This past Sunday, I had Masses and parish visits in Boscobel and Muscoda, followed by another Mass at Camp Gray for young adult retreatants.
The beauty of the long drive left me joyful and grateful for God’s handiwork. Rolling hills, wooded bluffs, harvested fields, a glorious sun, lakes, and rivers, all combined to create a symphony of God’s remarkable creation.
The day was perfected with a glorious rise of the harvest moon. The order of creation, the fruitfulness of the earth, the wonder of trees, rocks planets, and animals led me to ponder the ongoing creativity of the Lord, as I observed His fingerprints on everything I beheld around me.
Appreciate the beauty
Because the world is so familiar to us as our home, we may easily become blind to its exquisite beauty and not even notice the glory of creation as we speed down a country road on the way to our destination.
But, if we never take the time to observe the nature around us, to contemplate the stars, to watch a sunrise, to observe birds in flight, or glory in the autumn leaves, we miss out on the wonder of the world.
If we only surround ourselves with man-made things, we will think ourselves to be the highest point and the only reference of importance.
God has made the world for us to enjoy and has charged us to be stewards of creation, as we read in Genesis. How telling that the author of the Bible uses Temple language to describe creation and priestly terms to articulate the role of Adam as the one who names all of God’s handiwork.
The world was made for the glory of God, to manifest His beauty, goodness, and wisdom, and thus, is the place we live, move, and have our being, where we discover our identity as children of the Father, our purpose to be the love of God and our destiny as eternal life in the kingdom of heaven.
God created good
The Catechism reminds us that God made a good and ordered world, made it out of nothing, upholds and sustains it, and made it all for us so that we could offer everything back to Him.
For this reason, the Mass has a cosmic element to it, as we use bread, wine, oil, and water in the sacraments, as the liturgical year imitates the seasons of nature, as the Church traditionally faced the rising sun in Her worship.
The Eucharist employs the gifts of the earth and our human senses to offer praise and adoration to God. Divine worship is our fundamental and primary human act.
Just as the world of nature is ordered, structured, and patterned after God’s Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, so too the ecology of human nature.
We can only understand the gift and mystery of our own life and humanity as a grace created by God and received in gratitude.
The wonder of our very existence, the relational nature of our sexuality, our fundamental orientation to communion with God and others, the moral truth of good and the destructive falsity of evil, the power and meaning of conscience, the sacred gift of freedom, and the imperishable nature of the soul are all parts of God’s plan for us as the crown of His creation.
As beautiful as the world is, how much more important is the beauty of the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, ordered to love the Lord as the very meaning of our existence.
The Lord commands us to build a civilization of life and a culture of love, one in which every person finds welcome, nurture, respect, and dignity, able to flourish fully as a beloved child of God.
Caring for the human community spills over into caring for creation, seeking to conserve resources, to find simpler and less wasteful ways to live, reducing pollution and environmental damage, finding a harmony which bears echoes of the original peace and beauty of Eden.
A soulless consumer culture only seeks to exploit, manipulate, and sate its own desires. God calls us to live in a stance of humility and gratitude, respecting His moral laws as well as His natural laws.
The wisdom of our Faith contains all we need to live in harmony and peace in this world and to be happy with the Lord forever in the next.
If the definition of beauty is “a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight,” we can clearly take note that God has made everything beautiful and that beauty is one of the sacred portals which will lead us to God.
In a culture which often misuses the beauty of human sexuality, creates piles of disposable products, seeks comfort at the price of authenticity, and celebrates a materialism with no spiritual base, our pursuit and appreciation of beauty in art and architecture, literature, and education, music and worship, compassion and service is a prophetic and healing action which contributes to a true, good and beautiful human and natural ecology, with God at the center of it all.