All the Ways God Gets Our Attention

As saintos at luminous miseries prepares to convert to Catholicism we are being shown the gamut of ways God calls us. When the family is being shown around the grand old Catholic church that will be their new "church home" we see God calling through the sheer beauty of the art.

For our eldest daughter it really have been straight up doctrine, I mean how much more core can one get than being convinced of the truth of the Eucharist, body, blood and divinity of our Lord Jesus in the bread and the wine? For our youngest it is the witness of the work God is doing in her sister and in me and a fascination with the rosary, no doubt. For Mrs. Saintos it is her thriving spirit, her will to see us do life as a family and her own commitment to me as the spiritual head of the family. I know this sounds frightfully old fashioned but it comes as it is her own will to live this way and not some onerous obligation on my part it seems to me the act of a very strong person who happens to be a woman. For our son God seems to be reaching out to him through the relational and esthetic. Our son was much moved by the artwork that was so visible in the church, cancels, beautiful not kitschy sculptures, the Blessed Mother and Child, Joseph the Worker, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Holy Mary and the like. I know a moment of impact for us all was in seeing the Tabernacle. Father explained it and then opened it to show us the blessed host. I am telling you, I cannot speak for the others but I felt the tinglies! A moment that impacted our son was when Father showed us the one item that survived the fire that brought the building to ash in the nineteen seventies, it was the original Chalice.

Think of how many modern Catholic churches that saintos' son could visit today and not receive the same message because there is no beauty there to call him. I remember visiting the Basilica of Notre Dame in Montreal and watching a young woman ask her husband what was wrong. The church was incredibly beautiful and he had been brought to tears just by being there. He told her he was "having a moment" and we knew what he meant ... he had been feeling God's glory communicated through the beauty created to honor Him. I get that feeling from nature but I think it is a special calling to get it from man's works made to honor God.