Are We and Our Creations Natural, Spiritual or Beautiful?

1950 Mercury Sedan Main Street Reunion Napa CA

     College Cove near Trinidad CA

                

Being a lover of nature and the arts, I am accustomed to seeing beauty in natural scenes or in self-conscious art installed in art museums or art galleries. Like many, I dissociate the spiritual from secular human constructions. But, if we are embedded in nature, cannot prosaic everyday events like visiting the antique car show in Napa CA, bring us a lived communal religious experience. How does seeing a car show differ from attending a church, synagogue, or a masjid?

The Napa auto show, in many ways, brought so many people together in a way that churches do not. Religious assemblages are most often ethnically rather homogeneous: there are Black churches and White churches, Jewish temples and South Asian mosques. Yet, the car show was amazingly diverse: young and old, Black and White and Latino, the wealthy and the not so rich, all made the pilgrimage to Napa to see the vivid and glittery metal objects. The diversity of California burgeoned onto the streets of Napa. Few congregations can boast of such cosmopolitanism in their pews.

Do we do religion a disservice by calling festivals like these spiritual? Walking and viewing supplant the word; no sermon is spoken. Each participant interprets the show without a manual of theological tenets, without a sacred text, without a god as an organizer of experience.

Perhaps, going to an auto show is more akin to sitting on a misty bluff by the sea or ambulating through a museum. Perhaps the artistic--coming from the book of nature or from the wheels of technology--can offer us a more universal spiritual experience, one in which the viewer, solitary or in communion, responds to the beauty inherent in creation.

The Sea and the Shore: Water and Earth Made One

Trinidad Beach, Trinidad CA

The ocean and its shore are rich, symbolic and deep images that help us to anchor our perceptions and to develop our rituals in spiritually satisfying ways. Unity is blissful, but all creation starts with difference and we often struggle to reattain the treasure of harmony that unification brings to our souls. Like female and male, yin and yang, yoni and lingam, difference kindles action, which, in turn, yields to peace.

 

The boundary between the sea and its shore is permeable--just dip your feet into the ocean with its coolness, stirring up our feet into action or notice the  long-term geological carving of seastacks (like the ones pictured above): pure earth yielding to water.

 

Just, maybe, Love is like the sea, molding our bodies to its caresses and our minds to its diligent and undulating rhythms. Perhaps we can learn a bit from the sea, attaining spiritual patience and persistence. Perhaps, like the sea, we can offer the world love over rage and peace over belligerence. Perhaps even earth and the sea can lie down together in peace, lifting up the blessing of difference that is made one along the shores of human experience.