Luceat!

I know how relentlessly busy the last few weeks of school can be as a student (or as a missionary!) It seems like one endless stream of important and urgent tasks and somewhere in the middle of that you must find time to eat, sleep, pack, and pray (well, maybe not the first three). However, as you transition out of this caffeine propelled hyperactivity, I have a challenge for you–stop and smell the roses. Literally, make time to encounter beauty in your life.

In FOCUS, we frequently talk about the true and the good. I think 75% of my conversations as a missionary end up at least touching on a truth of our Faith in relation to some intellectual scrap from a class or mentioning a moral issue. However, rarely do I make a point to talk about and share a third transcendental–the beautiful. I was reminded of this by two things recently, experientially by an afternoon at an art and jazz festival with a good friend, Jennifer, and intellectually by a wonderful article I was sent by my “concert buddy” in Washington DC.

The article, “Beauty Goes Underground,” mentions a test done by The Washington Post last year. They placed Joshua Bell (a renown violin artist) dressed as a street musician with his Stradivarius violin in a NYC subway tunnel and asked him to play. They wanted to see if people were so entrenched in their daily routine that they would not even notice the casual concert in the corner, an experience that would usually cost them $100+ a ticket. Out of over a thousand people walking by in the 45 minutes he played, only 7 stopped to listen, a crowd never formed around him, and he collected a meager sum of $30 [he usually plays for $1,000 a minute]. Interestingly, the article also points out that almost every child that passed him tried to stop and listen and get their parents to do the same.

As a child, everything beautiful made me halt in awe. I still remember admiring a single blowing leaf for as long as it was visible on the ride home from school, and I vividly recall spending hours searching through our gravel driveway to find small “gems” of quartz rock. What changed? Why have we become so cold as a society? Are we really so busy that we have no time for the beautiful and only care for the utilitarian and shockingly unusual?

I propose that we reclaim the love of the beautiful in our lives. In the article, John Murphy cites Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete as “formulat[ing] the relationship this way: without beauty, truth becomes legalism and goodness becomes moralism. Beauty is how we find pleasure in truth and goodness.” If this is true, and I would assert that it is, than it is not merely good, but also necessary that we take time to incorporate beauty into our lives. How? Well, I began today by listening to my favorite men’s polyphony group as I made breakfast. Soon after, I took a deep breath of fresh air outside to appreciate the weather God gave us. After Mass, I knelt in front of a beautiful statue of Our Lady in prayer today because she lifts my mind to Christ more naturally than the “superman Jesus” statue behind the altar. I took some time to read some of Pope Benedict’s writings. Later, I put a beautiful piece of artwork on my computer desktop.  And on my way home, I paused to admire a brand-new family of ducks swimming next to my apartment.  It is easy to end a day saying, “Life is BEAUTIFUL!” if you only take the time to smell the roses.

Lastly, a beautiful life is an attractive life.  We are all called to evangelization, and an essential part of that vocation is to show others through the way you live your life and view the world something about how God lives and views His Creation.  God is the creator and essence of the Beautiful.  Let that divine attribute radiate through your life so that you may introduce others to the Source of Beauty.