Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition
The Catholic Church has always been a glorious melting pot of different charisms, spiritualities, and worship styles. It’s what makes her attractive, triumphant, and true. We often hear of charisms and spirituality in reference to religious orders and the saints, but have you ever given consideration to what your own spirituality is? Spirituality is the way in which we each live out and strengthen our relationship with God. It is the road to holiness, or sanctification. With reflection you will most likely find that one of the Transcendentals moves you to God more so than the others and that by identifying this we can use it as a kind of compass in navigating our spiritual lives.
The Transcendentals, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, are eternal attributes of God which we, in his image and likeness, possess to some degree. When pursued and cherished, they ensure spiritual strength and discernment; they highlight a path to greater communion with God and his Church. The three form a trinity of values that are interactive and dependent upon each other. You cannot isolate one and take it all on its own because where you find one, you will find the others. In our imperfect state, though, we each have a slight dominance in one of the three that gives a particular orientation to our spirituality.
People who relate most with Beauty feel the presence of God through beautiful things both in nature and created beauty. Beauty is also found in the proper ordering of things. When our lives are centred on Christ, and we live towards that goal of being united with him in Heaven, then we manifest all that is True, Beautiful, and Good. Beauty helps us to see the world as God sees it and the purpose of our senses is to discover and enjoy it. The young Carmelite Saint, Thérèse of Lisieux, was devoted to making her good works fragrant offerings to God and often used the image of showering Our Lord with spiritual rose petals. Following this “Little Way” for which she is so well known, where every small thing we do, if done with love for God, is a means of sanctification, we can promote Beauty in an endless list of day-to-day acts.
Goodness is perhaps the hardest Transcendental to define. It is easy to think of Goodness as being associated with such people as Saint Maximillian Kolbe a Polish priest and Conventual Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in place of a fellow prisoner in the German death camp of Auschwitz during World War II. It is also fitting to associate Goodness with the person who fights for justice. Goodness is virtue and holiness in action. It results in a life characterized by deeds motivated by righteousness and a desire to be a blessing to others. Goodness is the conformity to the divine will.
If you are a Truth person, you probably have a love of informational reading and you approach the Faith intellectually. Truth is defined objectively as the conformity of the mind to reality (what is true as God knows it to be). St Thomas Aquinas devoted his life to the promotion of Truth for the sake of the salvation of souls, and because he knew that it makes for a happy, or flourishing, life. He believed that happiness consists primarily in intellectual contemplation. Since the highest Truth and the greatest Good are of course God, our ultimate happiness must lie there. This happiness is possessed most fully in the life to come, but even in this life Thomas’s conception of happiness is strongly intellectualist: “it is clear that people who give themselves to the contemplation of Truth are the happiest a person in this life can be.”