A few years ago, when I was living in Portland, we were treated to an unusually bright and southerly appearance of the Northern Lights. You might have experienced this here too. 2024 and 2025 were years of elevated solar activity, where many of us living in the continental US were able to glimpse this phenomenon usually limited to more northern locations. This particular night, the forecast was for an intense solar storm and a particularly clear sky, so I stayed up past my bedtime and ventured out into the dark to try and catch a glimpse, for the first time, of the aurora borealis. My social media feeds were filled with people as far south as Florida posting stunning pictures of green, blue, and pink hued night skies. As we walked our neighborhood, trying to get a good view, we met neighbors equally filled with wonder. From one street over we heard hushed but excited midnight exchanges “I decided I do want to drive out somewhere darker to see it. Do you want a ride?” There was a collective joy that is rare for a suburban street past midnight. An energy that was more reverent than Halloween or a 4th of July block party. Perhaps best described as awe. “It’s so beautiful,” people whispered. It was.

And it served no practical purpose. In fact, I think it wreaked a bit of havoc on satellite and cell communications. It was difficult to monetize. Unlike the solar eclipse, the forecast was too last minute for hotels or travel agencies to create vacation packages. As far as I know, it didn’t have any immediate health benefits. It didn’t solve any of our social crises or improve productivity. We didn’t invest anything in it except for maybe a few lost minutes of sleep or a little gas to get out to a dark area. And the return on that small investment was only wonder. It seemed to sit entirely outside any of the systems we have for calculating value.

My sermon title is borrowed from essayist Annie Dillard, who says beauty is a grace, wholly gratuitous. A grace. Something entirely unearned, but with salvific power. She writes, “I think grace and beauty are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

And that’s what me and my neighbors and maybe some of you were doing that night of the solar storm. Trying to be there. But if someone asked me why the northern lights were so beautiful, I don’t know that I'd have an answer. It just…was. Maybe someone more well versed in color theory or something could explain why it was pleasing but even that isn’t a very satisfying explanation for why we judge it beautiful.

Truth, goodness, and beauty are often grouped together by philosophers and theologians as transcendent values. And while all three are fairly lofty and nebulous, I think truth and goodness are a little easier to pin down. We can point to scientific methods of verification to help us define truth and there are whole histories of law and ethics that define good behavior. Not perfectly and not with universal agreement, but there’s at least a starting place. But beauty is more elusive. What makes something beautiful? What do the northern lights, an ocean sunset, bright purple irises, a well-crafted line of poetry, a moving piece of music, a sparrow’s song, or the face of a beloved have in common? Even neuroscientists who study brain activity of people viewing images they consider beautiful have difficulties defining the commonalities and characteristics of beauty.

And yet, for something so nebulous, something so impossible to define, beauty seems to be absolutely necessary to our surviving and thriving. It seems to be something our souls innately long for. Psychologists and medical researchers write about something called “aesthetic deprivation.” A lack of access to beauty, like natural vistas, art, music, etc. has measurable negative physical and emotional health impacts on inmates, those who are hospitalized, and those working in those facilities. In this way, access to beauty is sometimes even framed as a human rights issue and there are a number of advocacy organizations that work to improve access to green spaces, art, and music for low-income communities, unhoused populations, and those who are incarcerated. Access to green space and nature videos have been shown to reduce violence and self harm in prisons and music therapy improves health outcomes for patients after a stroke or brain injury. There are many examples, but this isn’t something we need science to prove because it’s something each of us has firsthand experience with. Imagine a life deprived of art, music, tall trees, colorful flowers, poetry. We already know this deeply, innately. Our souls long for beauty and our most eloquent poets and theologians describe our encounters with it as nearly divine.

And I think it’s these qualities of beauty, that it is both absolutely necessary for the well-being of our souls and almost impossible to define, that make it so ripe for exploitation and commodification. Think about it, if you can be the one to define it, package it, sell it for a price, you can become quite a powerful person. And that’s exactly what our social, economic, and political systems have done for centuries. We hold up beauty as an ideal and then define it in such a way that only a select few have access to it. Our modern standards of physical beauty value thin, white, able bodies. And this isn’t about aesthetic merits, it’s entirely about hoarding power. Upholding beauty standards that value whiteness is one way of upholding systems of white supremacy. And weight loss is a $90 billion industry in the U.S. That’s a lot of money riding on us believing thinness is the standard for beauty. And while physical beauty is often the most egregious example, it isn’t the only one. And I say this as a fan of home improvement shows, but Chip and Joanna Gaines were able to build a small empire in Texas by convincing us all that what our lives were lacking was shiplap in our kitchen. John O’Donohue writes about how urban planning strategies have doubly impoverished the poor, with the least aesthetically pleasing buildings and facilities being placed in the lowest income neighborhoods. Those who try to define and box in beauty can amass power and money. Idolatrous beauty standards help prop up racism, patriarchy, ableism, and capitalism.

