Episode 25: Incarnational Beauty

La Bonne Vie

Kyle and Deacon Conque continue to get transcendental in this final installment from our series on the transcendentals. Join us as we contemplate transcendental beauty and the Cross.

Show Notes and Outline of Topics

Quote from Pope St. John Paul the Great, Address during Vigil of Prayer at 15th World Youth Day, August 19, 2000

"It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle."

1. Memory and Beauty

ּ• the importance of memory, "Do this in memory of me."

• repetitio mater memoriae, repetition is the mother of memory (Click here for a video from Dr. Christopher Perrin discussing this important principle in classical education.)

• remembering what's at stake: the fullness of life we have in Christ

• Is the Cross beautiful?

• Cardinal Ratzinger, The Feelings of Things, a Contemplation of Beauty

• avoiding the danger of letting mystery become familiar; "without contemplation, familiarity becomes contempt"

• willingness to be wounded by beauty

2. Expectations, the Scandal of the Cross, and Beauty

• beauty strikes us something gratuitous, beyond our expectations, more than we deserve

• the Lord's loving lagniappe

• the beauty of the Cross is not in physical appearance but in truth

• beauty inflicts a wound of love

• true knowledge is being struck by the arrow of beauty that wounds man

• beauty not in the "ahhh" but in the "owww"

• example of the Blessed Mother and her Immaculate Heart

• the pain of beauty roots us to stay in the mystery

3. Beauty and the Paradox of the Cross

• the depth of beauty available to us in paradox is beyond anything else; the paradox of the Cross

• the good life as a lifetime of being wounded in the contemplation of the Cross

• the profound relationship between beauty and suffering

• hunger is the best spice, being present in the scandal of the Cross enhances the wound and increases our awareness of beauty

• spending time with the Lord in His agony

• Lent as a communal contemplation of the Cross

• we don't want the wound of beauty to heal, we want the wound to increase our dependence on the Love of God

• an education of the Cross

• Lent is not about proving to God how much we love him, but it's about letting God love us.

La Bonne Vie is a podcast offering from John Paul the Great Academy dedicated to discussing the joys, triumphs, struggles, and issues with boldly living out our Catholic, classical mission in Acadiana through vibrant family lives.

Our theme music, "Vive La Bonne Vie," is by L'Angelus.