“Beautiful things expose us to the timelessness of eternity.”

Bishop Conley published an essay today, very similar to a talk he recently gave, promoting Beauty as the  most immediately useful among our means of evangelization.

God still speaks to these individuals in the language of truth and goodness. But their understanding is blocked by popular misconceptions—especially the idea that truth and goodness are purely subjective, and thus relative to the individual or group. “To each his own” or “who’s to say.” What Pope Benedict called the “dictatorship of relativism.”

Fr. Robert Barron, the Rector of Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary in Chicago, a theologian and great communicator of the faith, has lately taught that in the New Evangelization we must “lead with beauty.” Fr. Barron says that postmodern man might scoff at truth and goodness, but he’s still enthralled with beauty. He says that beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization, the point with which the evangelist pierces the minds and hearts of those he evangelizes. 

To say with the poet, “look up, look up at the stars” is to point to creation or even to an artistic achievement, invites the nonbeliever first to appreciate what is and then to consider the origin of that which is. 

In a cultural environment bereft of wonder, beauty takes on an even greater importance than it would otherwise have. Something in the experience of beauty is almost undeniable, even for the person who rejects the idea of objective truth or goodness. Beauty can get through, where other forms of divine communication may not.

Bishop Conley quotes a relatively unknown Hopkins poem above, The Starlight Night, worth considering below in its entirety. I think that as artists we all know that beauty costs. Pope John Paul said as much in his Letter to Artists. In this poem, beauty is the reward. Both are true for us, and the urgency is there on behalf of the many.