Leave Love with Me: Beauty and Justice, Love’s Color and Fragrance

By William Lawton and Stuart Piggin

Desire for beauty is at the heart of human existence. Some find this meaning out of their religious or spiritual perspective. Some find it at the edge of their traditions. And others find it outside any recognizable tradition. This book speaks especially to the second and third groups of people.
Desire releases us to explore difference, and to honor alternatives. Desire shapes our lives in unique ways. It centers our energies for personal and relational change, where difference can be debated, and variety permitted. We might transcend circumstances that limit us. Desire is more than "meaningfulness," it is captivation of mind and spirit to life's possibility. In my discovery, desire is an abandonment to beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666778748

William Lawton

William Lawton was formerly dean of students and head of the History Department at Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia. Subsequently, he coordinated street ministry among adolescent sex workers, and marginalized people while also being Chaplain at SECGGS Anglican School for Girls. He supervised PhD students in Australian social justice studies. For the next eight years he was national chaplain and ethics adviser with a major charity. This included visiting First Nations people in their communities.

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Author’s Preface

Love as Desire for the Possession of Beauty

Love’s goal is desire to always hold and embrace the good.

Our every deep-felt yearning shapes life to this end.

Love energizes desire, inspiring us to a lifelong commitment to beauty.

I sensed she was in the next room. Instinctively I called out to her. It was a repetition of more than half a century where we had lived in such close proximity. Both of us had treasured the fragments of distance that gave us private space. Desire stretched into that emptiness where only memory interchanges with imagination.

Though so much of life hangs on remembering, memory can be deceptive. It so persistently slides into imagination that all we can hold onto is the instant of sensation and decision. Everything was still in place, just as she had left it, mementoes of common striving and promising and loving. Every surface still held her touch—art she had bought, books she had collected, and drawers still filled with life’s collected trivia. Nothing was static; I could touch more than fifty years intensity of her presence. For that bare instant, I sensed her in the next room.

I had called out to her. Voice had no returning echo. I steadied myself: she is not there. No amount of platitude about her having only slipped away into the next room recovered her presence. She is not there. The very ordinariness of absence released me. She is not and never again will be present in any sense that I once knew her. She is alive to me only in memory and imagination and in the fractured steps of each succeeding day. The room is empty of all but longing and desire.

In these days of mourning, I can do no more than wait on the silence.

Endurance offers the merest window into that quiet space

the source of all being where God is said to dwell—Dominus est²⁰

Eternity is like entering an instant

between the gathering and crashing of a wave

breathless, waiting, anticipating, on the edge of discovery.

Time alone will show me if this is where I met eternity;

perhaps in my own longer journey I shall discover more than that:

but against the deafening sounds of my questioning

in this sufficient silence I ask our why with the Man on the Cross,

and leave the beloved there in the palm of the Crucified’s hand.

—WJL. This Sufficient Silence. The eve of Margaret’s funeral, August

25

,

2015

.

Margaret is silent. The room is silent. God is silent. The lips of the crucified are sealed. Memories ravage the spaces and emptiness; they surprise me with love’s passion. That intensity births and cradles imagination to will one thing, memory in absence. Memory’s recreative imagination shapes pathways into unanticipated experiences—a fresh universe of ideas, beliefs, dreams, and possibilities. Memory transforms desire that finds us tiptoe with a next possibility.²¹ Desire transforms self in a fresh life awareness of other that is graced by all the past has offered.²² This is rebirth. Each day offers fresh direction in life’s pilgrimage.

That long bleak evening, death surprised me with the possibility of life. Suddenly I burned with a fresh yearning. Memories of those long years together tumbled disconnectedly in my mind. They marked the ebb and flow of desire in both our lives—desire to achieve, desire to love and be loved, desire for courage, desire for change, desire for Presence. Death reminds us that desire still animates life: but, with no warning, grief overwhelms.

The loss does not cease she is not there; she has died: maybe God is not there; maybe God too has died. Life beckons into fresh discoveries. Life engulfs with beauty. Only from an empty room can we be reborn—and then, see self and other and God in changed perspective.²³ Something from this varied life awakens one constant—a desire to live in God, with a passion that surprises me. In this winter of my days, I awaken in the cold emptiness and with unbearable effort allow memories space to savor love. Through this anguish I am reborn. Love is desire for the possession of beauty—so leave love with me.

