True Beauty

One morning several weeks ago, I was reading Magnificat (a daily Mass devotional), and in the Year of Mercy issue I found a wonderful passage which I thought my fellow creative souls would enjoy. It's by the Christian singer Audrey Assad.

Artists are deep - sea divers in search of a pearl to enjoy and display: whether or not an artist recognizes the ocean as the divine mercy of God does not change the fact that it is so. The mercy of God in art is apparent in the fact that our work may be imperfect or lazy or even bad - and yet there is something mystical in all art, because those who make it are looking beyond what is visible to communicate something invisible. 
It is an immutable reality that we live in a state of yearning. Art reflects that perhaps most poignantly, because the very act of creating it is a search: and in listening, we search to encounter ourselves, and perhaps there we may encounter God and his divine mercy. 

I love this - it warms my heart. It reminds me of a quote from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot which Pope John Paul II used in his Letter to Artists: "Beauty will save the world." When we artists search for beauty to refashion, we inevitably find the Source of True Beauty. We serve a God who cherishes us, who's our closest friend - may we always remember that, and may we continually fix our eyes upon His kind face, full of eternal affection for His children, to whom He says, "You are precious in my eyes and honored, and I love you" (Isaiah 43:4). May we revel in His lavish love and be perpetually joyful emissaries of His burning passion for the world in all our works of art.

Image: Madonna and Child with Lamb by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1893)