To Light a Fire on the Earth Barron

To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age:

Author: Robert Barron

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Chapter Two BEAUTY

• That, in a nutshell, is the Bishop Robert Barron approach to missionary work. He wants to draw you into Catholic faith and practice, not because he thinks you’ll be punished if you don’t become a part of the Church but because he thinks it’s so amazing, so rich, so powerful powerful—in three key words—so beautiful, good, and true—that your life will be infinitely better because of it.
• In Christian tradition, beauty, goodness, and truth are known as “transcendentals,” linked to the three core human abilities to feel, to wish, and to think. Jesus refers to them in the Great Commandment when he talks about the mind, the soul, and the heart, and inducements to take the wrong path with each of the transcendentals formed the core of his temptation scene in the Gospels. While Barron is convinced that Catholic Christianity represents the fullness of all three, he’s equally convinced that the right way to open up the Catholic world to someone is with its beauty.
• many people today find talk about “truth” off-putting, There’s something more winsome and less threatening about the beautiful.
• ... he might suggest, “Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity at work among the poorest of the poor.” The wager is that the encounter with the beautiful will naturally lead someone to ask, “What made such a thing possible?” At that point, the canny evangelizer will begin to speak of the moral behaviors and intellectual convictions that find expression in the beautiful. If I might suggest a simple metaphor, when teaching a young person the game of baseball, a good coach begins, not with the rules or with tiresome drills, but rather with the beauty of the game, with its sounds and smells and the graceful movements of its star players.
• Barron is wholeheartedly convinced that Catholicism is true and good, but he’s equally convinced that, at its best, it’s also gorgeous, fun, fulfilling, life-affirming—and that if you can break through the cultural noise to get people to see all that, they’ll respond.
• The passion he felt for the game, and his drive to share it, he says, was in some ways his first taste of what it means to evangelize. “I’m an evangelist for baseball. You love something, and you want to share it. Something beautiful has seized you, and you think baseball is terrific, and you want to let people know why.
• Only when you’ve had that experience of falling in love with something, Barron believes, will learning the rules that support it make sense. Otherwise, “rule-talk” is always going to seem like someone trying to control another, like an exercise in power rather than liberation to play the game well.
• “Rules are not the enemy of golf,” Barron says. “Rules are what make it possible, and what free you to be a good golfer. That’s the right way to approach the rules of Catholicism too, but the trouble is we have this rule book and people bicker about prohibitions all the time, especially in regard to sex.
• I’m just trying to get to Heaven before they close the door.
• “So, do I think Catholicism is the fullest way to live the way of Jesus Christ? Yes. Do I think Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God, and the Way and the Truth and the Life? Yes, I do. I’m not apologizing for it, and I’m so on fire about it I want you to know it too.”
• From baseball and Bob Dylan, therefore, Barron took a strong core belief that the right way to expose people to a new idea, a new way of life, is to start with what makes it beautiful, relentlessly help them see and feel that beauty, and only then introduce them to the structures and rules that make such a way of life possible. Beauty, in other words, is the key to it all.

THE THEORY OF BEAUTY

• Balthasar "“Before the beautiful—no, not really before but within the beautiful—the whole person quivers. He not only ‘finds’ the beautiful moving; rather, he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it.”
• The beautiful leads to the good and the true
• Cardinal John Henry Newman, the great nineteenth-century English convert to Catholicism, and his famed Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, in which he referred to something called the illative sense. “It is a grand word for a common thing,” Newman conceded. In essence, it means the natural capacity of all people to sense when they’re in the presence of something remarkable, inspiring, ennobling—in a word, something beautiful.
• the illative sense isn’t about ars gratia artis, the celebrated MGM motto that means “art for the sake of art.” It’s rather a recognition that the encounter with something beautiful, something so obviously transcendent and powerful, often leads people to wonder how such a thing is possible, what might have fostered it or inspired it, and from there an openness to the divine and to religious thought is often born.
• The illative sense is what assesses a variety of experiences, hunches, intuitions, and thoughts together. I always loved that in Newman.”
• Barron insists that the Church must always hold two teachings about itself in tension. On the one hand, the Church is the spotless Bride of Christ, a thing of great beauty and purity. On the other hand, it is also an earthen vessel, composed of flawed and fragile human beings.

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Bibliographic info

• Publisher: Image (October 31, 2017)
• ISBN-10: 1524759503
• ISBN-13: 978-1524759506