Desire is more than a need for human contact; it is urgency to belong and relate. As desire bonds us with life, so life’s choices multiply. Desire shapes with a sense of urgency, to know more, to feel more passionate about people and connections. Life’s adventurous reality, person-to-person, passion-to-passion, consciousness of self and other, are the grounding place of our awakening to transcendence.²⁴ A glimpse of beauty that reimagines the world transforms the pattern of our ordinary lives. We see, we touch, we share its passion.

Desire stretches imagination and urgency to belong there essentially—in our very essence. We are in constant movement towards the other, their difference awakening recognition and celebration. They are within touch but beyond full embrace: desire is a journey into a responsibility and engagement with the other that is total but never satisfied.²⁵ This journey so transforms desire, that in desiring the other’s good we discover our own.

This is not about filling the lack in the other but about self-discovery in relation to that other. "The essence of perception [is] that things are given through the flux of manifestation . . . This is a tension toward, an aspiration, and by no means a displacement."²⁶ We meet God there, present, engaged as intimate sense of belonging with person, event, and action. This is Life, our affirmation of being, our belonging and becoming, where everything feels held within Life’s embrace.

Beauty reveals Life’s possibilities. We glimpse beauty’s presence in an instant of encounter, and the distance between us thins. This experience is first intuitive: beauty’s embrace is spontaneous and instinctive. When we desire beauty, we allow others to shape their space and sense of destiny. Beauty becomes grace and giftedness. This is not our time or our right to demand that others conform to our self-image.

It was not till the early 2000s when a community services worker with homeless people spoke with me about Longing for the Other in the thought forms of Emanuel Levinas. As the years have passed, I have found myself disciple and critic, not precise enough to challenge the long trail of these ideas, but passionate enough to reread faith and values through the desire that opens each of us to our true self. This holds us responsible to that Other in our shared life. This is a passion explored throughout the text.

What follows in these chapters is about a world we partially know and people we sometimes meet and often avoid. We are implicitly there also, weaving our lives in and out of surprising situations, with places and people we could never have imagined ourselves to be. We are looking for presence that fires our imagination and fills our inconsequential moments with passion for discovery. We are always searching for a presence in absence, a yes when we so often hear no, acceptance when rejection seems the norm. The very ordinariness of life holds the potential for adventure and discovery.

These chapters are about this search for transcendence through life engagement. Those we meet in the tumble of life so often shape their words and presence with such love and honesty that the moment of meeting transforms us. Life—God if you prefer—has energized our whole being. These companions of everyday are the gift of that life. They have intersected with the broken fragments of our day, and we are so often overwhelmed by their love and companionship. They show us that management of self lies in the hard skills—conversation, positioning, space awareness, and willingness to listen.

Moral imperatives may steady us but when desire shapes as courage we become open to what is missing—freedom, moral choice, the willingness to reevaluate and, if necessary, a determination to start again. In the process, a startling vision of human possibility may awaken us. We meet in unconventional places. We are in the borderland of beauty. We are accidental tourists in contended territory.

These chapters are a small part of a journey into life discovery, where each of us, ordinary people of everyday, reflect a beauty that is the radiance of life’s wholeness. These fragments of experience taught me to see life as interconnected with the people and situations of every shared day. They are celebrations of love and companionship. They are the discovery of an inner life and a meaning for life that transcends imposed rules and dogmas. Of course we obey commonsense regulations, but our spiritual center, our bonding with the Other, frees us to be risk-takers. Love must always cross boundaries. Homeless people, sex workers, and ultimately First Nations people became companions in self-discovery. Only from such a wide room, empty of self-importance, can we be reborn, so leave love with me that the beauty of desire might continue to possess me.

Bill Lawton

Acknowledgement of Country

Today, I live and work on the traditional land of the Wodi Wodi and Yuin people. I recognize and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs, and relationship with the land. I offer my gratitude to their Elders past, present, and emerging for their care for, and teachings about, our earth and our relations. And I also extend that respect to other Aboriginal Language Groups and other First Nations. May each of us honor those teachings.

