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Face of God (detail from “Creation of the Sun and Moon”) by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, c. 1510 [Sistine Chapel, Vatican]
By Francis X. Maier, The Catholic Thing, April 24, 2024
Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church .
As we get older, the temptation to be dissatisfied with our lives can grow. A fear of aging, along with memories of past failures and mistakes, can obscure the good in the world around us. A culture of consumption, distractions, and anesthetics, which is what we’ve created, feeds on that restlessness and profits from the anxiety that so often animates our desires. In the process, it steals something uniquely human from us. It reduces us to a bundle of material appetites. And it resents anything transcendent because questions about meaning threaten the machinery of wanting and possessing more.
This is one of the reasons why beauty – real beauty – can seem so diminished in our daily lives. Real beauty draws us up and out of ourselves; it connects us to realities that can’t be commodified. It re-sacralizes the world, even if only for a moment. And in doing that, it indicts the vulgarity, cynicism, and disorder that constitute so much of contemporary life. ….
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