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.

CASES OF CATHOLIC BEAUTY

• his basic evangelical strategy for where one should begin in presenting the faith to the world: “First the beautiful, then the good, then the true.”
• Great Literature
  • Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  • The Diary of a Country Priest by George Bernanos;
  • Divine Comedy, by Dante;
  • The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
• Great Cathedrals
  • “I don’t want to feel comfortable in church; a church should not be a domestic space,” Barron says. “I want to feel transfigured in a church, and the great ecclesiastical architects knew how to produce that feeling. There’s a lot there in terms of evangelical power.”
  • Asked if he could take a potential convert to one place on earth to demonstrate the power and magic of Catholicism, where it would be, Barron doesn’t hesitate: “It would be Chartres,”
• Barron says his favorite example of beauty in stone is the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota.
• Great Music
• Great Movies
  • A Man for all Seasons - Barron has credited More’s life, and the 1966 film that captured it, with getting across three basic insights: We’re all responsible for upholding the rights of others; accepting one’s duties often leads to discomfort; and despite the second point, you don’t have to be gloomy about it. "More tells him that he can find him a job as a teacher in a local school. Crestfallen, Rich complains, ‘If I were a teacher, who would know it?’ More replies, ‘You, your friends, your pupils, God…not a bad public, that.’ That statement sums up the whole Christian spiritual life, in many ways. You’re playing to one audience. To use Balthasar’s language, it’s not the ego-drama but the theo-drama that matters.”
  • Ben Hur specifically the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, with Charlton Heston,
  • Gran Torino - that it’s “one of the most Christological movies ever made,” and that Eastwood’s character, Walt Kowalski, “joins a list of a handful of really great cinematic Christ figures.” (He also puts Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke, Jack Nicholson’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and E.T. on that
  • Fargo

Chapter 3 Goodness

• Barron believes that Catholicism’s rules make sense only to someone who’s already been enchanted by the faith and the Church,
• “The concrete living out of the Christian way, especially when done in a heroic manner, can move even the most hardened unbeliever to faith, and the truth of this principle has been proven again and again over the centuries.”
• Origen of Alexandria said, “First come and share the life of our community and then you will understand our dogma.”
• Barron is convinced that the moral teachings of Catholicism are true, and that people who strive to practice them will live healthier, happier, more fulfilled lives. At the same time, he knows that in a postmodern, secular world, “rule-talk” often comes off as an attempt to limit people’s freedom, not to free them to become the persons God intends them to be. Therefore, the right way to deploy “the good” as a missionary tool is to start by showing people what a genuinely Christian life at its best looks like—and then, gradually, to lead people to appreciate the principles and norms which make that kind of heroic life possible. ==== THE SAINTS ====
• “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments,” Ratzinger said, “namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.”
• twelve thinkers, artists, mystics, and saints who, in his estimation, not only shaped the Church in their day but also changed the course of civilization. St. Francis of Assisi, • St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, Blessed John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Michelangelo, St. Augustine, St. Benedict, St. Ignatius of Loyola, Bartolomé de las Casas, Flannery O’Connor, Fulton Sheen.

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Bibliographic info

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