Beauty and the UAP Chapel

I brought my students to the UAP Chapel for many reasons. One reason is found here in the text of Pope Benedict XVI:

I would like to consider briefly one of these channels that can lead us to God and also be helpful in our encounter with him.

It is the way of artistic expression, part of that via pulchritudinis — "way of beauty" ... which modern man should recover in its most profound meaning.

Perhaps it has happened to you at one time or another — before a sculpture, a painting, a few verses of poetry or a piece of music — to have experienced deep emotion, a sense of joy, to have perceived clearly, that is, that before you there stood not only matter a piece of marble or bronze, a painted canvas, an ensemble of letters or a combination of sounds — but something far greater, something that "speaks," something capable of touching the heart, of communicating a message, of elevating the soul.

Art is capable of expressing, and of making visible, man's need to go beyond what he sees; it reveals his thirst and his search for the infinite. Indeed, it is like a door opened to the infinite, opened to a beauty and a truth beyond the everyday. And a work of art can open the eyes of the mind and heart, urging us upward.

But there are artistic expressions that are true roads to God, the supreme Beauty— indeed, they are a help [to us] in growing in our relationship with him in prayer.

We are referring to works of art that are born of faith, and that express the faith. We see an example of this whenever we visit a Gothic cathedral: We are ravished by the vertical lines that reach heavenward and draw our gaze and our spirit upward, while at the same time, we feel small and yet yearn to be filled...

But how many times, paintings or frescos also, which are the fruit of the artist's faith — in their forms, in their colors, and in their light — move us to turn our thoughts to God, and increase our desire to draw from the Fount of all beauty. ================= I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth against every denial, are the saints, and the beauty that the faith has generated. Today, for faith to grow, we must lead ourselves and the persons we meet to encounter the saints and to enter into contact with the Beautiful." - Pope Benedict XVI