Beautiful Writing Will Save the World

While spending time with my friend Megan Chalfant, a wonderful Catholic artist, a few years ago, I was introduced to the concept of art (including writing) as prayer. I understood that we as creators should pray over our work, dedicating it to God. But I hadn’t thought about how the act of doing the work God has called us to do is a kind of “Yes.” It’s a living out of our faith that is a form of prayer on its own. This realization sparked an elevation of my creative endeavors.

We chatted that day about many other powerful connections between faith and art/creation. It got me thinking about how we translate the concepts of God’s love and other eternal things into a language we can understand by creating. Since God made each of us unique, it makes sense that our expression of the truths we observe will take different forms than those around us. A sculptor, an architect, a community organizer, a musician, and a novelist will find vastly different ways to “say” the same thing.

Speaking God’s love into the world sounds a lot like evangelism, doesn’t it?

That day, Megan also gifted me a wonderful book produced by Likable Art called Created (In the Beginning God): Bridging the Gap Between Your Art and Your Creator. It opens with an admonition from Bishop Robert Barron to “Lead with Beauty.”

There is something unthreatening about the beautiful, which is what makes it so powerful as a pathway to God: first the beautiful, then the good, and finally the true.

Pope Francis focused on telling the story of beauty as a means of evangelism and as a balm for our souls during his message for World Communications Day in 2020. He emphasized that sacred scripture is the story of stories. It relates how God became story through his incarnation and how by becoming man, he made every human story a divine story. We can follow our Storyteller’s example as Catholic writers by sharing beautiful, good news.

Amid the cacophony of voices and messages that surround us, we need a human story that can speak of ourselves and of the beauty all around us. A narrative that can regard our world and its happenings with a tender gaze. A narrative that can tell us that we are part of a living and interconnected tapestry. A narrative that can reveal the interweaving of the threads which connect us to one another.

I love the idea of leading with beauty and regarding our world with a tender gaze. Because after all, as Dostoyevsky says in his novel The Idiot, “beauty will save the world.”

Beauty is powerful. But it is not always lovely at first glance. Dostoyevsky writes about beauty as “mysterious and also terrible.”  So while beauty often smooths our path to God, we aren’t called only to create easy-to-digest art or careful art that does not offend. Beauty can be found in suffering.

Authentic beauty… unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond. If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence. (From Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 Meeting with Artists)

Sometimes it’s exposure to a created work that reminds us of hard truths – our frailty, mortality, weakness — that ignites in us a longing for the eternal. Poignant art leads us back to what we would otherwise take pains to avoid – and it takes a sneaky route that we often don’t anticipate until it has already done its work in us. How many people came into relationship with God because they were drawn to the uncomfortable beauty of the crucifix? Or a hauntingly gorgeous old cathedral? Or the lives and deaths of martyrs?

As writers, we have the keys to unlocking truth through beauty for our readers. A well-written novel with compelling characters, for instance, can grow our compassionate understanding of a type of person we’d be hesitant to interact with in real life, and that “person” can teach us lessons that we’d brush off if the author wrote them plainly. And even better, carefully chosen, beautiful, illuminating words on any subject can point to the glory of the Creator who writes truth on our hearts and who declares that ours is a world worth saving.

Copyright Anjanette Barr, 2022