Sermon for Blues

I have a thing for blues. 

Long before I ever read Maggie Nelson’s incomparable book, Bluets, I was sure if someone could unlock my soul and paint its portrait, the outcome would be something like the middle panel of Rothko’s No. 61 Brown Blue Brown. 

Nelson writes that standing in front of an Yves Klein painting, she thought, “Too much.”  Despite her deep love affair with blue, ultramarine was too much, a kind of blinding that comes from seeing your own image reflected back at you with so much force. 

Not me.  I like ultramarine.  I love its delicious, cold-cock shock, like when the sun ricochets off reflective glass.   

And today, in Houston, I sit inside a circle of blue trees with their spinal cords painted electric blue.   You’d think paint might ruin the trees natural beauty, but instead, it’s like the painter saw them as they actually are instead of how them seem to be.  Touched by blue this way they look more like themselves. 

If I listed all the things I love that are blue—the North Atlantic sea, bluebonnets, veins, Byzantine frescoes, bruises, the skies above football stadiums, my brother’s birthstone, the eyes of the first boys I wanted, the earth from space, Linda Rondstadt’s voice singing Blue Bayou, my country’s coasts, the people I love most, iolite and lapis, and now this chapel of crepe myrtles in the middle of my city—I would never stop.

I’ve tried several times to write about a moment I experienced with blue.  It was seven years ago.  I was in the Natural Science museum in New York with my brother, in the butterfly room.  At the time, I was a little lost, heartsick and angsty, a woman without her skin.  I heard him gasp, my brother.

“Wait, Casey” he said and grabbed the back of my shirt.   “Wait.  Just watch.”

He pointed at a butterfly that perched atop a branch, it’s wings folded, closed.  Their tissue paper skin a dull, soupy brown.  He reached out his finger after a moment and lightly ran it down the butterfly’s underbelly.  It opened its wings, and I gasped too.

A quick one-two of blue, blue like nothing I’d seen before.  That color a whisper in our ear: where did you think you’d find me? 

Brown. Blue. Brown.

These are the moments that save us.  That a God might have my brother, a swimmer, who in water used to move through the blue with inhuman grace, like a creature with its heart aflutter, that a God might have my brother unlock it for me.  The Blue Morpho.  A sea of trees.    

A resting butterfly’s wings resemble nothing if not two palms pressed together in prayer.  And when they open—that flash of blue—if it’s not God then it’s at least a hint at why we created one.   They say you can tell a lot about a culture by the Gods its people invent.  And perhaps Voltaire was right.   Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.   

Spirit-flutter, soul-burst blue.  I want to live and die inside you. 

Amen.