With respect also to Adam from Jerrinja Tribe—traditional custodians of the lands known as the Shoalhaven NSW. Adam approved the wording and spirit of this acknowledgement.

20

. Merton, Conjectures,

146

.

21

. Wang et al., Memory and Desire,

7

–

9

.

22

. Čapek and Loidolt, Phenomenological Approaches,

226

.

23

. Scott, Social Nothingness,

201

.

24

. Ellis, Meaning, Desire, and God,

302

.

25

. Smith, "Deleuze and Question of Desire,"

68

.

26

. Smyth, Review of Renaud Barbaras,

190

. Barbaras, Desire and Distance,

131

.

Introduction

Desire for beauty is at the heart of human existence. Some find this meaning out of their religious or spiritual perspective. Some find it at the edge of their traditions. And others find it outside any recognizable tradition. This book speaks especially to the second and third groups of people.

These chapters explore the inner life balance through beauty that transcends imposed rules and dogma. Beauty lies in the intersecting layers of stillness, curiosity, and desire, glimpsed through respectful relationships. When we desire beauty, we so refocus life that imagination expands our vision and challenges our self-absorption. Beauty evokes love as the essence of our humanity, and love shapes as justice that crosses social boundaries.

Prelude: Love as Desire for the Possession of Beauty

A glimpse of beauty that reimagines the world transforms the pattern of our ordinary lives. Beauty’s return embrace is spontaneous and instinctive. We see, we touch, we share beauty’s passion. There is no demand to conform. Each other of daily encounter is free to shape their space and sense of destiny. This adventurous reality, person-to-person, passion-to-passion, consciousness of self and other, is the grounding place where beauty is our awakening to transcendence.

Chapter 1: Desire for Beauty lies at the Heart of Our Search for Meaning

We sense beauty because we inhabit wonder about an expanding universe of sight and imagination. The starting place is to love yourself and so to liberate your passions, your yearnings, your sense of wonder. Enter the inner chamber of the heart where prayer has no words, seeks no wonders and signs, asks nothing but a purity of heart that wills one thing. Only by being agents for change can we face life demands with courage that takes its inspiration from beauty and truth.

Chapter 2: Desire and Curiosity about Ourselves

Desire awakens us to curiosity about self and prompts us to explore difference as the exciting texture of life. We begin to see beyond color, creed and gender, and sexual stereotypes. Curiosity opens us to values and lifestyle alternatives and to tolerances about difference. Curiosity stimulates desire’s persistence in shaping how our lives will remaster in the years ahead.

Chapter 3: Desire for Presence

We are part of a cultural revolution in human rights, social justice, environmental protection, politics, education, health. Change impacts every social system and the entire ecosystem. Individual choices may lead us in utterly different directions, but the desire that drives our lives is fundamental to our shared humanity. We become companions somewhere never traveled before, gladly reaching beyond desires’ expectations. And there, we grasp the beauty that lies at the heart space of shared humanity.

Chapter 4: Desire for Beauty as our Inner Creative Awareness

Beauty lies less in what we see, and more in what we each are becoming. We find a harmony of being as we step out of our concealment into each other’s presence and touch. Life, face-to-face, demands energy, commitment, imagination, and a willingness to converse from the depth of our humanity. Love, justice, grace, and mercy transform a religious community. They shape a generous affirmation of people from backgrounds different to our own. Beauty is unattached . . . Beauty is an awareness in the mind.

Chapter 5: Desire as Reflex of Imagination

The power of public schooling and the influence of classically trained teaching can transform adolescents into creative, passionate adults. They stretch our imagination into alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Imagination, as the foundation of the artistry of life, releases desire to own who we are and who we sense ourselves becoming. We are not bound by necessity but freed by possibility.

Chapter 6: It Takes Resilience to Become What We Most Desire

Resilience is about living with the radicalism of change. The world we are part of questions our long-term human survival, and our well-being as part of the biosphere. Resilience is the determination to embrace opportunities arising from these crises that will teach us how better to cope with change. Resilience has a contemporary social focus with life issues about ecology, black rights, white privilege, social exclusion, and heterosexism. Each of us must question where these interpret the most fundamental values of our corporate and social lives.

