Many years ago, before i even came into the Church,  I joined a brand new parish community, which i am still a part of today. This parish started out meeting in peoples homes, then in a small single building, then a high school, and today, we are STILL building this Church. Something really special and sacred about sticking w a community though the growth of a new parish. Lot’s of grace is needed and offered for those who commit to His plan.

Within a few weeks of completing the first building, an anonymous donor gifted the parish w a beautiful Mary statue for our courtyard. It was powerfully beautiful, bright and greeted parishioners as they pulled up to our parish. Our parish priest, upon receiving it, decided to consecrate the entire parish community to Our Lady. He didn’t know that on the same day he dedicated our parish to the intercession and guidance of Our Blessed Mother,  that someone would come in the night and desecrate and vandalize it so badly, that Her face would become marred with hate. This sent out a sad and angry ripple out into our parish. For many years, we continued to see this marring on Our Lady’s statue until  recently, when she was restored to the beauty intended by the artist.

This hate for the beautiful, takes on many forms…pornography, self mutilation, and the desecration of our bodies though abuse are an example of this. God gives us our temples of the Holy Sprint, beautiful and chosen. Let’s look at marriage and family today… one of the most beautiful gifts from God, but torn apart by the enemy with division, perversion, and abandonment.  We are children of God, beautiful, bright, and yet we let go of this identity and choose the dark. This sends a sad and angry ripple out into the world.

Pope John Paul II quoted the line in his Letter to Artists, under the heading “The Saving Power of Beauty”:

“People of today and tomorrow need this enthusiasm [of wonder] if they are to meet and master the crucial challenges which stand before us. Thanks to this enthusiasm, humanity, every time it loses its way, will be able to lift itself up and set out again on the right path. In this sense it has been said with profound insight that “beauty will save the world” (§16).

This quote, Beauty will save the World comes from a book titled The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. At the beginning of the novel, the central character Prince Myshkin is shown a portrait of a young woman named Nastassya Filippovna by a Madame Yepanchin, his hostess. She holds Nastassya in contempt because her moral reputation is tarnished.

“So, you appreciate that kind of beauty?” she asks the prince.

“Yes. That kind—” the prince replies with an effort.

“Why?” she asks.

“In that face—there is much suffering,” he says, as though involuntarily, as though he is talking to himself.

“Beauty like that is strength,” one of the other women in the room angrily declares. “One could turn the world upside down with beauty like that.”

Dostoevsky once wrote in his Notebooks, “Suffering is the origin of consciousness.” A novel like The Idiot could only have been created as the fruit of the author’s personal sufferings. If you have heard my story, you know i know just a tad about suffering too. We have all suffered, yet do we join together in the victory of the suffering?  Can there be a resurrection without the crucifixion?

The beauty that will save the world is the love of God. This love germinates, flowers, and comes to fruition only in a crucified heart. Only the heart united with Christ on the Cross is able to love another as himself, and as God loves him. “To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.” Isaiah 61:3 KJV

The fight for beauty is a true battleground of the soul and intimately linked to the crisis of faith.  As an artist and speaker, i have a unique position on the battlefield. I not only share the art that healed me, i share the testimony of the One who heals.

Recently i have been painting Sacred Hearts for the beautification of this suffering and to help unite homes and families to +JMJ+ Sacred Hearts through home enthronements.  Through these works, God continue to remind me that “you can’t create without dying.”

And the dying is so sweet when we do it here on earth! When we offer up our small sufferings to the Lord and for His use, they become a gift of love.

Taken from A Daily Pilgrimage to Purgatory….

“Holy Souls in Purgatory, is there anything you regret when you think of your life on earth? I deeply regret my neglect of acts of mortification. How easy they would have been on earth, but how difficult they are now in Purgatory. Here the smallest suffering is more poignant than the most cruel torments on earth. In the world it meant only patience and resignation in the hardships and adversities of my life; it meant only giving from my surplus to the poor, and devoting myself to works of atonement; it meant only gaining Indulgences and performing works of piety. Nothing could have been easier, and my Purgatory would have been shortened considerably. If God would but grant me the grace to exchange the years during which I must still remain in this place of sorrow for as many years of life on earth! No commands would be too severe for me; no pains could frighten me; the most difficult works of penance would be sweet and give me comfort at the thought of this consuming fire. You who now smart under the insignificant trials and hardships of this life! You who now earn your daily bread by the sweat of your brow, rejoice! The smallest suffering endured in the spirit of atonement and offered to the Sacred Heart in the spirit of expiation, will save you from a long and painful Purgatory.”

So will beauty save the world? When we suffer for the sake of it, it will. Just look at a crucifix.