The Innate Drive to Possess
From a sermon by The Reverend Robert G. Hardies
Three months after I arrived in Washington, D.C., back in 2001, I paid my first visit to the Phillips Gallery in Dupont Circle to see a traveling exhibit of Impressionist paintings. It was about two months after September 11 and for me the art provided a welcome distraction from the horrors of the world. There was something about being in a room filled with great works of art — filled with the fruits of human goodness, rather than the spoils of our treachery — that restored some of my faith in humanity. But there was one painting that day that especially caught my attention: Vincent Van Gogh’s Roses, a portrayal of a vase of white roses on a green canvas.
Van Gogh has always been one of my favorites. His characteristic thick, swirling brush strokes convey a depth of feeling that never fails to move me. But this painting was even more exhilarating — the brush strokes somehow even more impassioned. Vortexes of white and green paint. Vortexes of emotion. Seeking some clue to the painting’s loveliness, I read the little card on the wall next to it. It explained that Van Gogh painted Roses from the cell of an asylum where he’d been sent after a nervous breakdown. He’d painted it not long before his scheduled release. In the riotous swirl of color you can almost sense both the delirium that landed him in the asylum and the frenzy of anticipation he felt as his release approached.
Van Gogh’s poignant yearning for beauty and for freedom struck a deep chord in me back in those dark days after September 11. The days when we, too, yearned for beauty. The days when we weren’t sure what horror might fall from the sky next. As a new minister I had spent a lot of time during that autumn caring for others, trying to be strong, often not taking time to ensure that I myself was being taken care of. Van Gogh’s painting is what finally gave me permission to grieve that fall. And I stood in the middle of the Phillips and I cried, and cried, and cried.
But my story is about what happened next. It turns out that the gallery that day was packed. Lots of people patiently waited while I sobbed, but I soon realized I needed to move on. Yet I didn’t want the experience to stop. I wanted the beauty, the healing, and the catharsis that I felt in that moment to last. I remember thinking, “If only I could take the painting with me.” Then I did what any red-blooded American does when seeing something he or she wants. I marched myself down to the gift shop and bought a copy of the painting — just a little postcard-sized reproduction — so I could take it home and remember the experience.
The next morning, I brought out the postcard to use as a focus for my meditation. But when I looked closely for those beautiful brush strokes of Van Gogh’s, they weren’t there. The reproduction, of course, was flat, completely devoid of the texture and passion of the original. I put it aside and closed my eyes and tried to recreate the previous day’s experience in my mind’s eye.
Savoring Versus Consuming
I’ve thought a lot about that experience over the years, about the healing power of beauty — but also about my response to the beauty. What I discovered that day is that there’s a powerful impulse within me to possess everything that I desire. To own it. To clutch it. To consume it. I look back now, and I’m appalled at how quickly my mind went from a posture of humility and gratitude for the painting’s beauty to an aggressive acquisitiveness. I took the moment and turned it into a point of purchase. Since then, I’ve begun to notice something of a pattern in my life — a tape that seems to go off in my head when I see something of beauty: “Gee, that’s lovely. Can I have it?”
I tried to analyze this. At first, I thought that this acquisitiveness might be, for lack of a better phrase, a “guy thing.” Perhaps this desire for control through possession was something that the culture bred into men especially. But I went to a woman friend of mine — a wise woman, someone I respect immensely — and someone who also happened to grow up outside this country. She said, “No, Rob. There are plenty of ‘guy things,’ but this is not one of them. It’s an American thing.”
Now, I have to admit that I usually get a little defensive when Western Europeans talk about the sins of America. But what she said next really hit home for me. She said, “Americans don’t know how to savor. They only know how to consume.”
Let’s face it. As a culture, we are probably better known for our consumption than our savoring. We are not known as the people who gladly linger over a delicious morsel of something; we’re the culture that shouts, “Supersize me!” We aren’t the people who are content with a little place to call our own; we’re the culture that builds acre after acre of McMansions. And the media constantly teaches us that we can buy the things that are most valuable to us. You know, we’re set up to believe that if only we could purchase that hot little sports car, we’d be young and attractive again. If only we could afford a weekend at that fancy spa in Sedona, then we’d be fully realized, spiritual people. If only we could get that SUV, then we’d have the freedom to roam the great outdoors. Have you noticed that all of the ads for SUVs are shot on some Alpine mountaintop? All the SUVs I’ve seen are stuck in rush-hour traffic on the highway with everyone else. We’re sold an illusion.
But it’s a powerful illusion that we’re being sold. It convinces us that somehow we have control over our happiness. Krister Stendahl was a Dutch theologian who taught for many years at Harvard Divinity School. He once wrote: “The colonialism and imperialism of the American mind thinks that the only way you can honor something else is to have it yourself. But to really rejoice in that which you do not have, that is what we need to learn.” To be able to savor something from a distance. To love, but not to possess.
Beauty and Commodification
It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that covetousness — the aggressive desire to possess things — predates American consumerism. In fact, the Hebrew Scriptures tell us that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with two stone tablets of five commandments each. They included many prohibitions we’re familiar with: “Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not take the name of God in vain.” They’re all prohibitions against certain kinds of overt behavior, except for one: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife and possessions.” In this case, the prohibition isn’t against an act, it’s against a feeling. When it comes to your neighbor’s wife and property, the commandments are saying, “Don’t even think about it. Don’t even go there.”
It’s instructive that of all the commandments, this is the only prohibition on a thought or desire. It speaks to the corrosiveness of this particular desire to possess. I think it’s an addiction of sorts, and like any addiction, it limits our freedom. It traps us in patterns of behavior that we have no control over. It diminishes our joy and our ability to savor grace and beauty. That’s the other thing that I learned about my experience with the Van Gogh: I learned that covetousness kills the beauty it seeks. The moment I moved from a humble and grateful reception of the painting to the desire to possess it, the painting’s ministry to me ended. The tears dried up. I was busy deciding what size print I should buy, whether I should pay cash or credit, paper bag or plastic bag: all of the familiar patterns of consumption’s addiction. Then I got home and looked at the painting and it had lost its beauty.
We are tricked into believing that if we own the things we desire, they will survive. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Beauty doesn’t survive commodification. There’s something ephemeral about it. Something delicate. The moment it is clutched, it’s destroyed.
Covetousness is especially tricky, because it takes something in us that’s wonderful — our love for people or for beauty or for truth, our desire for these things — and turns it into something destructive. It’s as though we’re the little child who has to be taught that when she holds the ladybug in her hands, she must hold it gently, or she’ll crush it. We sometimes unwittingly crush the things that we love. We want to possess them, when instead we should be savoring them. What’s called for here is almost a Buddhist ethic, an ethic of presence and mindfulness in the face of beauty, and at the same time, a kind of non-attachment. An ability to let it go. To let the beauty return at its own will, in its own time.
It turns out I was lucky. The Van Gogh that I saw that day was part of a traveling exhibition. It was just on temporary loan to the Phillips. What a delight when, a few months later, I was walking through the west wing of the National Gallery and found that its permanent home was right there. And so now, whenever I’m in a frame of mind like I was after September 11, I take a moment out of my day and stop in on the Roses. I sit down on the little bench they have in the Van Gogh room and, silently, I weep.
This kind of savoring reminds me of the lines from Wendell Berry:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
To rest in the grace of the world. To relish the beauty of things I cannot own. To savor, and not to consume. To desire, but not to covet. Slowly, I’m learning to love with a lighter touch.
The Reverend Robert G. Hardies is Senior Minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C.