Chapter 7: Mixing Memory and Desire: Manhood’s Journey into Wholeness

This chapter contributes to Cold War memoir about adolescent commitment to left-wing politics. It engages a dependent conversation about changing experiences of manhood/masculinity from the 1940s to the present. The traditional markers of manhood were challenged as the exclusive rights of men. In this self-discovery, men need urgently to listen again to the inner voices, often from childhood, that counseled compassion and engagement with others—to be a father to themselves.

Chapter 8: Desiring The Stranger—A Pathway of Discovery where in Depth the Self Gains Breadth

This chapter recounts two personal interactions from a year of travel among First Nations people. It concludes with a brief experience of Louis Farrakhan’s America’s Nation of Islam, the impact of mainstream Islam on Indigenous Australians, and its challenge to Christian white supremacy. The reader is invited to share this journey and to reach beyond personal boundaries. Our thoughts, like our lives, need to be decolonized, the whole self rediscovered.

Chapter 9: Unbind Desire: Swing Wide the Doors of Your Life

This chapter explores the surrealist ideal that desire can liberate each generation to build relationships that offer dignity, hope for the present, and a future urgent for radical transformation. Let the doors of your house swing wide . . . unbind your desire that you might share your life dreams with those closest to you. We daily open to life’s alternatives. We awaken to a persistent awareness of beauty that can liberate our thoughts and actions to love more generously.

Chapter 10: Desire for a Different Way of Loving

In our many-phased, complex life, we open space for conversation, for nonjudgmental listening—a space where the other can share their life wisdom. This is inner space now prepared to feel the emotional stress of another human being and to steady our own. We interrupt our busyness and self-focus. We take a journey that no longer holds us to past loss and tragedy, where love as the involuntary giving of oneself can become the quality of all aspects of shared life. We have become open to a different sort of loving.

Chapter 1

Desire for Beauty Lies at the Heart of Our Search for Meaning.

Desire is the energy of life. It awakens every passion, every sense of beauty, every hope for life fulfillment. Desire is the urgency of our yearning and our creativity. It is a primary life value fundamental to religious faith and to how each of us might reach across social division. Desire releases us to explore difference, and to honor alternatives. Desire shapes our lives in unique ways. It centers our energies for personal and relational change, where difference can be debated, and variety permitted. We might transcend circumstances that limit us. Desire is more than meaningfulness; it is captivation of mind and spirit to life’s possibility. In my discovery, desire is an abandonment to beauty.

The story that follows is defined by the life energy of a close on twenty-year experience as a priest-­academic working on the edges of contemporary city life. This meant daily intimacy with street people, sex workers, and, in general terms, homeless and sometimes abandoned people, along with passionate community carers, social historians, and social analysts. There was no place here, from any of us, for conventional hand­-down help.

Desire is a fundamental theme in what are commonly called Abrahamic religions and in Buddhism—and, without tediously naming further, to most long-standing religious belief. But interpreters of each almost always warn against desire. In varying degrees, they stress that desire must be sublimated toward some greater ideal, union with God, or purity of soul. The following text parts company here—desire is the urgency of the soul, the mainstay of life. To that extent, desire is our personal, vital engagement with beauty. Beauty expands our consciousness of the world around us and so beauty is liberated from mere experience. To see and to think beauty is to be self­-transformed.

When we desire beauty, we so re­focus life that imagination expands our vision and challenges our self­-absorption. We enliven to another possibility; even the trivial, the least brushmark of beauty, holds attention. Beauty is more than a romantic ideal, and more than an aesthetic impulse that stimulates and expands collective ideals. Beauty abounds in life’s complexity, in its possibility and disappointment, in its anger and exaltation—emotions are in full play. We sense beauty because we inhabit wonder about an expanding universe of sight and imagination. Desire for beauty is at the center of our search for life’s meaning.

This needs more than straight­-line thinking—we have no option than to re­vision our everyday world where conventional values so often provoke and sustain human suffering. We live the ambiguity of expanding our life discovery into an alien space and being transformed there. Here, a journey with the poor and dispossessed offers back more than we might otherwise think possible. Desire for beauty motivates justice. This journey begins with tension, often fear that our self­-focused values will isolate us. This is not so strange an experience: each of us takes this path with life partner, with children, and with friends who stand close to us all our days. Their presence is transforming.

