Second Sunday of Advent - December 7, 2003

            We have all seen and felt the power of beauty.  I first began -- as an adult -- to notice this power while I was traveling in the world, especially in Europe, where things used to be built first and foremost for their beauty and not for utility.  I have seen the power of beauty affect a crowd of people -- tourists -- as they made their way across a sunlit piazza chatting away mindlessly... until they entered the portals of a Cathedral, and there a hush descended upon them, and faces turned upward, drawn by a beauty, a beauty and wonder urging them to peer beyond this world.  I have watched it, this power of beauty, to do, strangely, something to the soul -- I have seen it in the faces of non-Christians standing in St. Peter’s in Rome before that exquisite statue of our Lady holding her dead Son, her countenance marked by a sorrow too deep for words; there the crowds stare at this sight, moved by something they can’t quite identify.  And in the rooms of great museums, people noisily tracing their way past works of recent vintage, only to arrest their chatter in the Medieval and Renaissance sections before scenes of sacred beauty.  Hushed by the  power of beauty.

            A Russian novelist once said that beauty would save the world.  It will; in a sense, it already has.  Because beauty -- rightly understood and appropriated -- is really nothing less than the Truth, Goodness, God, speaking to us, wooing us, through visible and audible, sensual forms.  Beauty is the communication of truth and goodness, a communication that calls to us across the threshold of eternity because truth and goodness are timeless.  Beauty is of God; for He is Beauty Himself. 

            Therefore we know where the glorification of the ugly comes from.  It is the product, the excretion of hell.  So the so-called celebration of the ugly, as we see in much of pop culture,  the pathetically shallow and stupid music of our times, the kitschy mindlessness, some of it actual glorification of the satanic -- this is no innocent and youthful pass-time but either the expression of depravity or the cry of a human soul starving for beauty, or both. 

            But just as there is a just and rightful fear of the demonic, there is also a mysterious and discouraging fear in modern times of beauty itself.  And there is a fear of beauty because there is a fear and a kind of aversion to what beauty calls us to.  There is, that is, a modern aversion to the sacred, a fear of the holy, the things in this life that remind us of our mortality and our true home beyond this world. 

            There is really no other way to explain how someone, with whom I walked into a most plain and utilitarian and ugly Catholic parish church, how he could say to me with a straight face, “Isn’t this beautiful?”  “Are you trying to convince me or yourself of that?” I responded.  But here, I’m convinced, what is meant by “beautiful” is really the word comfortable, or the non-disturbing, the reassuring.  Yes, we moderns have done what no one else in history ever did, ever tried to do, would never have thought of trying to do -- and that is to tame Beauty.  “Beauty” in the modern age has come to mean what makes me feel good, what especially makes me feel good about myself.  But real beauty disturbs us.  Have we not felt its power?  Are we (frightful question) still capable?  Those simultaneously felt intimations of sorrow and joy -- sorrow for a fallen world, seen so clearly as fallen in the light of beauty; and also, at the same time, Joy, joy surging up within us at the hope inspired in us by beauty, hope for a final restoration of all things.

            But why talk about beauty on the Second Sunday of Advent?  What has beauty to do with today’s readings, today’s Mass?  Everything.  Everything.  Because the readings are essentially about repentance, that change of mind we are called to that moves us away from the putrid ugliness of sin and evil and back toward God, God’s will, that is, toward Beauty.  It will not do for motivation to repent to just tell ourselves that “I did a no-no,” or that the consequences of sin are just so inconvenient (and they are, much more than just merely inconvenient).  No, we need a glimpse of what is promised to those who truly repent.  We need to be inspired by beauty and realize that through a refusal to repent we could lose, for all eternity, the breathtaking glory of what beauty promises. 

            Like the captives of Zion, in today’s psalm, let us too be brought back to our senses (yes, even our five senses!, so that we can again detect beauty, real beauty, and receive that inspiration we must have to repent and live the Christian life in the hope of what God Himself has promised us.  Let the small (sometimes overwhelming), signals of great and eternal joy reach us through our attention to God and His Word.  Let the radiance from beyond light up our landscape, not with a dream but with a glimpse of reality, that we who “were like men dreaming.... [but] then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with rejoicing” -- that we as from a dream, awakened by beauty, God’s voice to us, we turn our backs on what will only damn us and turn to what, to the One Who will make us blessed and far happier than even the most beautiful things of this world can even begin to foreshadow.