Lessons From Michaelangelo

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 2^nd of March, 2003

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
as winter stubbornly clings to our heels,
to worship, to celebrate the fullness of life
and give thanks for our ability to embrace it
with our hearts and minds and bodies
woven into the grace of this community.
Love, come, for we are ready.

May our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves,
true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become.

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

(A great man died this week at age 74, a man who was, in many ways, the spiritual leader of our own School for Young Children. I am speaking of Fred Rogers, of course, Mr. Rogers, whose decades long television show expressed the same philosophy of esteem, diversity, imagination, cooperation and so forth found in our own day-school. Many of our teachers had met this gentle Presbyterian minister, and learned from him throughout the last years. I express my condolences to our School for Young Children faculty on the death of this teacher of teachers, who has taught more children and inspired more teachers than any human being in history. And I have let this morning's prayer before the silence be a tribute to his philosophy by quoting him as a wisdom teacher for us all.

O Love, this is what he said.
He said: "There is something of yourself you leave at every meeting of another person."
He said: "In the scheme of things, this morning is as brief as the twinkling of an eye, yet eternity is made of such twinklings."
He said: "True wisdom is never separated from compassion."
He said: "Life is for service."
He said: "It's wonderful just to be yourself."
He said: "The truly great things in this life are never center stage, but always in the wings."
He said: "What really matters is whether the alphabet we learn is used for the declaration of war or for the description of the sunrise."
He said: "If only you could see how important your life has been to those you have met."
He said "All I know how to do is to light the candle that has been given to me."(Here, the candle is kindled)
In his honor, let us keep a span of silence. Amen.

(silence)

And let us remember the worthiness of our own lives, the gifts we have been given, the people we have met who have left their mark upon us too. Let us remember those who have been truthful to us, and shown us the fullness of their person, and who have thus been our teachers.

We can name these men or women or children aloud in the shared air, or silently in the sanctuary of our hearts.

(naming)

Many are the men and women who have gone before us who have been our teachers and our inspirations. Fred Rogers, the teacher, certainly, and Susan B. Anthony, the prophet. Martha Graham, the dancer, and Albert Einstein, the scientist. So many. So many. Buddha and Jesus, the questioners, and Mirabai and Rumi, the singers of the heart. So many, so many…Ashoka, the peacemaker and Sojourner, the truth-teller. And Michelangelo, poet, painter, sculptor, architect, lover, loner and leader.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is a sonnet by Michelangelo written in 1522. It was written in Italian of course; this English translation does not try and keep the rhyme and meter for fear of losing the substance and poetry.

In years long past, I have been a thousand times wounded, and even slain. Not to mention being knocked down and exhausted. By my own fault, yes, but mainly by You, Love. So do you really think my gray head will fall for your false promises again?

How many times you have first tied me up, then cut my sorry limbs free. How many times you have punctured my flank! I'm so torn apart I can hardly recreate myself, I think. Even when I water the garden of my breast with endless tears.

Love, I complain to you. I speak to you. Look, I am free from your wiles, now. So why do you have to take up your cruel bow and keep shooting at the nothing that is me?

After all, when wood is already ash, using a drill or a saw on it makes no sense. Why chase someone like me who has neither the capacity nor the energy to move so much as an inch?

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is a quotation from an essay the actor Jane Alexander wrote, on what she believes, back in 1985.

Acting is not difficult for me. Some roles are immensely challenging, but because I believe in a universal soul I feel that within me there is a deep well of human experience to draw upon. Sometimes it takes a lot of cajoling, patience and despair before the right emotion or state of mind reveals itself, but I know it is there, and that when I am truthful in my work, it strikes a responsive chord within the audience.

"Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty…that is all you know on this earth and all you need to know," said Keats. I too, hold this as my precept. "Nothing human is alien to me," said the ancient Roman, and that also is my precept.

Sermon: Lessons From Michaelangelo [Next][back to top]

Since today we welcomed new members to the congregation, I thought I would look at two central touchstones of our liberal religious heritage. Two words that we say most every Sunday at the beginning of the celebration. Reason and Passion. Ancient words. Words of approach, not doctrine. Words of practice, not conclusion. One might even say, holy words.

And I want to explore these two words by meditations on a famous human life, namely, that of the great Renaissance artist, Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarotti Simoni, or, as he is commonly known, by his first name only, Michelangelo.

No, Michelangelo was not a Unitarian Universalist. Michelangelo was probably not even the most pleasant person to hang around with back in the days when he lived. His nickname, after all, was Terribilit. (the Terrible One, or even, the Terrifying One).