Through face-to-face encounter with the Other, we learn to sense the sacred in people and situations. This means we deal gently with ourselves and with those we meet. We are on sacred ground where who we are and what we search to become is on display. So, we learn to listen with imagination and compassion.

—Diary note, August

5

,

2015

Beauty shapes in ways not imagined: beauty has a human form, beauty offers a pattern for human destiny, beauty surprises us with all-of-life mind-teasing discovery. Beauty makes us question who we sense ourselves to be—everything about life is in flux. A burst of beauty into our conformist lives can drive us to search for what lies beyond every question; this is our whisper of transcendence. It awakens awe and inspired energy.

Desire for beauty is the high point of any culture that honors how to value others in the world around them, and how to value ourselves. Desire for beauty expands how we experience our shared world. It offers an intensity of presence—something or someone has bonded emotionally with us. This is beyond the visual; our sensitivities to life have been awakened by interactions and experiences with an utterly different other. Beauty, as the passion and birth­child of desire, persistently re­creates us.

This search is for more than beautiful objects or people: yearned-for beauty reaches beyond gaze that objectivizes the other’s appearance. To see beauty in each other, and in our divided world, we need the fresh space of that other’s presence that enables belonging and mutual discovery. Beauty has a face and a name.

Beauty is the revelation of the soul to the senses. To offer beauty is our life gift. Beauty fires the creative imagination; it awakens impulses and energies deeply embedded in our history. Beauty is a radiance that searches beyond each life experience for wholeness and harmony. It is our search for order and its energy captivates every creative imagination. Beauty lures love beyond sensuous delight. Human history inscribes how profoundly our ancestors understood God through beauty.

Beauty face­-to-­face can open us to deep inward encounter, a sense of presence. We meet in the place where friendship uncovers secrets and awakens hope and joy. Desire for beauty can also become a life practice and, if we have a mind to journey there, beauty can be the centerpiece of a religious commitment. With desire’s awakening, religion can be a trace of beauty in the human search. Religion then becomes a passageway from emotion to a wider embrace of life discovery. Because beauty as transcendence is the goal, this space of meeting does not encourage interdependency. One’s self meets one’s different self, and that self shapes into the likeness of what each yearns for.¹

Meeting face­-to-­face takes us beyond trivial encounters to sense the divine presence in every ordinary event and to value every person as shaped in the divine image. Yes, every can seem a journey too far when the event or person turns out to be enemy, but at that place Jesus asks the transforming question: how do we greet the enemy with love?

—Letter to a friend, January

1

,

2013

At such a centerpoint, beauty awakens us to strive for each other’s good. This growing life balance embodies shared desire; beauty empowers self-transforming commitment to each other’s essential life yearning. This is not bonding through attachment; it is discovery of our other self. Beauty is the whisper, perhaps the promise, that this otherness is our instant of transcendence. Beauty like this is also sensed in altogether earthy things. That bonds beauty with our search for truth; it exalts truth beyond what is verbal and cognizable.²

Seeing and Meeting Beauty in People and Things around Us

The stories that shape these chapters draw from experiences—they are who I am, perhaps more accurately, who I remember myself to be. Some days, the best I can manage is holding on, trying hard, almost there. But even these uncertainties and self-doubt have not dimmed seeing beauty and strength where I never expected to find them. It is like a conversion or sudden turnaround moment. I find myself shocked by my waywardness, my fragility, my uncertainty about life definitions and moral judgments, yet, in that instant, can feel and live reconciliation. What surprises me most is that this inverts self-­negation: life awakens to human companionship, openness to the world around us, and desire to explore things beyond our control.

