One night, bandits came to the hermitage of an old monastic and said, “We have come to take away everything in your cell.”

The monastic said, “Take whatever you want, my sons.”

The bandits gathered up everything they found and went away. But they left behind a little bag with silver candlesticks. When the monastic saw it, he picked it up and ran after them, shouting, “Take these, take these! You forgot them and they are the most beautiful of all.”

Beauty does not stand alone in the universe, isolated and remote, under glass and precious for its rarity. Beauty is the bridge to justice. It’s the beauty of nature that warns us against pollution. It’s the beauty of a child that urges us to work against the racism and sexism that would harm her. It’s the beauty of life that brings us to rage against the injustice that obstructs it for anyone. Beauty is the glue that holds the world together.

We may well be spending far too much time teaching skills and productivity and efficiency and far too little time on music and art and poetry and flowers and literary appreciation.

To raise a child well, we must seed a place in their souls for beauty. To live life fully, we must learn to take time out for beauty.

Beauty is the most provocative promise we have of the Beautiful. Beauty lures us and calls us and leads us on to seek the glory of the face of God in the here and now. Souls thirst for beauty and thrive on it, and by it nourish hope. It is Beauty that magnetizes the contemplative and it is the duty of the contemplative to give beauty away so that the rest of the world may, in the middle of squalor, ugliness and pain, remember that beauty is possible.

What we do not nourish within ourselves cannot exist in the world around us, because we are its microcosm. We cannot moan about the loss of quality in our world and not ourselves seed the beautiful in our wake. We cannot decry the loss of the spiritual and continue ourselves to function only at the level of the vulgar. We cannot hope for fullness of life without nurturing fullness of soul. We must seek beauty, study beauty, surround ourselves with beauty.

To be contemplative, we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give it away—like the monastic offers it to the thieves—until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 1: Beauty is what enables the human soul to reach beyond the dust of being alive to the stars that call us beyond it.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 2: We are born to take the beauty of the earth and add to it the beauty of our own souls.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3: To make our homes, our yards, our offices beautiful is a gift to the rest of the world. It enables others to see in the obvious the beauty we all too often miss. “Beauty is all about us,” Pablo Casals writes, “but how many people are blind to it.”

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4: Art, any kind of art–painting, literature, music, photography—is nothing more than a rendering of the way the world looks to the artist. It is meant to stretch our own souls to see even more of life than our own world has to offer.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5: Beauty of any kind lifts the soul above the humdrum to the beatific. It gives every ordinary life the sheen of possibility.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6: We must learn to look for beauty because beauty gives us insight into the real purpose of life.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7: Real beauty is never ostentatious or overdone. It does not depend on great amounts of money. It is nothing mysterious or academic. It does not take training. It takes only an instinct for what is simple, what is true, what is enough and what is fresh enough to stir in us a whole new way of being alive.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8: To learn to recognize beauty means that we must take every opportunity to see good art, to listen to great music, to read great literature, and to ask ourselves in every instance what feelings each of them excites in us. “Art,” the philosopher Raissa Maritain writes, “proceeds from a spontaneous instinct like love does and it must be cultivated like friendship.”

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9: Beauty is something to be sought after. It changes everything else we do and are. “Through Art,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “we are sometimes sent—indistinctly, briefly—revelations not to be achieved by rational thought.”

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10: We know we have seen the beautiful when feelings long dormant rise to the surface of our souls, capture our hearts in midair, and bring us back to earth different people from what we were before we experienced it. “Art,” Solzhenitsyn goes on, “thaws even the frozen, darkened soul, opening it to lofty spiritual experience.”

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11: Beauty is a window into the possibilities of life.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12: The time we spend pursuing the beautiful—in words or music or form––brings fresh air to the spirit, hope to the heart.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13: Art is the attempt to give life to a new idea. “The artist,” Madeleine L’Engle writes, “is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver.”

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14: Learn to stand in front of an art piece—a painting, a sculpture, a play, a book, a poem—and ask yourself, “What am I meant to see in this?”

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15: To engorge ourselves on bad art—bad TV, bad films, bad music, bad decorations—is as damaging of our quality of life as being slowly and surely smothered by smog.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 16: God is beauty; beauty is an expression of God. Neither can be found without serious and sensitive searching, open and attentive pursuit.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 17: Good art mellows the soul. Bad art petrifies it, turns it to stone, diminishes the level of its humanity. “Just as good literature and good art raise and ennoble character,” Donald Coggan writes, “so bad literature and bad art degrade it.”

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18: Art is a function of what it means to be human. Only humans have the capacity to change life from the crude to the beautiful, from the base to the sublime. Artists enable us to do that. Without artists, we would be left in a wilderness of unrealized possibility. “The artist does not see life as a problem to be solved,” Dorothy L. Sayers writes, “but as a medium for creation.”

