"a hall with a stage and a place where I could sit and be lectured on the subject."

I've been waiting years for Mark DeRaud to start blogging.

Le's pray his three part guest post on buildmychurchnow.com/blog/ (Thanks for giving the artist a voice) is a sign and sign post of more to come.

The Spiritual Language of Beauty

by Mark DeRaud

A Catholic friend asked me if the Chrism mass I had witnessed, performed in front of my newly installed murals, was “beautiful.”

My response was visceral. I thought, “How odd. Who cares if it’s beautiful?”

If I thought of beauty at all, I thought of it as peripheral, if not alien, to authentic Christian experience.

This was not so for my Catholic patrons. Their rich environment, I learned, reflected an ancient orientation towards a deep visually experiential life. They expected me to help their walls speak, to testify to the beauty of heaven, to see Christ within, to enhance contemplation, “to know [His] love that surpasses knowledge,” (Eph: 3:19) (See Bernini’s sculpture below, “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa”).

As a Protestant I had not needed a ‘sacred’ space. I needed only a hall with a stage and a place where I could sit and be lectured on the subject. My inner..

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