Roseanne Sullivan: The Mystery of Faith
(Copy of an email from Maggie Gallagher, Executive Director of Benedict XVI Institute with some wonderful accolades about my work)
Just after I published a post about St. Bartholomew’s Feast Day yesterday evening, I received the text included here from Maggie Gallagher, the Benedict XVI Institute’s Executive Director, who frequently sends out emails to about another 81,000++ recipients about topics related to the institute she so ably manages on behalf of Archbishop Cordileone. I’m flattered that she considered my writings on the relationship between beauty in the church and faith to be worth such a glowing email, and I hope you will enjoy reading it too.
Last week's salon with Dana Gioia was fascinating. It is rare to hear a great artist, in this case the poet who wrote the libretto for Sir James MacMillan's Fiat Lux, speak so eloquently of the intersection between faith and creativity. He also used our Zoom to announce some great news about the next classical music performance of Fiat Lux.
If you missed Dana live, listen to the Zoom salon here.
Dana Gioia is pictured above with our own Roseanne T. Sullivan. Many of you know her but all of us should know her better.
Roseanne Sullivan manages our Facebook page and crafts the first draft of the Ancient Liturgies newsletter. She edits a Friday letter at Dappled Things [NOTE: I complied Friday Links for several years, but Mary Finnegan, Dappled Things social media editor, is doing a find job of it now as my successor] and writes frequently on liturgy, art and beauty. She also is the author of some intensely beautiful poetry some of which she publishes in Catholic Arts Today such as "Love Song of Our Lady of O" and this poem selected for publication in Homage to Soren Kierkegaard, a forthcoming anthology from Wiseblood Books.
Recently she sent me this essay which is so to the point I wanted to share it with you:
"Beauty creates a longing for transcendent realities. As poet Dana Gioia wrote in the essay quoted below, 'art is mysterious. It reaches us in ways we don’t fully understand.'
“This ability of sacred art to call our hearts and prepare our minds to receive truth is something we need to bring into the discussion as the Church ponders how to help the appallingly large number of Catholics who either were never taught or never believed or lost belief—for whatever reason—in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
Dana Gioia wrote [in Singing Aquinas in L.A.] at First Things about how while he was at Benediction with his parochial school classmates every month, both the grand space of the church in the ugly neighborhood of his childhood and the sublimity of the Tantum Ergo, which is one of the great hymns of humble adoration of the Eucharist composed by intellectual giant St. Thomas Aquinas, taught him far more than mere words could ever do.
'The Eucharist was mostly an abstract idea. I sensed a sanctity in which I could not participate. But as I stood singing this short hymn with all my friends and teachers, I physically felt enraptured and exhilarated in the act of veneration. . . .
'I do know from my earliest memories that Tantum Ergo struck me as penetratingly sublime. Those two minutes of each month were more beautiful than anything outside the church doors on the ugly streets of my hometown. The hymn acquired private meaning—a web of deep longings and associations, of intellectual and spiritual awakenings that I didn’t yet understand. . . .
'My particular affection for the hymn probably originates in a combination of personal and impersonal factors. First, there was the resonant beauty of Aquinas’s verse set to the stately eighteenth-century tune by Samuel Webbe. Second, there was my personal experience of singing the words repeatedly for years with my friends in the first grand space I had ever seen. Finally, there was the mystery of the Eucharist, which I first understood not from theological instruction but through the beauty of song.
‘As an artist, I learned something else from the Latin hymns—that art is mysterious. It reaches us in ways we don’t fully understand.'“
Art is mysterious. (Maggie speaking again). It reaches us in ways we don't fully understand. We were born with this capacity for experiencing the possibility of transcendence beyond what we can see and taste, because we were born for the mysteries of faith. The mystery is incarnational in its nature, that is the material world, the things we can perceive with our senses, are freighted with intimation of what lies beyond.
Roseanne goes on (I've excerpted it for length):
"I had a somewhat similarly transforming experience at Benediction as a child. Mine was on the opposite coast, in Boston at Our Lady of Victories Shrine, the dearest, most charming church I remember from my unsettled childhood when my sisters and I were moved without much explanation from one living place to another in and around Boston, sometimes with our widowed mother, sometimes with relatives when our mother was gone away and nobody would tell us where.
“Somewhere about 1950, I went to Our Lady of Victories when I was about five years old with my thirty-two-year-old mother, four-year-old sister Martha, and two-and-a-half-year-old sister Joe-anne. I especially remember us going there for Benediction, on a Sunday evening, all of us dressed in our Sunday-best-albeit-a-bit-shabby dresses, hats, and gloves. My sisters and I trailed after my mother on the half-mile walk along the mostly empty Sunday streets from where we lived for a few months in a few small rooms with a bathroom shared with the neighbors on the wrong side of the tracks from posh Copley Square.
“Halfway down the block on Isabella Street, we found a side door on the left side of the church and made our way down a dark stairway into a basement chapel, which was sumptuously decorated, hushed, and dim.
“Whenever I go to Benediction, I still recall moments of that evening in perfect detail. We sat about 1/3 of the way back on the right of the main aisle. As usual, I was on my mother's right side with my sisters forming their unjoinable group of two on the left. When the Blessed Sacrament was placed on the altar for adoration, I feasted my eyes on the monstrance that looked like a golden sunburst with the host as its pure white glowing center. I loved the singing of O salutaris Hostia and Tantum Ergo. I can vouch from a five-year-old's perspective that even though I didn't understand most of the words, both these hymns powerfully moved me.
“There I enjoyed for the first time the bittersweet longing that beauty awakens in the soul, although it took many more years for me to correctly identify what I was longing for.
“It is far from true that beautiful, richly decorated churches take away from the poor. On the contrary, they offer everyone a refreshing oasis in the aesthetic desert of the rest of our lives.
“The restoration of beauty to our churches and our liturgies, the beauty of profound music either directly from or at least harmonious with the Church’s sacred treasury of chant and polyphony, the beauty of solemn ritual, decor, reverence, and a sense of mystery—on top of the clear catechesis like the kind I received and I’m sure Dana Gioia received, all could go a long way towards restoring people’s faith in the sacramental reality of the Word of God made flesh to eat and blood to drink that occurs during transubstantiation."
Faith begins with acknowledging the mystery of life itself, of our longing for what we cannot ever (in the natural world) have, but whose glimpses we see everywhere.
It ends in a God who gave his only begotten Son so that we can have in the end our heart's desire, through Him, in Him and with Him.
May the Holy Spirit be with you and yours this day and every day.
Love,
Maggie
Maggie Gallagher, Executive Director
BenedictInstitute.org
From IG: Dear Roseanne,
Good to see you getting recognition for all your work to keep Catholic culture alive and flourishing.
May God grant you many years.