Back in the late eighties, for about four years I shared my house with a good friend, Nora Prosser, known to some of you perhaps. We each had our own space, but it was a single-family house with not much soundproofing built in, so we quite often used to hear each other's activities. Not that either of us was noisy, and there was hardly ever a problem . . . except on Saturdays, when neither of us worked and we both liked to have the radio on. Although I'm musically uneducated and undiscerning, I used to enjoy CJRT's Jazz programme on Saturday mornings, and Nora was dedicated to the CBC Opera broadcast on Saturday afternoons. I hated opera, and Nora's teeth were set on edge by jazz. We tried to be considerate of one another, but it was undeniable that I would try to do my grocery shopping on Saturday afternoon and Nora would take her Bruce Trail hike in the morning, and we'd each wonder why the other had such weird preferences!

What was also undeniable was that Nora and I each derived great pleasure from our chosen form of music - and something even beyond pleasure, a quality of spiritual nurturing that all music lovers know about. We were uplifted by the sounds we heard - or at least, I was uplifted by some sounds, and Nora by others. And the music we didn't like had the opposite effect on us: it was a real "downer"! I keep my radio tuned to CBC 2 most of the time these days, but on Saturday afternoons, even if I'm not doing grocery shopping or participating in Pizza and Games here, I turn the radio off rather than catch the first sounds of the week's opera.

And yes, I do understand that if only I could learn to appreciate it, my life would be enriched, but I don't seem able to. I don't like the taste of bananas, either (one of the very few foods I don't enjoy) even though I know that they're not only nutritious but also delicious to most people. And I turn right off when I see pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, dripping blood - the blood that was, according to the Christian Church and the painter of the picture, shed to wash away my sins. Although there was a time in my life when that imagery was very meaningful to me, it now leaves me cold. It doesn't "ring true" for me at all.

Does all this mean that truth, like beauty, is entirely in the eye of the beholder? Does it mean that what you find true is purely a matter of taste and preference, so that there can be no dispute about the truth of some proposition, just as it's no good trying to convince me to like bananas or opera? If so, then it wouldn't make sense to tell anyone their religion was untrue, whatever distressing things it might lead to, although we might privately think fundamentalism, for example, is in poor taste, just as some of us aren't fond of particular styles of dress or interior design. Is truth only a matter of aesthetic appeal? And on the other hand, is something that we enjoy seeing or hearing therefore true? This may be a particularly good question to be asking ourselves on the day that the Aesthetics Committee is about to have its first meeting!

At Thursday's Lunch With the Minister, I asked if anyone there had thoughts about the topic of today's talk, and someone mentioned that Beryl had spoken on a similar subject the year before I came here. Naturally, I was curious to see what she had said, and I blessed the person or persons who had the foresight to gather all her talks together in binders. One piece in Beryl's talk, which she gave in May of 1997, struck me with special force. It's about a memorial sculpture which artist George Segal was commissioned to design and execute in 1979 as a memorial to the four people killed and the nine wounded in the Kent State University anti-war demonstration.

Segal created a piece based on the Abraham and Isaac story from the Hebrew Bible, showing Abraham holding a knife in his hand, ready to sacrifice young Isaac, who is kneeling at his feet. The commissioners of the work rejected this sculpture, not because it wasn't beautiful but because they didn't want to commemorate the Kent State deaths by an artpiece depicting a violent act about to be committed. They didn't feel it was true, in the sense of "being true" to a person or to a conviction, although my guess is that the artist's intention was to show, paradoxically, in his work, youth being sacrificed to a system which required obedience, as Abraham's god required obedience from him.

I doubt there could be a better example of the question we're considering today: what is the relationship between truth and beauty? Does truth reside in the artist's intention, while beauty is a matter of the viewer's, or listener's perception? Or, conversely, is beauty inherent in a beautiful object, and truth a matter of objective reality, while our senses may be more or less tuned to perceiving them, just as someone may be colour-blind, tone-deaf, or unable to follow an argument for the existence or non-existence of God? This question has exercised the minds of philosophers as well as artists and other thinkers; in fact, it comprises a special area of philosophy known as aesthetics. One school of thought argues that art is a matter of imitation of nature, so that the truest art is that which most closely replicates the original. Another school argues that art is the activity of creating emotionally expressive symbols, so that the truest art is that which most vividly expresses an emotion and calls forth that same emotion in response. As the great novelist Leo Tolstoy has written,

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced and having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

I wonder if any of you have already thought ahead to one possible implication of this - that the more persuasive words or music or pictures are, the more beautiful and / or the truer they are. Beauty and truth then are matters of majority opinion! The most beautiful, and the most true, are those which are understood and appreciated by the largest number of people. And let's not be too quick to dismiss this concept - we see it put forward particularly often in relation to public displays of art, along with the similarly vexing question of art's "appropriateness."

