Pilgrim progress- a disciple on a journey!

For a thousand years, until the publication of the Imitation of Christ, the Confessions of Saint Augustine was the most common manual on the spiritual life.  It has had more readers than any of St. Augustine’s other works.  He wrote his Confessions ten years after converting, and after being a priest for eight years.  In it, St. Augustine confesses to God, narrating the writing addressed to Him.   St. Augustine admits to God:  “Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new.  Late have I loved Thee” (Confessions, Chapter 10). The text continues: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!  You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.  In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created.  You were with me, but I was not with you.  Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all....

A popular quote we hear but may find hard to understand is the phrase “Beauty will save the world.” It was Fydor Dostoyevsky, the Russian novelist, who composed this enigmatic phrase. However, when has it ever happened in the course of history that beauty had saved anyone from anything? Indeed, beauty had provided embellishment or has uplifted but how will it save the world? In today’s world, t here is huge pressure on people to look perfect and beautiful. From plastic surgery to smoothing skin and erasing wrinkles to enlarging muscles and slimming waists, airbrushing, or "photoshopping,”, the bombardment does not do much for self-esteem. These images don’t reflect reality, yet from a younger and younger age, people are aspiring to these biologically impossible ideals, dangerously so. These are distortions of truth. If only people would realise that for 2000 years, God has been telling each one of us that we are beautiful in His eyes because we are created in the im...

Over the past week in our classes in Liturgical Law, we have also discussed the concept of art and regulating artistic forms in churches and architecture. I thought I would share with you a paper which I wrote about 4 years ago on the theology of art and beauty in the liturgy. “Celebrate with dignity and beauty”- A theology of art and beauty in the liturgy Introduction: The whole notion of theological and liturgical aesthetics has gained momentum in contemporary theology, largely due to the work of such liturgical giants as Hans Ur von Balthasar, whose seven volume work Herrlichkeit (Glory of the Lord) heralded the opening of a new approach in twentieth-century thought. This new writing on beauty however, also reflected how little the liturgy of the Church is referred to and how feebly liturgical considerations enter into the fabric of the new theologies of the aesthetic.   It seems we are all drawn to beauty in some way, but we are not all moved by it to contemplate...