This semester I am co-leading a graduate seminar on the Christology and Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. It has been an exhilarating experience: a communal engagement with the dense and rich thought of the Swiss theologian.We've read one volume from each of the three parts of his monumental trilogy, each of the three parts famously focused upon one of the "transcendentals:" the beautiful, the good, and the true. What makes von Balthasar so appealing to many is his beginning with the "neglected transcendental:" beauty.I was taken, then, by the lead article in the current "Commonweal:" Paul Schaefer's "The Reach of Beauty: Growing Up Catholic on the Prairie." The article is quasi-"sacramental:" it embodies the beauty it narrates. Here is its close:

I write this partly to rescue the old traditions from conservatives who use them as a symbol in their resistance to any reform. And also for those liberals who are just as adamant that concern about aesthetics is somehow suspect. Yes, I know the liturgy is not fundamentally a drama or theater but a ritual, a riteit is worship, not spectacle. And I know that the councils reforms were an effort to engage Catholics as participants in the Mass rather than as spectators closed off from each other in private devotion. And I know that my youthful liturgical experience at St. Marys was perhaps exceptional. The old rite was not always beautifully or even reverently done. But I still find it tragic that the unplowed and fallow fields of todays Catholic youth no longer soak up the nutrients of two thousand years, composted from the dead language of the Romans and the poetic drama of the Greeks, with a heavy leavening of Gothic romanticism. Thank GodI say it now without ironythat Roman Catholic architecture, murals, sculpture, paintings, music, and the theater of the traditional services were there to nourish my soul, exactly as my father believed they would.

But, in complete honesty, the author earlier recounted:

But that was sixty years ago. When I went to Marquette University, I left the farm forever and after graduation and two years in the U.S. Army, I left the Catholic Church. I was consumed with a desire to find a place in the world where animals and their needs did not drive my daily life. I wanted days other than Sunday when I wouldnt fall asleep while reading because of sheer fatigue like my father. And as I moved out into a wider world the Catholic religion became suspect to me. I was not struck by lightning like St. Paul; it was a more gradual process. I found it very difficult to accept the divinity of a Jewish man from Nazareth, despite the appeal of his teachings. Though it was painful for my family, especially my father, I could do nothing else.

Reading the article, confirmed for me the need for the Church (and I mean, of course, all of us) to cultivate beauty in its liturgical celebrations, but also to articulate (with reverence and respect, as the First Letter of Peter admonishes us) the reason for the hope that is in us. To seek both to embody beauty and to bear witness to the truth of the Creed we confess -- a never-completed task, for which the recently beatified John Henry Newman can serve as inspiration and guide.And thanks to Paul Schaefer for his welcome "challenge" -- and his Thanksgiving tribute to his father.