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19: Art is not possible without the leisure it takes to pursue it. The creation of an idea always requires as much contemplation as it does skill. That’s the difference between an artist and an assembly line, between a picture and a print of it. It is in the original that the creativity lies, that the idea is born, that the artist resides.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20: For a soul to be fully developed, it must have developed a capacity for contemplative leisure, for thinking things through, for reflection and realization, for growth in understanding. Reflection is the seedbed of artistry of any kind.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21: There is as much art in learning to see art as there is in creating it fresh. Otherwise, art would be lost in the bedlam of tackiness that is smothering the world with plastic knicknacks and pornographic films and formula fiction. “Art,” John Cheever says, “is the triumph over chaos.”

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22: Art has done more to speak the voice of a people than all the bullets in the world have ever done. Drama and poetry fueled the Irish demand for independence; music sang enslaved people into freedom in the United States; art and architecture maintained the dignity of colonized native people in South America.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23: A culture too busy, too technologically absorbed, too focused on making money to cultivate the leisure and reflection that art demands runs the risk of losing sight both of what it is and what it wants to be. “Leisure and the cultivation of human capacities,” writes the anthropologist Margaret Mead, “are inextricably interdependent.”

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24: The artist functions as a bellwether in a society. They point out what is happening to the soul of a people. They tell us what is and what’s coming in family life and human relationships and social systems and human values. “What society requires from art,” Elizabeth Janeway says, “is that it functions as an early warning system.”

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25: Without art, we would all live in the dust bowl of life where survival is the only goal and money is the only measure and the self is the only norm. The society that refuses to invest in the arts dooms itself to its own destruction.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26: We must give ourselves the leisure it takes to both cultivate the arts and to contemplate them. Our own development depends on it.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27: One of the greatest gifts a society can give its children is a love and an understanding of the arts. The generation that makes that possible is the generation that saves the next one.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28: To be an artist of our own life, we must learn how to detach ourselves from it long enough to reconstruct it. “Every now and then, go away and have a little relaxation,” Leonardo da Vinci writes. “To remain constantly at work will diminish your judgment. Go some distance away, because work will be in perspective and a lack of harmony is more readily seen.”

LET’S SHARE OUR THOUGHTS
The following discussion questions, Scripture echo, journal prompts, and prayer are meant to help you reflect more deeply on The Monastic Way. Choose at least two suggestions and respond to them. You may do it as a personal practice or gather a group interested in sharing the spiritual journey.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

1. Sister Joan draws a line between good art, which stirs the soul, and bad art, which diminishes or deadens the soul. Do you think that this is mostly a matter of taste or is there an objective difference? What examples have you come across in your own life of good or bad art?

2. Which daily quote in The Monastic Way is most meaningful to you? Why? Do you agree with it? Disagree? Did it inspire you? Challenge you? Raise questions for you?

3. After reading The Monastic Way, what is one way that you can put Sister Joan’s teachings into practice in your own life?

4. Joan Chittister uses other literature to reinforce and expand her writing. Find another quote, poem, story, song, art piece, novel that echoes the theme of this month’s Monastic Way.

5. On February 19, Sister Joan writes, “Art is not possible without the leisure it takes to pursue it.” Do you agree with this? What are the implications of this idea? Have you, or can you, take the leisure time to make or appreciate art?

JOURNAL PROMPTS

Prompt 1: Here are a few statements from this month’s Monastic Way. Choose one that is most helpful to you and journal with it.

• Beauty is something to be sought after. It changes everything else we do and are.

• Art has done more to speak the voice of a people than all the bullets in the world have ever done.

• We are born to take the beauty of the earth and add to it the beauty of our own souls.

Prompt 2: Spend a few minutes with this photograph and journal about its relationship to this month’s Monastic Way. You can do that with prose or a poem or a song or....

SCRIPTURE ECHO

Give thanks to the source of all blessing,
All the beauty of the earth bless God.
God of creation, we praise you forever.
––Canticle of Daniel,
That God May Be Glorified
That God May Be Glorified is the psalter of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie. Order a copy through https://www.joanchittister.org/pages/shop

PRAYER
Late have I loved you,
O Beauty ever ancient, ever new,
late have I loved you!
You were within me, but I was outside,
and it was there that I searched for you.
In my unloveliness
I plunged into the lovely things which you created.
You were with me, but I was not with you.
Created things kept me from you;
yet if they had not been in you
they would have not been at all.
You called, you shouted,
and you broke through my deafness.
You flashed, you shone,
and you dispelled my blindness.
You breathed your fragrance on me;
I drew in breath and now I pant for you.
I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more.
You touched me, and I burned for your peace.
––St. Augustine