And it works. Often. But not always. Because that’s the thing about beauty. The qualities of mystery and transcendence that make it ripe for exploitation also make it more powerful than our attempts to confine and control it. It always finds a way to break through. A flower grows through the cracks in a concrete sidewalk. A song drifts through a neighbor’s open window stopping you in your track, bringing you to tears. It’s Norbert Capek holding flower communion in a Nazi concentration camp. It’s Dan Berrigan, in prison for burning draft files during the Vietnam war, writing poems about tulips in the prison yard. Those are the moments of beauty we can’t buy and no economic or political power can take them from us. They are moments of grace.

So I think our task then, is to make a spiritual practice of noticing and relishing in as many of those moments as possible. In our reading, John O’Donohue calls this the work of “Beautifying our gaze.” Training our eye to see the grace of hidden beauty, the beauty that already exists in everything around us. And I think we can take O’Donohue’s use of the term gaze to mean more accurately and inclusively, attention, not just physical sight but whatever senses and tools you use for observing and interacting with the world. Beauty does not wait for perfection, O’Donohue tells us but is present already secretly in everything. Learning to notice that kind of beauty is both a form of resistance and a means of salvation.

First, noticing beauty in this way can be a means of resisting a culture constantly focused on productivity, monetization, shares, and likes. It is a reminder that life has meaning beyond what we can do and produce and measure and that we can find value and nourishment outside of our capitalist systems. It takes the needs and delights of the soul seriously. For example, I love when I glimpse a brightly colored hummingbird and go very still and quiet. I don’t move to take a picture for Instagram, worried my reaching for my phone will scare it off. It’s a brief moment of wonder appreciated only for its own sake. Even if just for a second it lets me escape our transactional society and just rest in the grace of the world.

I also think that making a practice of noticing beauty, especially looking for the places where it's hidden in plain sight, can help us develop an alternative vision of the kind of world we want to inhabit. We are constantly bombarded with images of war and destruction on the news, images that highlight our inhumanity, images in magazines that purport to exemplify beauty but only serve to remind us of what we lack. Journalist Krista Tippett talks about a conversation she had with a Rabbi and an Imam that turned to the topic of the salvific power of beauty. Beauty, they said, is creative, not destructive. It is of wholeness, not fractionalizing. When we make noticing beauty a spiritual practice, we counter those images of destruction with images of wholeness. This doesn’t mean entering a state of denial and turning away from the images that are unbeautiful. They are important to see. But by attending to that which is beautiful, especially making an effort to notice the beauty of the overlooked or unexpected, we can begin to expand our vision of what’s possible, deepen our love for our communities and our world, thus deepening our commitments to saving them, and grow in our appreciation for the gifts already present in our midst. It is from this place of possibility, love, and abundance that we commit to the work of transformation and justice. Theologian and anti-apartheid activist John. W. de Gruchy writes, “The beautiful serves transformation by supplying images that contradict the inhuman, and thus provide alternative transforming images to those of oppression. We are, in a profound sense, redeemed by such beauty, for art does not simply mirror reality but challenges its destructive and alienating tendencies, making up what is lacking and anticipating future possibilities.”

Activist and social reformer Dorothy Day is a personal hero of mine. Day was an ardent pacifist and advocate for improved working and economic conditions for the poor. She was a co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement and spent her whole life providing food and hospitality to the most marginalized in society. Among the many wonderful books about Day is a biography written by her granddaughter entitled “The World Will be Saved by Beauty.” It’s based on a quote from Day’s favorite author, Dostoyevsky. This struck me as such an eloquent but odd title. It seemed to me more fitting for a biography of maybe Rachel Carson, Thoreau, or John Muir. Someone committed to preserving natural landscapes. Or perhaps a famous artist. Day spent her life in urban landscapes, poor neighborhoods, looking at vistas not particularly known for their beauty. But Day had, in the words of John O’Donohue, a graced eye. She saw the image of the divine, the face of God in everyone she encountered. She glimpsed a beauty in the people she served that was invisible to so many others, and that ran counter to the images of destruction, deprivation, and isolation that shaped so much of the society she was living in. It was this alternative image, this image of wholeness and blessed divine creation that drove her work and guided her life. When we learn to beautify our gaze, when we observe those we meet and the world we walk through with love, reverence and appreciation. When we train our sense and attention to see wholeness rather than lack, we participate in a kind of re-creation, a restoration. It becomes a salvific act, piecing back together a fractured world.

The theology of beauty may feel academic or esoteric but the living into it is so concrete, so simple. Putting yourself in the presence of beauty for beauty’s sake is deep spiritual work and never frivolous. So stay up past your bedtime to see the northern lights or a meteor shower. Revel in the sound of laughter. Read poetry and linger in the garden. Find value in that which can not be bought or sold. Train your senses to notice the wholeness and holiness inherent in everything. Fill your moral vision with images of creative possibility that remind you another world is both possible and already present. Let the grace of hidden beauty become your joy and your sanctuary. It just might save the world.

May it be so. Amen.