Water into Wine by Lisa Mladinich
A blessed Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows to everyone!
Today the meditation is the cost to our souls of being surrounded by the ugliness of modern culture. Without an appreciation for modesty and humility, a love of beautiful churches, sacred art, and sacred music, the winsome story of our salvation fails to take hold.
When beauty is categorized in vulgar terms, using airbrushed, scantily-clad models, and calls to self-importance and self-indulgence, we lose touch with our own God-given interior beauty and become seriously lost.
Without beauty, we lose touch with goodness and truth.
“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, from The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics: Seeing the Form
The Litany of Loreto
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In