Ken moves awkwardly on his walking frame, managing hallways and doorways with difficulty. Pause a moment and you sense the stature of the man, purposeful, dignified, and passionate about the world around him. With surprise, you watch him trawling the rubbish bins, sorting soft and hard plastics, and shifting bottles into a large hessian bag attached to his walker. He mentioned matter-­of­-factly that, in the four months since Christmas, his recycling had earned him $1,000. Other people added, not at all matter­-of­-factly, that he had donated every cent of this money to providing additional services in the attached nursing home. Dismissively, he calls this his daily exercise, but we know that he is fired by an embodied desire that reframes his dreams into reality. What he does seems to reflect who he actually is. He lives the consequences of the choices made by his confined living in this aged care facility. And because others’ needs are in view, his life is marked by generosity: energy for others is the most obvious quality of his life.

I watch this and recall the many community service appeal stories that begin with accounts of the other’s loss, panic, and depression, and how our gift will bring change. The charity worker tells a story from a worldview shaped by giving from our bounty to another’s desperation. This has long­-term outcomes in view. We, as observers, are urged to give from a generous heart. I am certainly not undervaluing this, but the street called Margaret and me to attentive listening, something much more committedly personal. Simply being present is critical to the instant of crisis. The street was our shared heart space where life must be embrace before it can be gift.

Let me set these contrasts more personally. The street was our life-­changing experience. The diocese took over our street outreach center and sold it to a more public power group. We needed to recommence with another property—and find the means to pay for it. So, blame and protest brought community and international support—free commercial coffee, a kitchen professionally and freely provided, and money from friends around the world. The classic charity storytelling of making lives better brought success and our gratitude for others’ generosity. Powerful stories like these make headlines—and they provide ongoing resources for more powerful outreach.

But our community knew it must offer more than this. Our role was to reach beyond helping others to entering life with them. This street work was about living our shared humanity. It was more than grand action; the street was where we made community with others. Hardship and loss stories from here are harder to tell because they belong to other people and my telling of them is only secondhand. Some stories are so private I can only hint at them—they come from a broken heart that cannot be mended. Some stories come from life’s ending and life’s losses. We needed to so unbind desire, to break its net, if we were to engage desire’s higher goal of generous unrestricted love of other.

We continue to pray that love will be born,

that compassion will transform our meanness and self-interest,

and that involvement with people will teach us of the essential beauty

in each soul, before loss, pain, violence, and cruelty crush the spirit.

—Margaret Lawton

She was barely into her twenties and addiction held her as a street working girl. While she worked the streets her only friends and supporters were a small group of street workers, community carers, a scattering of nuns, and members of our street café. Most of us only knew her by her nickname but she was a fairly regular attender at our drop-in center—the one the diocese closed. Indeed, it was on the eve of closure that her life spiraled out of control, and she was found dead in a laneway. At death, her family finally owned her and arranged a lavish funeral in a provincial cathedral. None of us were invited, so we planned our own celebration of her life. We asked permission to use our street café for one last time. Our small diverse circle held hands, shared memories, and sang a simple made-­up song about love and peace. Each of us touched our desire for a love that would bind us through life’s darkest moments and so we prayed for peace—her peace and ours.

Peace is a promise or pledge word; it draws across the boundaries of difference. Peace stands in the trenches with others—it nurses their wounds. Peace stands in no-man’s-land seeking to bring warring parties together. Peace is the gift and presence of the courageous and generous-hearted. Peace is the essence of a contract to serve humanity. Peace is the energy of friendship. Peace draws us to an inner vision of what it means to follow in the steps of someone who lived from the energies of God and offers that same pathway and goal.

—Diary note, December

21

,

2013

.

This was a time for belonging, where desire, a deep desire, filled body and mind and bound us to each other. We need the touch of another person, we sense their presence, we listen excitedly for their voice. And when they are absent or lost to us the grief is unbearable. This is the heartbeat of desire where our life enfolds with another.

The mentions here of the diocese as power structure were intentional. Yes, it was as a cover barely concealing anger and disappointment, ­­but it also helps draw a wider conclusion. The external pressure might have been any power group making decisions about the best use of property and the larger advantages of sale. We came from a different place. We needed to affirm the centrality of justice as the key measure of our small community and, at the same time, our willingness to let go of ego. The center was a means, but finally only people really matter. Only here in mutual service and affection do we discover the depth of each other’s life and struggle. As best I am able, hints of their stories will also be told—but gently, all life is sacred.

Seeing