Beautiful Faith

I once read a statement which said "the problem with what the Church teaches is not that no one believes that what we teach is true or good; rather they do not find our teaching beautiful."

 

I do think there are those who oppose the truth taught by the Church; on the other hand, probably the great majority of our society doesn’t even think about what we teach, instead they are indifferent. But the statement that what we teach is not seen as beautiful, this I understand as saying we don’t make the teaching of truth attractive enough: beauty attracts.

 

I see in Pope Francis a Catholic teacher who attempts to make the teaching of the Gospel attractive. I don’t mean that he waters down the truth or compromises it one single bit. Instead he speaks to the listeners’ imagination to help them understand the Gospel and how it is to be lived.

 

And Christ calls us to love, to a love which is "good, true and beautiful:" (to use the ancient philosophical ideals).

 

 

 

Saint Augustine says: "Beautiful is God, the Word with God ...

He is beautiful in heaven, beautiful on earth; beautiful in the womb,

beautiful in his parents' arms, beautiful in his miracles,

beautiful in his sufferings; beautiful in inviting to life,

beautiful in not worrying about death,

beautiful in giving up his life and beautiful in taking it up again;

he is beautiful on the Cross, beautiful in the tomb, beautiful in heaven.

Listen to the song with understanding, and let not the weakness of the flesh distract your eyes from the splendour of his beauty."

 

Listen to "Now I Walk In Beauty" HERE

 

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He Came to Lead Us into Beauty

"Good Shepherd" by William Dyce

At Christmas, especially, many Catholic Churches are decorated as beautifully as possible. Some Protestant churches are suspicious of such decorations, fearful that all that "stuff" will distract from a "pure" worship and focus upon God. Yet the Catholic instinct, as soon as the early persecutions ended (by mid-4th century), has been that beauty in our churches focuses and deepens our appreciation for God’s beauty, for we believe God is All-Beauty.

I have reflected upon this previously (HERE) and I believe it is part of the sacramental approach of the Catholic Church, shared by the Orthodox Churches and to some degree by certain Protestant churches, as well. 

This is how the Catechism (CCC#41) explains it:

 "All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfections of creatures - their truth, their goodness, their beauty all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently we can name God by taking his creatures' perfections as our starting point, 'for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator'."  (Wisdom 13:5)

I have studied the subject of "religious beauty" for a number of years now. It is quite fascinating to me. I remember once reading a certain Christian author’s critique of the Church’s preaching and teaching. He said, many do not dispute that what we teach is true or reasonable (though many others  would disagree); rather we have not made our teaching and preaching beautiful enough. Love should attract...

The late Pope John Paul II wrote about the "Consecrated life" of those men and women in religious orders, such as Sisters. But we are first consecrated by Baptism, so I believe that the Pope’s words can apply appropriately to all of us:

Saint Augustine says: "Beautiful is God, the Word with God ... He is beautiful in heaven, beautiful on earth; beautiful in the womb, beautiful in his parents' arms, beautiful in his miracles, beautiful in his sufferings; beautiful in inviting to life, beautiful in not worrying about death, beautiful in giving up his life and beautiful in taking it up again; he is beautiful on the Cross, beautiful in the tomb, beautiful in heaven. Listen to the song with understanding, and let not the weakness of the flesh distract your eyes from the splendour of his beauty."

The quest for divine beauty impels consecrated persons to care for the deformed image of God on the faces of their brothers and sisters, faces disfigured by hunger, faces disillusioned by political promises, faces humiliated by seeing their culture despised, faces frightened by constant and indiscriminate violence, the anguished faces of minors, the hurt and humiliated faces of women, the tired faces of migrants who are not given a warm welcome, the faces of the elderly who are without even the minimum conditions for a dignified life.

              Quoted in John Paul II, POST-SYNODAL APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION
                                        VITA CONSECRATA. March25, 1996: 24 &75)

For a long time I have seen that in our Catholic Faith, Beauty and Justice are partners in serving God. Beauty without justice (especially caring for those unjustly treated), could lead to an escapist aestheticism. But justice without beauty would be a diminished justice, since justice is to bring us into "right relationship" with  God, who is Just, Good, True, and Beautiful in his love. (To read more about this: HERE)

If we follow Christ, he will lead us as the Good and Beautiful Shepherd into his beauty and truth and empower us to work to restore beauty and dignity to people’s lives, the original beauty for which God created us. This is why he came into our world and why we make Christmas as beautiful as we can.

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God's Beauty

I was reading a beautifully written essay by David Scott entitled "God, the Hound of Heaven." (Citation HERE) Scott asserts:

"The Catholic believes that the Trinity has left marks of his kindness and omnipotence in creation, like a divine tattoo. ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’ said the nineteenth-century Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, perhaps the finest Catholic poet. Another poet of the divine, the sixteenth-century Spanish monk St. John of the Cross, saw vestiges of the Trinity everywhere:

        ‘Scattering a thousand graces,
        He passed through these groves in haste,
        And looking upon them as He went,
        Left them, by His grace alone,
        Clothed in beauty’

"All this beauty, all this power and glory, is meant to lift us up, to lead us deeper into the weft of the Father. We know with Augustine that ‘heaven and earth and all that is in the universe cries out to me from all directions, that I, O God, must love you.’"

I’m not sure when I first began to love beauty. I was not raised in a "cultured" family that appreciated art and fine music and nature’s beauty. It wasn’t that my parents were against such things, it was just that they were not raised that way.

We did go to the beach when I was a child and so I learned to love the sea and its beauty. And I was read to when I was little all these wonderful childhood stories and I eventually read the books myself and have always loved reading ever since. Reading opened wide my imagination. In High School I was enrolled in the College Preparation program, and so I was introduced to some classical literature at that time.

But perhaps I first began to experience beauty and its inspiration when I attended an Episcopalian Eucharist, which I would later learn was very much like the Catholic Mass. Having been raised a Methodist, at that time that denomination’s worship was based in very good songs and the preaching of God’s Word. Not much emphasis was placed on the visual and ritual.

That first Eucharist I attended, it enchanted me. The music was good. The preaching was good. But what I had never experienced connected to the worship of God was seeing a priest in vestments, praying over the bread and wine, and the deep reverence of that prayer and the reverence showed by those attending. I started attending the Sunday Eucharist in that Episcopal Church and I liked the ceremony, the opening procession with banners and the sense that this kind of sacramental worship had a long history. I would eventually trace this history back to the Catholic Church itself and so become a Catholic.

But from that first time, when I was still in High School, when I attended my first Eucharist, I discovered that God is beautiful and speaks to us in beauty.

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