When I asked to go to the congress I did not think I would get permission. Madonna House was allowed only two official delegates, and those were Fr. Tom Talentino and Cheryl Ann Smith. But I was granted permission, and here I was as "an official representative of Madonna House."

As a representative, I was able to attend some of the sessions, but since I was not a delegate, I did not have a place to stay at the congress center. So I was staying five miles away in a village outside of Rome, and here I was walking there on this most beautiful of days.

I had just heard Cardinal Ouellet give a talk on Von Balthasar’s vision of beauty. And the day before I had heard a talk by Cardinal Schonborn about icons and beauty.

Though I struggled to understand the philosophy and theology, beauty is something I can understand. Most of the talks seemed to avoid my head and go straight to my heart.

So as I walked down the long road to Grottaferrata, I was thinking about beauty in my life in the light of four points from those talks that were dancing in my heart.

The points were: God is Beauty. Christ is all-beautiful; Christ’s crucifixion, which brought our salvation, is the most beautiful thing he has done. The most beautiful thing that I can ever do is to make Christ more present in the world.

I am an artisan. Before I came to Madonna House, I attended art school for three years. In Madonna House, I have spent countless hours carving and weaving.

The talks at the congress, in a dramatic way, confirmed, illustrated, and enlivened a movement that has been taking place in my heart. For beauty is not only the theme of the congress, but it’s also the theme of my life.

A couple of years ago, I gave a talk at the Madonna House summer school about art and culture. In preparation for it, I was listening to the CD of Catherine’s staff letter # 140.

In it she asks, "Will you bring God beautiful vestments that you have sewn through the night with the finest threads of gold and silver? Will you bring him a scepter that you spent half your life carving out of priceless ivory? Are you going to bring him verses that will move multitudes, or music that will enchant the world?"

Suddenly I stopped the CD and cried, "Yes! That is the desire of my heart."

But then I restarted the CD, and Catherine cried, "No! You will bring stew well made, cards 3 x 5 correctly filed over and over again, floors eternally scrubbed so as to allow his feet in your neighbor to walk across it… Years of this."

The monotonous stuff. Day in and day out.

"This is what you will bring to your beloved."

I then said to God that I believe that even though I may be sorting screws or sweeping a floor, I’m helping him make my soul into a work of art that will far surpass anything that I can do with my hands. I believe that in doing these things out of love of God and neighbor, my soul is being made into a work of art.

At the congress I was overwhelmed as the talks confirmed the movement that has been going on in my heart. What joy! What fire!

The word I received in Rome was: God is all beauty, and without God, there is no beauty.

The more I love God, the more I follow him, the more I serve him in others, the more beauty there is in me.

For what can be more beautiful than a soul so transparent that when someone looks at him, the person sees only God?

I see it so clearly. Instead of carving ivory or weaving late into the night (though I may do that, too) all I have to do is become holy through whatever I am doing.

In doing so, I will be doing the most beautiful of things: I will be making God more present in the world.

Here it is a month later, and I am walking down a hill again. This time it is Carmel Hill in Combermere, and I am walking down to the main house of Madonna House. The day is bright, sunny, and hot, very similar to that day when I was walking just outside of Rome. Once again I start to think of the effect that the congress has had on me.

In me, beauty has forever been wed to truth. For me, for something to be beautiful, it also has to be true.

When I was studying in art school, we were taught a certain philosophy of beauty. It wasn’t clearly stated, but this was it: truth was replaced by cleverness.

Art was all about doing new and clever things. It was almost as if beauty was exclusively found in the new and the clever, or even in something just because there was no truth in it.

Paintings were made that contained no more than a line or a dot of color on an expanse of white. Teapots were crafted in which tea could not be made, and jewelry that could not be worn.

As I have grown in the life in Madonna House, my taste in art has changed.

For example, I used to like the paintings of Botticelli and dislike those of Fra Angelico. But Fra Angelico, whose paintings I once thought of as stiff and stilted, I now see with new eyes. There is such a depth of truth in them that I can spend hours looking at them.

But in the works of Botticelli, I now see an artist trying to show the world that he is brilliant. Yes, they are nice pictures, but the artist gets in the way of my seeing the Madonna and Child.

My outlook on beauty has also changed. God is beauty and God is truth. So to really be able to see beauty, one needs to be in relation to God.

I used to hate the saying, "Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder." But now I see it differently. The more one looks at God, the more beauty he is able to see.

It is as if God who is Truth becomes the lens though which one can truly see beauty. At the same time, one then sees truth as beautiful.

The crucifixion is the most beautiful thing that Christ did, because it is through the crucifixion that Christ brought about our salvation.

I will forever be grateful for the opportunity that I had to go to this congress in Rome. My life is forever changed.

God is so very good. He is so very beautiful and so very true.