From our Pastor’s heart 9/14/25

I am continuing my articles on the three lenses. We have worked through the word ‘commune.’ Why ‘in the beauty of the Lord?’ Beauty is a word that I think really sums up all that the Lord provides for us. Classically speaking, beauty is a perfection – it is when everything comes together ‘just right.’ It is when something has a harmony with the parts around it that it becomes obvious that that is what the thing was supposed to be; it fits just right. We talk about a beautiful baseball game or a beautiful building. We might say that someone has a beautiful soul or a beautiful smile. Our breath might be taken away when we see something in nature that is beautiful. Catholics believe that beauty is something that is really out there: it is not just in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is naturally attractive to humans. We are drawn to it and repulsed naturally by ugliness. I’ve never heard someone yawn in boredom at Mt. Rainier or not gag a little when they smell a dead rat in a trap a couple of days too long. At least, we can anesthetize, numb ourselves to the ugliness of another box-store strip mall that looks like nothing more than a garage, the banality of the thousandth CNN ‘breaking news’ piece, or the tiredness of the next TikTok trend, but beauty is always something that catches our eye and moves us towards a generosity of life. It calls us out of ourselves to something greater. Our jaw drops, and we sit still and recognize what is in front of us.

Recognizing beauty is also something that has to be learned. A three-year-old probably won’t recognize a properly cooked five-course meal if they’ve only ever eaten macaroni and cheese from a box! They probably can’t sit through a whole viewing of The Passion of the Christ because they don’t really understand its depth. For us adults, and to me, a moment where this happens is at the times I have gone to a concert, and everyone knows the song is over, but we all simply sit together to relish what just happened. I remember this exaltation of the heart at the last notes when I performed my last concert of Haydn’s Paukenmesse as a tenor in a college seminary. Recently, I heard Fisher’s The Passion of St. Thomas More for the first time while driving to Port Orchard, and I couldn’t help but be choked up by hearing it. A more homely example might be when my grandfather would say at dinner, “Well, it must be good, if no one is talking!” The golden hour, when all is lit up in the setting sun, is a moment where, when we catch it right, it makes us sigh with relief and at the wonder of what we are seeing.

In our Parish Family, I have already heard a lot from parishioners about the beauty they see in things in our Parish Family, like St. John Bosco’s Meditation Park, where there is an interplay between ordering the natural world and bringing in Catholic devotion, so that we see more clearly how everything is “charged with the splendor of God.” Lakewood’s natural surroundings, bounded by Steilacoom and the Sound on one hand and the many lakes that we call home, have a great amount of natural beauty. The Lord also wants to introduce beauty more deeply into the midst of a place of great poverty, suffering, and banality, where the ugliness of sin in crime and poverty is not in the town next door but might very well be our neighbor’s difficult situation. The Scripture speaks often of the beauty of the Lord and His temple. Beauty is the word that has been used to describe the totality of who God is and the love the Trinity invites us into.

Beyond Holy Communion, I have already seen some of the wonderful ways that parishioners commune in the Lord and His beauty every Sunday. I have watched our nocturnal adoration groups spend the entire night at St. Frances Cabrini as they echo the words of the psalmist, “better is one day in your house, O Lord, than a thousand elsewhere.” Our listening sessions will give us an opportunity to share deeply together in those ways that we have found ourselves communing in the Lord’s beauty – both in our own personal life of Faith and that communion with the Lord in our parishes as well!