Being a Unitarian and used to being in a small minority on most matters of importance, I find it impossible of course to agree completely with the assessment of beauty and truth by majority vote. But I think there's some truth in it - and perhaps that means also some beauty, in the sense that scientists talk about an "elegant" theory. Consider this statement by the Dalai Lama's introduction to a book on Buddhism:

All religions . . . have the potential to help certain types of people. It is clear that for some people the Christian approach is more effective than the Buddhist one. It depends on the individual's mental disposition. We must, therefore, appreciate that potential in each religion, and respect those who follow them.

This way of thinking is so much more congenial to me, and probably to you, than an exclusivist view of religion which claims one truth above all others. And yet, the paradox, and (I suggest) the point of greatest learning for us independent anti-authoritarian Unitarian folk, is that the reason we find it more congenial has a lot to do with the simple chance of what the Dalai Lama calls our "mental disposition" - the genetic structure of our brain, the way we were brought up, the culture in which we live, and so on. Our attraction to liberal religion may be only as significant as our attraction to opera rather than jazz or realistic rather than abstract art.

Does this mean, if we admit its plausibility, that we can or should just give up on any attempt to make the world a better place through our work as free-spirited Unitarians, or forget any efforts to reach others with the message of our accepting community, or stop seeing ourselves as a balance to the "religious right"? No, I don't think so, any more than the music lover should forego the idea of bringing music to as wide an audience as possible. It may well be that not everybody will ever enjoy jazz, or opera, or string quartets, or rhythm-and-blues, but there are certainly some people who will enjoy one or more of those forms of music if they're introduced to them. It's even just possible, though maybe not as likely, that someone who thinks they don't like them could change their minds with enough encouragement.

Why would we want to change anyone's mind - about the beauty of art or the truth of religion? The one indisputable reason, I believe, is that we want to bring to others the happiness that we experience. If fine art, or the wonders of the natural world, or our spiritual home, bring joy, caring people want to share that joy. In the most recent issue of Quest, the publication of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, Sarah Lammert, a Minister in Utah, writes,

Human beings crave beauty, need beauty as much as the air we breathe. And much like air, beauty is all around us, available to pull in through our senses, if we would but slow down and pay attention . . . there are those times when I look up at the horizon and feel pulled into a sacred reality in which I know that the world is filled with beauty. A simple painting on a wall, a wisp of song playing down the hall, the play of water in a river, the crunch of [fresh snow], the fragrance of bread baking in our oven - any encounter with the simple, lovely side of life, restores me and fills me with a sense of well-being.

It's that sense of well-being that people who love beauty and who love truth want to share with others, so that the world as a whole will be enriched. The instinctive wish to share it surely can't be faulted. And yet, there are limits, aren't there? I understand and admire the opera lover's enthusiastic hope that more and more people will be encouraged and enabled to enjoy opera, but I don't want to be forced to listen! I understand and admire the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons in their devotion to spreading what they see as the good news of their respective faiths, but I admit to impatience when they take up my time in trying to persuade me to their view. It's a fine line, isn't it, between being open to the various forms of beauty and truth and failing to recognize that we may not have, in the Dalai Lama's phrase, the "mental disposition" for some of those forms.

Earlier this week, in one of those serendipitous little chance happenings, I followed a link from an email message to the website of Scouting movement in Canada. There I found an article by our own Liam Morland, from which I take these words:

There are two realms of human understanding: the material world and the spiritual world. The material world is the realm of science, hard facts, observations, conclusions, and objectivity. "Things fall because of gravity" and "The universe is about 15 billion years old" are statements of fact about the material world. Many are testable; they can be shown to be false or true (though absolute proof is only possible within mathematics) . . . The spiritual world is the realm of emotion, ethics, beauty, and the meaning of life. "My love is like a red, red rose" and "That is a beautiful painting" are statements about the spiritual world. They cannot be demonstrated to be true or false. One may see beauty in a painting that another finds to be ugly. Neither person is wrong. A purely material examination of a painting would reveal that it is a piece of cloth covered with a substance that reflects many different wavelengths of light. There is no material way to measure or even talk about the beauty of a painting. Spiritual concepts allow us to give meaning to the cold facts of the material world . . . Science finds facts, religion or spirituality gives meaning.

