Since my days as a young boy, walking the banks of the Nith in south Ayrshire, I've been fascinated by swans. To the child I was, swans were huge fabulous creatures. The first times I heard the whoosh of their wings as they took off, and flew overhead, I was in awe of their combination of beauty and power. Where we walk these days, there's a pair of resident wild swans. Occasionally they come over, keeping their distance, and perform what I can only call water ballet, graceful slow movement, effortless gliding, posture and head held just so.
As a theologian I have happily lived with the belief that beauty is its own argument for creative purpose, however conceived and expounded. I have little interest in an analysis of the concept of beauty when I stand beside a lochan and watch a swan embodying that elusive and very thing, beauty.
At least one starting point of reflection would be what any of us might make of the urgency and the urge to "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." A white swan, against dark water, in winter sunlight, makes a deep impression on the heart, so that I could as easily describe it as the holiness of beauty. Because those moments of aesthetic joy are their own form of inarticulate prayer, that need no words but simply turns us inside out in an embrace of a world where such moments happen, as pure gift and unexpected joy.
Keats' famous line, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," has its own truth, but that first moment of beauty perceived rebukes our emotional complacency and awakens in us a new hopefulness for a wounded world. To that extent, that first moment of perception, beauty can be the subtle call of God, a nudge towards looking for and living into the beauty of the world.
But Keats is right. Beauty leaves a lingering legacy, a gift both of memory and the transformative impact of that moment when beauty ambushes us.
"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."
Some time in my fifties I discovered the poetry of Mary Oliver. She is a poet of nature, of the world around her. Many of her poems are about birds, which makes much of her poetry a form of literary ornithology.
Her descriptions are both observation of what the eyes see, and inner perception of what the heart feels. What the eyes see, the mind and heart consider, knowing this is a transformative moment of encounter with a hummingbird, an egret, a robin, wild geese, – or a swan.
In her poem, 'The Swan', Oliver laces together metaphors in an attempt to describe what is seen when a swan takes off, rises, and slowly recedes upwards and away. Only at the end of the poem does she raise the question that I think is a rhetorical question expecting the answer, "No. Not really."
The first line asks the only important question when beauty presents itself to us. "Did you see it?" From then on the whole poem is a series of questions, asked with the enthusiasm and persistence of one who has been captivated and needs to share the gift. She knows that beauty has the power to weave bonds out of shared experiences, gifts to us transcendent moments that transform the way we see the world, and each other. And that last line, with its interrogative mood, requiring of us an accountability before beauty; that question, and its answer, takes us back to the biblical command and invitation, "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."
SWAN
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
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