Burke’s Blog

The time for for renewing our culture into one of light and life via new intellectual and artistic paradigms has never been so ripe as it is today. Communication on a worldwide level is so simple now. The Internet, for one, is a tool that can possibly assist in bringing us closer.  In every region, city, and town where it is not persecuted and made illegal the Catholic Church has people, followers of Christ. 

Many people feel fractured and insignificant, unconnected with any sort of hope for a better world. We are bombarded with messages of presumption and despair – but there is hope – as long as there is trust in the Goodness, Truth, Beauty, Oneness, and Love of God.

We do not all speak the same language however, which often makes rational communication difficult among God’s children. Therefore it is essential to the proclamation of the Christian Gospel to renew our understanding of Christian art and Christian music, as well as our general understanding of beauty, as these things allow us to communicate, not rationally, but emotionally.

Rational communication, though, should not be completely ignored in this pursuit. It is important for our own precise understanding and renewal of desire. There are several modern Christian philosophers, like Jacques Maritain, who have already shown us the beginnings of aesthetics in the context of Christianity. We should learn words like his and transfer them into our artistic forms of emotional communication – including, but not limited to, music and the visual arts.

In this quest for an authentically Christian artistic expression, we will certainly begin to see how our own lives can be molded and shaped through our behavior and actions – not unlike molding and shaping our artistic creations. We will find that sometimes being a better person and being a better artist are similar in some aspects but different in another.

We often get the message from the secular media and people in the “business of arts administration” that the value of art is only measured by its price tag or by the amount of advertising it can sell. This is erroneous. The value of art is measured by its potential ability to create a lasting connection between people. Communication literally means “with unity.” This is why Catholics have a running start – through the Eucharist we have unity of faith and unity of desire.

We just have to be not afraid – not afraid to be told we are ridiculous, not afraid to have our own faults thrown back upon us by worldly retaliation, not afraid to be economically unsuccessful, and not afraid to evoke Christian meaning with our art.

Our lives are but specks within a giant universe of space and time -a universe in which, in the end, God will be the only thing remaining.  The time is right for all of us to create a more visually and more audibly beautiful world while simultaneously changing our hearts and minds to be unified with God.