That last sentence of Liam's distinguishes nicely, I think, between two different kinds of truth: Science finds facts, religion or spirituality gives meaning. It's the second kind of truth in which we are perhaps more likely to find beauty, though many scientist would also say that they believe their chemistry or physics or biology to be beautiful, too. The line between fact and meaning is in some ways as hard to draw as the one between beauty and truth. Think of the moment when a woman learns that she is pregnant - is it possible to divorce the biological fact from the meaning it has for her? Or take the news of an enormous oil spill: can it be treated with complete detachment from its ecological implications?

As you know, the rather cryptic words, "Beauty is truth; truth beauty," were written by John Keats, although I think he was probably quoting an earlier source. The poem from which they come is "Ode on a Grecian Urn", in which Keats was recalling, from a carving he'd seen either in Greece itself or in the British Museum, where he spent many hours, the depiction of a religious ritual involving sacrifice and fertility rites and all kinds of ceremonial goings-on. What seems to have specially appealed to his poetic sense was the way in which the particular occasion, full of young men and maidens and animals and gods, had been lifted out of its limitations in time and space and made universal and immortal. The urn showed a pretty girl being chased by a suitor - commonplace - now no longer just a fleeting moment but everlasting and accessible to everyone who sees the urn - "For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair."

This, to my mind, is what above all unites art and religion, beauty and truth - that they lift us out of the commonplace into a realm of broader and more permanent meaning. This is why I believe that we need to respect the impulse behind all art and all religion, which is very different from being disposed towards any of their particular forms. We need to respect art and religion because they enable us to transcend the limitations of our time and place and culture and even escape, sometimes, just for a little while, those confining mental dispositions from which we can never be entirely free. While we listen to a sublime piece of music, or watch a superb piece of theatre, or read an utterly convincing exposition of a philosophical position, or participate in an observance of our faith, we are taken out of our separate selves and into a larger identity. It's not that the world of the everyday, the world of our personal or even selfish concerns, is necessarily false or second-rate, or that we must resign ourselves to living with ugliness most of the time; it's that it's wonderfully possible to reach another plane of being!

There's been some interesting correspondence among UU ministers lately about how hard it is to predict which sermons (or talks, or reflections, as I'm calling them these days) will be most helpful to members of our congregations. I think the discussion is related to what I've said today about beauty and truth, and particularly to the conversation I had with the children. Sometimes, we can find beauty and truth if we take a different perspective or start with a different expectation. Here is is one representative piece of what was said by various Ministers; it's from Rev. Barbara Edgecombe, responding to a colleague who'd preached what he considered a poor sermon which had been received with something close to ecstasy by his congregation. Edgecombe wrote:

. . . the late Jascha Heifitz, the great violinist, said: "There are four kinds of performances: those which I like and the audience doesn't, those which the audience likes and I don't, those which neither likes and those which both like."

I have had your experience [says Edgecombe] and also the other three scenarios which Heifitz describes. A sermon is not classical music, of course, but it is, at its best, communicating something from the soul to the soul, which classical music does for me. If Heifitz could not predict how this communication would go, despite his best preparation, I don't think we need worry that we can't either. Predictability is actually a characteristic of something which is not alive. And unpredictability, a trait of aliveness, is pretty uncomfortable.

Nobody really wants to do live broadcasts, because they are so much more uncomfortable due to this unpredictability. Today on an NPR live broadcast, for about five minutes they were unable to get a mike working for a guest interviewee. When we preach, we are doing "live broadcasts" (in spite of having notes or manuscripts). It will never be really predictable, and that's the awe and the scariness of it. The awe and wonder of your experience with your "unorganized" sermon which they loved, and the fear that you may think it's A+ and they may shun it, makes preaching "liminal space" (crossing the threshhold, that is, entering something new) and it is, I believe, the root of the religious character of preaching.

Perhaps it seems a little arrogant to link the giving of a talk to what I've said earlier about truth and beauty, but I want you to know that I recognize the vital importance of the interaction between speaker and listeners. If there is beauty, or truth, or occasionally both, to be found in a Sunday service, including the speaker's reflections, the beauty and truth come from everyone present. And they're always a bit of a mystery. You may remember that a great composer is said to have been asked what a particular piece of his music meant. He replied, "If I could tell you, I wouldn't need the music!" And the French painter, Georges Braque, once said that "the only valid thing in art is that which cannot be explained."

No-one has said it better than Walt Whitman, though, and I'll end with his words:

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments;
It is for you whoever you are - it is no farther from you than your hearing and sight are from you; itis hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest.
We consider bibles and religions divine - I do not say they are not divine; I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still;
Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, in things best known to you, finding the best, or as good as the best -
Happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place - not for another hour, but this hour.

And so may we find beauty and truth - true beauty, beautiful truth, unique to each one of us, yet shared as an aspiration by all of us - in this place, among these friends, as often as we come together. So may it be.