Chaplain’s Column
Beauty Revealing God
One way of discovering God is being aware of the beauty and goodness all around us. Beauty is irresistible for many people today and is a door that leads to God. There is so much beauty in nature and such things as art, music and in the many people who continue to shine with beauty.”
St. John Paul II said there is an upward impulse of the human heart toward what is true, good and beautiful.”
Many of us can probably point to an encounter with real beauty such as a movie that grabs hold of us, breathtaking music, or something so good, kind, or loving in human friendships, that a tear comes to our eye. Beauty has the ability to pierce our heart like nothing else.
Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles said “The encounter with the beautiful will naturally lead someone to ask, “What made such a thing possible?” He suggested a simple metaphor: when teaching a young person the game of baseball, a good coach begins, not with the rules or with tiresome drills, but rather with the beauty of the game, with its sounds and smells and the graceful movements of its star players.”
Growing up in Chicago, Bishop Barron is a die-hard Cubs fan. He said he played the game himself from Little League through high school. For him, he said “the love of the game came first. It was the smell of the grass, the “crack” that a cleanly hit ball makes when it leaves the bat, the “smack” of a well-fielded ball entering the glove, the combination of speed and cunning and power good teams have – just the poetry in motion of it all.”
Bishop Barron said “I’m an evangelist for baseball. You love something, and you want to share it. Something beautiful has seized you, and you think baseball is terrific, and you want to let people know why.”
Bishop Barron said “All people have a natural capacity to sense when they are in the presence of something remarkable, inspiring, ennobling – in a word, something beautiful.” He pointed to how human experiences of nature’s beauty, the joy of observing your sleeping child, the honor given to a soldier who sacrificed his life for his comrades and country, the haunting beauty of the second movement of Schubert’s “Piano Sonata in A major,” of indeed any created good or beautiful thing, and come to the conclusion that there must be an unequalled reality behind it all, ultimately, He whom we call or know as God.”
Beauty is for everyone and awakens in us the realization that we’re made for God, who is Beauty Himself. St. Augustine, in the early fifth century, famously wrote “Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you!”
St. Augustine mourned that he waited so long to yield to faith and baptism, but finally after discovering God’s beauty and truth, he burns for the peace and joy that only God can provide.
The world is wonderfully beautiful because we have been a part of it. We are created in the image and likeness of God and we are capable of recognizing the beauty that is within and around us. We are all beautiful in God’s eyes and he continues to reveal himself to us in all that is beautiful.
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