Salon: noun: a fashionable assemblage of notables (as literary figures, artists, or statesmen) held by custom at the home of a prominent person

Well, I would consider you notables, but I would not consider myself the prominent person!  Today began a gathering of artists to learn, discuss, and inspire.

For the past 2 years of missionary life I have neglected using the gift of craftsman as artist that God gave me.  When I was a first year missionary I met a student named Anna, an art major at George Mason.  She was working on a project when I, in passing, commented that “anything is art.”  She responded, “no it isn’t.”  “Yes it is,” I assured her.  She was right.  She, the student, planted a seed in this missionaries heart to learn the true purpose of art and beauty.  Why am I an artist?  What am I trying to say through my artwork?  Will it make an impact on the world?

This summer God inspired me.  Crafting is an infrequent event in my calendar.  I only touch my art projects about once a month so I knew that if things were to change then students must be involved.  Otherwise my missionary hours would not allow it!  Every Friday afternoon (beginning today) the art students will gather and discuss art and beauty and the amazing opportunity we have to transform our world with a little beauty.

For starters, we’ll go through Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II To Artists, the chapter on beauty in George Weigel’s Letters to a Young Catholic, and pieces of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Noble Lecture. Pumped!

Today’s seed for artists:  “…Beauty helps prepare us to be the kind of people who can be comfortable in heaven- the kind of people who can live with God forever.  Beautiful things and beautiful music draw us out of ourselves and into an encounter with a truth that’s beyond us, yet accessible to our senses.” George Weigel (Letters to a Young Catholic)

Art has turned into an expression of me instead of a craft to be mastered.  The product of the craftsman’s labor can elevate humanity to spirituality!  I hope we get there!

Are you interested in supporting me in my mission?

Visit:

http://focus.convio.net/goto/5291

“A need in the world meets a deep joy in me.” St. John Vianney

Hey y’all! As you may already know, I’m entering my 3rd year as a full time Catholic missionary through FOCUS, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, right outside of D.C.

During my college years at Troy University I was tested in my faith by the passing pleasures of the world. I was seeking love through the unhealthy lifestyle I was living, but instead I found loneliness, anxiety, and confusion. By God’s grace, I continued to go to mass even when I neglected to live out the Catholic faith day by day. At the climax of this life of disordered love, I sat in the Church in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and Christ revealed His love and Divine Mercy to me. The love of the world that I sought got me nowhere.  I finally recognized that I needed God, and that His loving embrace was the only way for me to be truly satisfied. Only a few months later I heard God’s call to be a FOCUS missionary, to give back to students that might be in the same situation I found myself in during college.

Hello world!

Hi!  Hello!  Chow!  Bonjour!  I’d like to begin my blog with words that are not my own.  This blog is about fixing our gazes on the Creator.  Whether I’m standing on a beach, talking with a friend, or doing my taxes, I hope to see God.

In 1999 Pope John Paul II wrote a letter to artists.  He quotes Cyprian Norwid on beauty:

“Beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work to raise us up.”

Oftentimes it is beauty that points me to something greater than myself.  Have you ever been struck by elegance floating off of the tip of a violin bow?  Have you ever forgotten yourself when you stepped into an ancient Gothic cathedral?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in Noble Lecture, wrote:

DOSTOEVSKY ONCE ENIGMATICALLY let drop the phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, elevated, yes; but whom has it saved?

There is, however, something special in the essence of beauty, a special quality in art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolute and subdues even a resistant heart. A political speech, hasty newspaper comment, a social program, a philosophical system can, as far as appearances are concerned, be built smoothly and consistently on an error or a lie; and what is concealed and distorted will not be immediately clear. But then to counteract it comes a contradictory speech, commentary, program, or differently constructed philosophy–and again everything seems smooth and graceful, and again hangs together. That is why they inspire trust–and distrust.

There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe.

A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them.

Perhaps then the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the dressed-up, worn-out formula we thought it in our presumptuous, materialistic youth? If the crowns of these three trees meet, as scholars have asserted, and if the too obvious, too straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, not let grow, perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will work their way through, rise up TO THAT VERY PLACE, and thus complete the work of all three?

Then what Dostoevsky wrote–”Beauty will save the world”–is not a slip of the tongue but a prophecy.