Where Hope and Beauty Meet

Homily for the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The thought occurred to me that while we critique the secular world for its materialism and its reductivism and its obsession with feelings and sense experience, we Roman Catholics can think the same way about our churches. We have standards for our churches. We want them to look a certain way. We want our churches to feature liturgies that strike us a certain way or meet certain needs that we experience or satisfy particular longings of our human hearts. We care about our churches, and we care about our liturgies and with the secular world we can place much value in aesthetic experience: The beauty of a work of art, the beauty of a building, the beauty of a song, even the beauty of a liturgy.

What I want to say is that a work of art that does not reveal something of the truth and goodness of God is not really beautiful. And there is a way in which we could say that any work of art that is genuinely beautiful necessarily reveals something of the goodness and the truth of God; that’s how beauty works. Maybe we need to do some heavy lifting with our thinking or contemplation, but if it’s beautiful, we can make the move from art to God. But the measure of real beauty is the extent to which the truth and goodness of God is revealed through the very life of a work of art. And that is what sets churches apart from whatever other kinds of art that are out there in the world. Churches, when they are meeting the standards of real beauty, are possessed of a life, a life that is revelatory and that tells us viscerally and tangibly something that we need to know about who God is and how God lives.

The Basilica of the Assumption is a church that is possessed of a life that is revelatory. People remark on the beauty of the place all of the time, and just about every day of the year you will find tourists walking through the building to marvel at the beauty of its design, but the Basilica of the Assumption is more than a building—it is a living and breathing parish. Most Sundays you will find visitors coming to join us for a liturgy because they have heard something about the beauty of our worship, but the life that the Basilica of the Assumption possesses is not merely liturgical—the life of the Basilica is an animating spirit that changes how its members exist in the world.

We Roman Catholics who call the Basilica of the Assumption our home, if we are getting things right, we aren’t the same when we leave this building. Our experience of beauty within these walls changes us because within these walls and at this altar we meet God. And then we go out into the world, and we meet those secular people who live in their reductive world that chases after feelings and sense experience and we show them—show them, reveal to them, manifest to them—something of the goodness and truth of God. And now the Basilica of the Assumption is genuinely and really beautiful; now is the Basilica of the Assumption a work of art worthy of our admiration and our love.

I think that the movement from meeting God within the walls of this Basilica to revealing God on the streets of a broken city is the inner logic that makes the Source of All Hope missionary program the remarkable gift that it is to the Church in Baltimore. The missionaries of Source of All Hope get beauty right; what I want to say is that these young men and women probably understand something about beauty that the rest of us only grasp in hints and shadows. These missionaries get the connection right between the life of God, the life of a parish, and the lives of those who stand in need of hope. These missionaries get the fact that when a Christian who meets God at an altar in a church goes out into the world and does the work of love, it is not only the Christian but also Christ who shows up on the streets of a broken city—and there is real beauty, something so much more visceral and tangible than what appeals to the senses. There is the kind of dwelling place for God being built up by the Holy Spirit of which St. Paul speaks

Tonight marks the conclusion of the mission year for Colin and Roberto and Magdalene and Claire and Will and Ben. I don’t think it has always been the case that the missionary year of service has ended on the Anniversary date for the Dedication of the Basilica of the Assumption. But there is no happier coincidence. The last several months, I’ve spent much time learning about the landscape of missionary programs in the church in the United States, and I can say with confidence that there is no other program in the country that understands better the essential connection between meeting Christ within the walls of a church and revealing Christ outside of those same walls. The missionaries of Source of All Hope take seriously the image that Ezekiel gives us of life-giving water flowing out from the temple into a world that stands in need of God.

What the missionaries understand so well is that Christ, and Christ alone, is the source of all hope and that real hope is not of this world—real hope exists in the connection between how the thing right there in front of us gestures toward what is unseen, not yet revealed, beyond the limits of our immediate experience. Christian hope is not like the hope of the secular world. Maybe that sounds like a common-place, not-so-insightful thing to say about our missionaries. But for the last couple of days, I have been turning over in my mind the connection between hope and beauty. There was a line from St. Paul in the Office of Readings the other day that really struck me. Paul says that:

For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?

Hope is about what we do not see, about what we do not have, about what we do not yet possess. Real hope is about the life of God that is just beyond the horizon of our experience, filling us with a desire for what we cannot see and with a confidence in everything that is yet to be revealed. And beauty does the same kind of work as hope. The experience of real beauty reveals to the world the truth and the goodness and the love of an unseen God; to experience real beauty is to meet Christ.

What do any of these thoughts really mean?

Well, to my mind, these thoughts mean that a building like the Basilica of the Assumption is really only a work of beauty and a source of hope to the extent that the lives its members are a work of beauty and a source of hope to a broken world. And these missionaries—Colin and Roberto and Magdalene and Claire and Will and Ben—they get the fact that a Christian life can be wholly and authentically beautiful; they know that the Christ we meet within these walls is the only source of hope for those who live outside of these walls.

The missionaries of Source of All Hope are witnesses who show us how to live. We aren’t all called go on mission in the streets of Baltimore for a year; this whole structure being joined together into a living temple of the Lord that we call ‘the Church,’ of which each of us is a living stone—well, the Holy Spirit makes use of each of us in different ways. But to belong to a church is to belong to a life, a life that reveals something of the goodness and truth of God, and that is the mark of real beauty. And the life that exists within these walls must flow out into a city and a world that stands in need of God. So, there is work for us to do outside of these walls, each in our own way. To belong to the Basilica of the Assumption is to take that kind of work seriously, it is to show to those who do not know him something of the Christ who alone is the source of all hope.

Homily preached at the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on May 31st, 2023