Living the Ineffable
Service, August 2, 2026, Jim Seavey,
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
Responsive Reading:
These Roses, # 556 in Singing the Living Tradition
These roses under my window make no reference to former roses
or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.
There is no time to them. There is simply the rose;
it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower
there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less.
Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.
But we postpone or remember; we do not live in the present,
but with reverted eye lament the past, or, heedless of the riches
that surround us, stand on tiptoe to foresee the future.
We cannot be happy and strong until we too live with
nature in the present, above time.
—An adapted excerpt from the essay “Self-Reliance,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reading:
THE ABSTRACT SUBLIME
Robert Rosenblum
First published in ARTnews, February 1961
“It’s like a religious experience!” With such words, a pilgrim I met in Buffalo last winter attempted to describe his unfamiliar sensations before the awesome phenomenon created by seventy-two [paintings by] Clifford Still at the Albright Art Gallery. A century and a half ago, the Irish Romantic poet, Thomas Moore, also made a pilgrimage to the Buffalo area, except that his goal was Niagara Falls. His experience, as recorded in a letter to his mother, July 24, 1804, similarly beggared prosaic response:
I felt as if approaching the very residence of the Deity, the tears started into my eyes, and I remained, for moments after we had lost sight of the scene, in that delicious absorption which pious enthusiasm alone can produce. We arrived at the New ladder and descended lo the bottom. Here all its awful sublimities rushed full upon me…… My whole heart ind soul ascended towards the Divinity in a swell of devout admiration, which I never before experienced Oh! Bring the atheist here, and he cannot return as an atheist ! I pity the man who can coldly sit down to write a description of these ineffable wonders: much more do I pity him who can submit them to the admeasurement of gallons and yards…. We must have new combinations of language to describe the Fall of Niagra.
Moore’s bafflement before a unique spectacle, his need to abandon measurable reason for mystical empathy, are the very ingredients of the mid twentieth-century spectator’s “religious experience” before the work of Still. During the Romantic Movement, Moore’s response to Niagara would have been called an experience of the “Sublime,” an aesthetic category that suddenly acquires fresh relevance in the face of the most astonishing summits of pictorial heresy attained in America [previous to 1961].
Prayer
Now in our service we take a moment to pray followed by silent mulling. Please open your gray hymnal to number 345 which we will sing in our seats to close the silent meditation.
Later in the service we will be reciting a prayer by Henry David Thoreau which starts “Great God”. Let me now state for those skeptical of the word, Thoreau used ‘God” interchangeably with ‘Nature’, a term he used to mean what we now know as ‘Ecology’ – the Earth as a whole system, all parts interrelated and interacting. When I came to UUism in the 80’s, Rev. Howard Hunter said ‘God, or that which is what you imagine to be greater than yourself’, I collapsed in relief, and muttered, ‘oh, good, a disclaimer.’
So now let this prayer come into being:
I raise or lower my voice to the ineffable Presence lurking beneath or above our everyday experience: I invoke that Presence, felt in our bones at moments of transcendence, and request that we receive support in our quest to make right relationship in the world, to find peace at home and away, and to practice love in all our actions.
Sermon:
This wee bit of a Sunday talk is about Cape Ann as we find it to be: a sacred space, a place set aside from the ordinary, an island of that which is larger than ourselves. An island where big space inspired big works, written and, acknowledging the ineffable – a presence expressible in words – big paintings of nothing: nothing but paint, canvas and the calling in of an expansive presence. My goal is not to console or conclude, but to ease some head scratching about what we still, after 120 years call ‘experimental art’, and celebrate the creative, curious and energetic human exploration of this world, this garden of Eden.
I am inspired directly by the current exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum, ‘Avery, Gottlieb, Rothko: By the Sea’, about the friendship of three new York artists that blossomed as they and their families summered here in the 1920’s and 30’s, and the two younger artists were nurtured by Milton and Sally Avery. I would have not appreciated the evolution of their later work had I not read as an art student in the late 60’s, the 1961 article in ART News by Robert Rosenblum, ‘The Abstract Sublime’.
When I view these paintings, I think of the experiences of the sublime I have encountered all of my life here ‘even among these rocks’ on Cape Ann. The paintings mirror my moments of inspired peacefulness and an expansive sense of being. The word ‘ineffable’ always comes to mind from this quote from T.S. Eliot, a word artist who was also a summer resident since infancy of this rocky isle, drawn from his 1942 poem, The Dry Salvages:
“That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.”
A year after this poem, Adolph Gottleib and Mark Rothko responded to a New York times critic while they were breaking away from the pictorial into exploring the archetypal realm of the mind with these formulations of their intent:
“The point at issue, it seems to us, is not “explanation” of the paintings but whether the intrinsic ideas carried within these frames have significance.
We feel that our pictures demonstrate our aesthetic beliefs, some of which we, therefore, list:
- To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
- This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
- It is our functions as artists to make the spectator see the world our way – not his way.
- We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”
So let us celebrate the conversation between ourselves and this planet, this Blue Boat home. If we still don’t quite get the Abstract Sublime artist’s, Rothko, Gottlieb, and their contemporaries Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock, also examined in the Rosenblum essay, let us pick up Lydia Wilsky-Ciollo’s marvelous book ‘Wildness: Henry David Thoreau and the Making of an American Theology’ and explore the sublime as experienced by our most careful nineteenth century observer. Lydia proposes that Thoreau indeed wrote theology with the world itself as the Sublime.
So be it.
Now we shall use Thoreau’s words to pray, recognizing that although humbled by the world, neither he nor our abstractionist artists, bathed in humility, exempting them and us from the understanding of our mortal friends. We will take this slowly to account for the stilted language and weird syntax of rhymed construction.
So in all humility and irony, let us pray:
Unison Prayer
‘Prayer’ by Henry D. Thoreau
Great God, I ask for no meaner [wealth]
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.
