The Way of Beauty
When we experience the loss of someone we love dearly, even after having taken time to grieve, everything in our lives can feel just a bit off.
I once had a chance to speak with a man whose wife had been dead for over a year. Taking over certain responsibilities in the home, like paying bills and doing laundry, took some time to get used to, but one thing that still felt so different happened every time he took his motorcycle out for a ride. This man and his wife were married for forty years, and during that time they traveled by motorcycle to almost every state in the country. The man grew accustomed to the feel of his motorcycle with his wife on it - her weight, her closeness behind him. Even though it had been over a year since she passed, the man still hadn’t gotten used to how different the experience was without her.
Even looking at photos of those who have died can feel slightly off; as we see our loved ones, we know that we had many meaningful memories with them, but the picture can seem hollow as we recognize the possibility of forming new experiences on this earth are now over.
I believe that there is a huge temptation to treat the statues, paintings, and other images in our churches in the same way.
We may see a crucifix, a painting of the Sacred Heart, or a statue of the Blessed Virgin and begin to think, “well, that looks nice,” but interiorly it feels the same as looking at a photo of someone long since passed. Instead of these sacred objects helping us meditate on a person or event, they merely become “sacred wallpaper” - doing little more than creating an aesthetic that feels “churchy.”
A significant contributing factor to seeing images in our churches this way is found in a limited scope of reality. If our worldview is so anchored to only what we can see, touch, taste, hear, and feel - even if we claim to be Christians - living as if heaven isn’t real, then it is no wonder that our churches feel more like museums than a place to encounter the Living God. Failing to develop an intentional and ever-deepening prayer life - that is, a relationship with God - narrows our capacity to have an eternal view of the world around us. Without this eternal perspective, heaven can’t exist - and if heaven doesn’t exist, then all of the saints and Christ himself portrayed in all kinds of artistic mediums simply become an opportunity to be nostalgic about something that happened decades, centuries, and even millennia ago.
Without an intentional and ever-deepening relationship through prayer, Christ and the saints become entombed in plaster, paint, and glass - leaving us with beautiful churches devoid of any life.
If we find ourselves in a church and everything seems so empty, what can we do? How can the great artistic treasures of the past 2000 years come to our aid in inspiring a life of prayer that is rooted in an ongoing relationship with our God supported by the living Body of Christ in Heaven?
I would like to offer three ideas:
First, ask for it.
This isn’t something that we can do on our own, nor is it something that we ask for once and then move on. Persistently and consistently ask God to take away the scales from your eyes that have dulled your heart to the beauty before you. Oftentimes, people become bitter and hardhearted, believing that God has abandoned them to a life of misery, yet all the while, they have failed to ask Him for any help at all.
Ask God for new eyes to see the beauty of the world around you, especially to see what will lead your heart closer to His.
Second, develop a childlike wonder.
In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
Chesterton sees the childlikeness of God that is excited to make the daisies bloom or every blade of grass rise from the soil. The freedom that God enjoys gives him this unlimited energy to avoid the monotony that we experience whenever we lose sight of what is good.
It can be so easy to take the things in our lives for granted - especially those things that seem so accessible or disposable. Yet, look at how the world wept as Notre Dame burned. Even those far from God were moved to tears as a place of great beauty that may have easily become part of the background of Paris was being taken away with no certainty that it could ever be restored.
As you make a more intentional effort to pray, ask God to help sensitize your heart so that you may see His workings in your life. Ask that your heart may be aware of how He is personally loving you each day. Instead of living with God in the background, ask that you can hear Him cry, “do it again!” into your life each day.
Finally, ponder His face.
Our God is personal - that is, you can have an intimate relationship with Him.
We can meditate on this relationship and be drawn deeper into it by seeing the art in our churches through renewed eyes. In 2002, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote, “To admire the icons and the great masterpieces of Christian art in general, leads us on an inner way, a way of overcoming ourselves; thus in this purification of vision that is a purification of the heart, it reveals the beautiful to us, or at least a ray of it. In this way we are brought into contact with the power of the truth.”
Even the crucifix, an image that seems so contrary to a worldly idea of beauty, we still find love. Ratzinger tells us, “However, in his Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes "to the very end"; for this reason it is revealed as greater than falsehood and violence. Whoever has perceived this beauty knows that truth, and not falsehood, is the real aspiration of the world.”
He continues, “The icon of the crucified Christ sets us free from this deception that is so widespread today. However it imposes a condition: that we let ourselves be wounded by him, and that we believe in the Love who can risk setting aside his external beauty to proclaim, in this way, the truth of the beautiful.”
Artwork in churches - especially artwork depicting Christ - is not meant to fulfill some kind of utilitarian checklist. Far from it! The statues, paintings, and stained glass are opportunities to encounter the love of God and meditate on the lives of those that know that love well.
We can ponder the face of Christ, reflecting on his loving gaze that pierces our hearts in a way that makes known his saving power in our lives. We can find inspiration and ask for the intercession from that “great cloud of witnesses” of the saints who have gone before us.
Let us conclude with one last quote from Ratzinger:
“Is there anyone who does not know Dostoyevsky's often quoted sentence: "The Beautiful will save us"? However, people usually forget that Dostoyevsky is referring here to the redeeming Beauty of Christ. We must learn to see Him. If we know Him, not only in words, but if we are struck by the arrow of his paradoxical beauty, then we will truly know him, and know him not only because we have heard others speak about him. Then we will have found the beauty of Truth, of the Truth that redeems. Nothing can bring us into close contact with the beauty of Christ himself other than the world of beauty created by faith and light that shines out from the faces of the saints, through whom his own light becomes visible.”