Inspired by Beauty | Rev. Beth Dana | 07.19.2026
Where do you find beauty in a world where so much is going wrong?
In this sermon, Rev. Beth Dana reflects on beauty as our birthright, and on the quiet spiritual discipline of noticing it, even in the overlooked and the discarded. Drawing on the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye and her practice of “trash walks,” Shoji Yamasaki’s performance project turning litter into dance, the letters exchanged between painter Sophia Peabody and her sister Elizabeth, and art historian Dr. Sarah Lewis’s idea of “aesthetic force,” Rev. Beth Dana invites us to let beauty open our hearts, to gather it where we find it, and to recognize the holy within so that we might see it all around us.