But grappling with his life serves to lift up these two magnificent words beautifully. Reason. Passion.

First, let me set the stage.

The century when Michelangelo lived does not at first seem very much like our own. They had no computers, no bombs or missiles. They had no weapons of mass destruction, nor television sets on which they could watch brutal events from the comfort of their living rooms. They had no radios, no centralized plumbing, no grocery stores with wide aisles, no cars, trains or planes.

Yet they managed to live lives that were little different than our own… for fragility, drama and sheer intensity. Michelangelo's day and age was surprisingly like our own.

We have our religious fanatics on TV, or hiding out in caves, strongly criticizing the sensual pop culture of our day. They had their religious fanatics too, like Savonarola, setting fire to "the vanities" he didn't approve, for religious reasons. (Vanities which included, I'm sad to say, some paintings by Botticelli.) We have our fundamentalists who take scripture literally; they had their extreme religious reformers, who popped out the stained glass windows in the cathedrals because such things are not explicitly mentioned in the Bible.

We have our sexy movies, our (wink-wink) "reality" television shows, our easy flirting with sexuality in the public sector. They had their public sex scandals, debates about nude art in the church, and surprisingly frequent torrid events, like the 50 courtesans who danced naked at the Vatican to honor Lucrezia Borgia.

We have our learned scholars, like Karen Armstrong, who can explain the nuances of Islam to parochial Americans. They had their scholars too, like Pico Della Mirandola, who could speak 22 languages fluently, or Leonardo da Vinci, who familiarized himself with fifteen different scientific disciplines in between beautifully painted masterpieces.

We hear talk of terrorism in our newspapers and on television, terrorism both by others and by ourselves (depending on the politics of the speaker). But Michelangelo also lived in an age of routine terrorism, where tyrants sent around their mercenaries routinely to ransack and destroy at will. The artist saw citizens of the great walled cities of Tuscany simply tied up and left to starve to death in a display of wanton power comparable to the worst excesses in our own day.

The rich and poor were as far apart in his day as in our own, and the topic of "cultural wars," Protestant North vs. Catholic South, Islamic East vs. Christian West, raged back then with the same maddening fury of our own day.

So you can see why the settings strike me as remarkably similar. But you probably don't know yet why Michelangelo figures into my meditations on Reason and Passion. Let me now try to make that clear.

Over the last three decades, Michelangelo has been a favorite subject for me to study. And during my readings on this man, I kept on bumping into ideas which helped me to understand my own religious life.

Now Michelangelo is undoubtedly the best known artist that ever lived, in any culture. The Sultan in Istanbul wanted him to come and paint there, despite the Islamic hesitation to use images, so great was the artist's reputation. Popes and patrons vied for him. His images of the two mighty hands of God and Adam almost touching can be found now in a million places outside the Sistine Chapel…they are as much an overused cliché in the world of art as the Mona Lisa's famous smile.

But I would submit that the great Michelangelo is really not known at all. That his whole life has been distorted. And that even our greatest biographers have wantonly and deliberately lied about him.

Throughout his life, Michelangelo had a rich love life, including a sexual life. No one wanted us to know that until recently. His most famous biographer, Irving Stone, went so far as to make up a love life for him by inventing women who never existed. Stone suppressed all the letters the artist wrote to the many young men with whom he had fallen in love, like Febo di Poggio or Cecchino Bracci. The sculptor's own nephew took all of his love poems…and the man was prolific…and changed all of the he's to she's in every poem implying same gender love. His love life was not always consummated…for instance, his three decade swoon for the handsome Tommaso Cavaliere was only expressed by letters, never by physical engagement, but it was a same-sex love nonetheless. But peoples' love lives, whatever form they take, permeate the rest of their days, affecting their decisions, their grief, their joy, their sense of self and their energy for their work.

The commitment to the religious approach of reason which our living tradition asks of us as religious people is not some clockwork, tick tock logic that vainly calculates whether an omnipotent God exists or not. No, the reason that our living tradition asks of us takes this form: a commitment to dig below the surface of any assertion. A commitment to question any story. A commitment to refuse to accept fame or popularity as authority right from the beginning.

