Beauty Attracts: Constance T. Hull's Reversion Story

Beauty is to the heart as Truth is to the intellect; beauty to the heart is like food is to the body. Without a healthy diet, hope fades, the imagination is dulled,... and the body withers. Beauty is as necessary to living as air is to breathing. If there is any doubt about what that last thought means, recall the visual prison drawn by the Soviets in the previous century.

How Beauty Led to My Radical Reversion

by Constance T. Hull

https://catholicexchange.com/beauty-led-radical-reversion

Excerpts

When I was 28-years-old, I found myself searching ardently for God, but I had made some terrible choices. I fled a destructive relationship—for both of us—and moved to Washington, DC for the third time in 8 years. In the beginning, I wasn’t quite ready for Mass. I walked out of a couple, mainly because I was racked by the guilt of my sins. The weight was taking its toll on me.

I went to Bible studies at Protestant churches, but being raised reading St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle, it was impossible for me to deny the Real Presence of the Holy Eucharist. Logically, Catholicism always made sense to me. I was having a hard time living the requirements of the Faith. I hadn’t yet had a full encounter with Christ.

During this time, my friend and roommate suggested that I start going to Mass at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, which was only a couple stops down the Red Line of the Metro from us. She had a friend who was considering seminary and he went to Mass there. [...]

I decided to go with them and then we went out for lunch. [...] I made the decision that I would attend the Sacred Triduum that year. [...]

What happened on that Holy Thursday was the culmination of twenty years of God gently wooing me through beauty. When the Mass began and the priests and deacons began to process in while the organ and the choir filled the space with glorious music, I stood in utter amazement. There Heaven and earth met—as they do at every Mass—and I could see it. I was overflowing with joy. I could finally see what the Mass truly is and it changed my entire life. The beauty of the Liturgy was the culmination of all the years God had been calling to me through beauty. I could finally see the Divine Lover clearly.

This journey began with music and it reached its climax at that Holy Thursday Mass. I heard for the first time in my life Pange Lingua Gloriosi chanted. It pierced me at such profound depths that I thought I might die from the sheer beauty of it. St. Thomas Aquinas’ haunting hymn in its fullness being chanted in that sacred space while Our Lord was put in repose in one of the Blessed Sacrament chapels was the single moment when I truly accepted my Baptismal promises and made the decision to live as a Catholic for the rest of my life.

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Tradition has a vocabulary: amazement; beauty; joy; clarity; conversion; commitment. If we make available the Mass, and offer it beautifully, that is, with orthodox preaching, reverence and authentic sacred music, people will find God.

To return to the thought which opened this post, the human spirit in those lands behind the Iron Curtain was crushed by an anti-aesthetic, an anaesthetic. Socialist realism served the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union in the attempt to mould minds and hearts to promote communist ideology and to serve the state. Human spirits were crushed; human beings were crushed. Ask the guards who worked at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.

Even a dip of the toe in the socialist realist (anti)aesthetic pool will open eyes to the similarity between the hulking grey boxes built to accommodate the worker/citizens in Soviet Russia, East Germany and Poland, and the blunt, caustic "churches" into which many Catholics have been compacted for the past 50 years.

Thankfully, a slow turn toward beauty is accelerating among younger Catholics. This accelerando, this crescendo, is happening in spite of the active opposition of many clergy and lay people who, instead of serving the Mass, are attempt to retain power over the Liturgy. That grasp or noose around the necks of faithful Catholics is slipping away from the heterodox and being returned to those who understand the truth, goodness and beauty of the Sacred Liturgy. We may have entered a brief downturn in respect for Tradition, but the overall trajectory of renewal is one of ascent.

There is reason to hope, given the rise in number of restorative renovations of churches, and the number of new church projects that embody the true, the good and the beautiful. Such restored or new temples of glory are necessarily accompanied by or filled up with music befitting the sanctuary of God and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Why we should apply ourselves to serve Mass so that its beauty may be clearly seen and heard? No impediment to the grace which flows through beauty should be placed between the human heart and Jesus Christ.