beauty that can encompass not only aristocratic or court values, but all of the expressions of God’s many children, and all of the precious lives that are at stake within those expressions. If the Presence is to be real, we must be the hands and we must be the feet.
Toni Morrison is an incomparable guide, teaching us to see God where others see only refuse. Her words are marigold petals, bringing the dead back to life. May they show you the way toward expansive, generous, and unorthodox beauties.