And furthermore, our living tradition asks us to reason about the world always through the lens of the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the minorities. Historically here in the west, these have been women, people of color, men and women with variant sexualities or gender identities, minority religious sentiments, etc. These realities are often hidden, and quite deliberately. Apparently some folks would like us to think that all of this talk of minorities and diversity is new. Something fresh. Something revolutionary and maybe even a tad dangerous and upsetting. Our tradition reminds us that this simply is not true. There have been minorities struggling in this world for ten thousand years, but always being thrust back to the margins, the edges, or hidden under cloaks of dishonesty, like Irving Stone's, and ignorant assumption. Michelangelo's whole sad and frustrated same-sex love life, revealed so clearly in the heart-breaking poem I read this morning, has been dismissed as irrelevant for four hundred and fifty years. But love is never irrelevant.

This deliberate marginalization of minorities, or rather, assumption of uniformity, still goes on. Bible stories are read heterosexually when they can be just as easily read from a minority sexual viewpoint…and have been for a long time, not just in these post-Modern days. Rabbis over a thousand years ago concluded that the biblical Joseph of Egypt did not share their own interest in women, and that the story of Joseph and Potiphar found in Genesis is about a lover's quarrel more than anything else. But such interpretations, ancient as they are, have been swept away by modern conformist culture. Was it really a Roman who wrote the famous sentence which Jane Alexander quoted, "Nothing human is alien to me?" Not if you assume that Romans were "white" people from Italy. Terentius Afer was eventually a Roman citizen but he had first been a slave. An African. A black African from Central Africa. But that reality is known by few. Russians are assumed to be white and monolithic also, yet the great Russian poet Pushkin had African grandparents, and was black, unknown to most folks who read his poetry. And did Kurt Vonnegut write that famous graduation address that begins "Wear sunscreen?" No, Mary Shmich wrote it, a woman. And the famous piece attributed to Nelson Mandela, read in Unitarian Universalist pulpits around the country, about human beings being afraid of their own power? That was written by a Detroit minister, a woman, not a head of state. When a woman science fiction writer in my former parish tried to get published under her own woman's name, Joyce Van Scyoc, she was not published. When she submitted the same stories with a name that could be a man's name, Sydney, she was published lavishly, and translated into five languages.

To be a man or woman of reason in this world is to always be willing to question past the surface of things. It's to be wary, critical and not quick to believe. Most of the cultures of the world we are part of, favor such deception about history. They would rather we not know that minorities were writing, preaching, singing, criticizing, shouting, painting and building long before this present era. But it's a truth that reason reveals, and a healthy skepticism uncovers. Ours after all, is a religion of revelation. Our ancestors put it this way: "Revelation is not sealed." And this makes sense to me, for revelation means "to lift the veil off of what has been hidden." This sort of reason is good and healthy religious work, depth work, in the words of the late theologian Paul Tillich. Or spiritual work if you will. For to be spiritual, says Matthew Fox, is to let go of the superficial and shallow, and be radical, that is, to dig deep to the radix or root of things. Come, let's be reasonable together.

And while we're at it, let's be passionate. To be passionate does not necessarily mean swooning or shaking or yelling. It means admitting that, like Michelangelo, we are "always learners." Liberal religious language, you see, does not speak of being "saved once and for all" by the bloody passion of a crucified savior. It does not preach about "the one final sacrifice" on Calvary. For us, passion means that nothing is final. It means there is always more to learn, to understand, to grapple with. Our religious history thinks of us as if we were still children with wide open eyes. It has reminded us that to make our lives whole (which is all the Latin word "sacrifice" means) we do not have to worship blood or death. But rather, we are free to worship, to deeply value, learning and life.

Michelangelo was one of those people who always learned by doing. He writes, in one of his letters, of poets and painters being good because they "dare to do whatever they desire to do. This is a good insight, and a good power." He criticizes a particular Flemish painting he sees one day for not having any "nerve."

I find this approach to passion helpful. For Michelangelo, passion is not some sudden impulsive "I can do what I want when I want" attitude, but rather, the artist sees passion as the daring which is the fruit of practice and study and learning. Michelangelo always sculpted and painted very quickly. Those who watched him were aghast at the sheer weight of the chunks of stone which flew off his chisel. They were surprised by the large, swift strokes he used on the ceiling of the chapel, working with strength into the wet plaster.

But he was never being impulsive. Everything he did was the result of practice, practice, practice, and thus, accumulated learning. And he did not think such passion could be taught. It had to be discovered from within, from within one's own life. He cautioned his students and novice artists not to try and paint as fast as he did but to paint as fast as they did. Each person's passion is unique. In our Unitarian Universalist language, we say the same thing by asserting the "worth and dignity of every human person."

