With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon,
who could be unhappy?
~ Oscar Wilde
My friends, I hope you can be patient with me this summer. I have long, slow moving thoughts to work out here with you. My hope is to devote these summer columns to reflections on the transcendentals: beauty, truth, and goodness as they are brought forth through the nourishment of the artists, intellectuals, and professed religious within the Church.
The state of these transcendentals has been on my heart for many years. As a teenager, hunched over my books, I read Søren Kierkegaard’s lament in The Present Age: “what this age lacks is not reflection, but passion” and felt its painful truth sink into my bones. As an adult, I am seeing his words ring true again and again:
More and more individuals…will aspire to be nothing at all –
in order to become the public… all participants becoming
a third party (an onlooker).
Looking at contemporary Catholic spheres, Kierkegaard’s foresight is painfully clear.
Too often, we in the Church are undercutting beauty, truth, and goodness to prop up mediocrity and self-reflection. Instead of seeking inspiration from the richness of art, wisdom, and devotion, we diminish our inspirations until they’re lukewarm – easy to access and unchallenging.
Against Mediocrity
One of the reasons we are so trapped in this pursuit of mediocrity, is that we have been trained to see our daily life as dull and uneventful. We use language that diminishes the richness of each day. Suburbs are designed to minimize the grandeur of human existence, to distance us from each other, and reduce our opportunities to be amazed by the richness of the world around us.
Think of how different your day would feel if you saw yourself touched by these three aspects of perfection. If you saw yourself as inherently engaged in the pursuit of all the abundance of creation.
In the spirit of this rejection of mediocrity, I will be spending the summer months defending beauty, truth, and goodness as lived out in the artistic life, the intellectual life, and the religious life. Do these lives encompass all Catholics? No. Many of us aren’t called to be artists, intellectuals, or religious. That doesn’t make our lives less magical or inspiring; none of us are called to mediocrity. All of us are called to sainthood – but the important distinction is that our call to sainthood is to follow our authentic, actual call. Like Emily of Caesarea and Frances of Rome, many are called to a hidden life of married holiness.
A Certain Kind of Exile
This is a distinction we consistently reject in our contemporary culture. Not everyone is an artist, not everyone is an intellectual. And though many more people are called to a religious vocation than answer that call, we are not all called to religious life.
Some few, are called to be all three at once – Aquinas, Augustine – both artists in language – are two stunning examples. Hildegard of Bingen and Gregory the Great are others. Pope St. John Paul II is a modern example of someone who seamlessly marries these three callings. Many blend two of the callings: Leonardo da Vinci, Andrei Rublev, Fra Angelico.
In defending the uniqueness and exclusivity of these callings, I hope to encourage an increased love of the fruits of those callings in all of us. The transcendentals touch every life, but each of them has its ultimate vocation as well. Some of us are called to pursue that vocation. Others are called to engage with the “necessary others” in our midst: the artists, intellectuals and religious whose vocation is to show, teach, and pray – to pour themselves out for beauty, truth, or goodness.
Like the prophets of the Old Testament, these necessary others in our midst spring up from our families, parishes, and communities. When we make the effort to see and support their calling, we bring harmony to ourselves and our communities.
When we attempt to “level the playing field” – pretending that we are all artists, or intellectuals, or that thriving communities of professed religious are not essential to a healthy Church – that the laity can do “just as well” as the monks and nuns who have nourished the Church for millennia – then we are attempting to make our world a gray dystopia – where the beautiful are hidden, the strong weighed down, and the brilliant distracted so that no one can inspire or uplift his fellow man.
But genius – whether artistic, intellectual, or religious – is not so easy to contain. Kierkegaard warns us that genius is like lightning, forever bursting forth to inspire the world, no matter what limitations are put on it.
Let us, the Church, be such an inspiration. Whether we do so in the confines of our own home, or by living in such a way that the beauty, truth, and goodness in our lives stretch out from that cozy cottage at the edge of town and nourish the necessary others in our midst. At the end of life, it doesn’t matter whether we have achieved notoriety ourselves, or have merely been one of a thousand blessed images in the memory of others.
Summer Series
Those who feel eternity are
above all fear. They see in every night
the place where daybreak will occur,
and are assured.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
As I work through the vocations of artist, intellectual, and vowed religious this summer, critiquing areas in which these vocations have been minimized or mediocritized or divorced from the community at large, I hope you will follow along with me. I realize this is a bit of a divergence from my usual articles.
Beauty, truth, and goodness – essential properties of being. We all share them to some extent. We all long for them. In this series, let me raise up those who, through nature and calling, fulfill the almost prophetic role of bringing them to us in a fuller, more tangible way.
The post Those Who Feel Eternity: Thoughts on Beauty, Truth, and Goodness appeared first on Catholic Stand.
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Author: Masha Goepel
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