But even though his motto was "ancora imparo," always learning, he was not talking of book learning. He was talking about the hands-on work, or, in the words of our principles, "direct experience." Michelangelo was not some finished scholar, a serene guru of art who dispensed wisdom, a zen master of perfection to whom people came for sober advice. He was simply a man who was always learning, and expected others to learn for themselves. Nevertheless, he himself was always daring and nervy.

Religious liberals have chosen a similar approach. We too, by virtue of our claim to live without a creed, have chosen to be "learners always." We have chosen not to close the door on new revelation, new ideas, new insights that might invalidate, or, at least re-interpret the old. This is a deeply passionate thing to choose to do. It is daring and nervy. To set sail without familiar winds and time-worn charts is courageous. But that is our incredible heritage.

It means we can act in this world, and offer critiques of its plans and purposes, even though we are not perfect ourselves. We don't have to wait till "we get it all together" before we make our mark on the earth. I, for one, know that I will be long dead before I finally "get it all together." I am convinced that the purpose of life is not perfection and completeness anyway, but as Fred Rogers reminded us, to be of service to others. The purpose of life is to live it. To play the hand we have been dealt as best we can.

Michelangelo may be revered as one of the world's great geniuses now, but he had a difficult hand to play when he was alive. Yes, he was passionate, but he was also a total introvert in an extroverted era. He hated crowds and hated parties. He ran from fans who were always after him to give away his art. He lived in a time of almost endless political turmoil and decadence. He had to change his address at least fifteen times in his life, suffering incessantly from homesickness. People went out of their way to steal from him. The physical nature of his work made sure he suffered from bodily things too, gallstones, depression, and other painful matters. He could be clumsy and awkward, or even petty in his responses to people when he was feeling pain. He often was not the most pleasant of human beings to spend time with.

But despite these limitations and difficulties, despite his fears and pains, Michelangelo consistently dared to produce great works. Many of them he never finished…he got sick, or was whisked away by some other project, or the funding ran out. But he was always creating, always learning, always true to himself, true to his passion…the passion to create, to improve, to bring beauty to the earth, the beauty that, as Keats said, is a form of truth itself.

This passion, you may have guessed by now, could also be called by the word freedom if you would like… Michelangelo was first and foremost a man who dared to be free. Not free from old ideas or ancient superstitions, like so many interpret religious freedom these days. But rather, he counted himself free to express whatever his deeper life demanded of him…the daring and nerve to live out your life responsibly by your own choices and decisions no matter what the conditions you live in, or live in you.

In this, we have no greater model than Michelangelo, a man of sacrificial passion, that is, a man whose freedom made him, despite his undeniable brokenness, whole. Whole.

The David, the captive slaves, the Sistine Ceiling and Altar Wall Fresco of the Last Judgement…these are masterpieces that may endure a thousand years. But the spirit of reason and passion once embodied in the artist shall last a lot longer than that. His loves, his losses, his torment and his creative tension are gone from the earth right now, but his spirit lives on whenever a religious liberal reasons from the perspective of the edge, not the center. And his spirit lives on whenever a religious liberal freely dares to move toward love even if they are imperfect and not finished yet.

Michelangelo is a dear teacher in my own personal pantheon of great men and women. But, as a religious liberal, I do not worship any human being as final or ultimate. I worship the reason and passion which can pave a path on which any man and any women might walk their pilgrimage toward greater love and learning.

Blest is that path. Blest our liberal religious tradition, and blest is Love, that Love which Michelangelo has taught me, like so many others, to worship as the Most High, the Most Deep, my daily means and my final end.

Offeratory [Next][back to top]

For the sake of a community that proclaims its responsibility in the real world of budgets, and commitments, as well as in the world of the spirit and of love, we both give and receive the offering.

Prayer [back to top]

Love, like unexpected fountains of flowers in the winter you fill my heart with beauties for which nothing has prepared me.

Remind me that every day is just as unexpected as an iris in March. Impress upon me that my work in this life is to carve the stone of this very moment with the chisel of my love, my reason, my passion and my struggle, there to reveal the blossom that had been hidden inside all the while. Don't let me confuse peace with stillness, or love with sentiment. Give me the peace of heart that is unrest, a longing for deeper things. Dare to startle me with unrest, O Love. Dare to startle me. Amen.

[back to top]
 

First UU Church Home | Church Newsletters | First UU Staff | Sermons | Elected Officers
Email Mark | Email the Church Office | Email the Webmaster

Last update: 04/10/2003