Christ is risen. I'm Mother Natalia, a Byzantine Catholic nun from Christ to the bridegroom monastery and this is Pines with Aquinas.

Today I want to talk to you about beauty. I want to talk about beauty first of all because I think it's just a really important topic for our times today

but also because it's basically all I've been praying with for the past several months and so it's kind of all I have to talk about.

I want to share a lot from something that a friend of mine shared with me recently which is a message that when Pope

Benedict the 16th when he was Cardinal Rotzinger he gave this message to a communion and liberation meeting in 2002, and the whole

message is about beauty.

And he says at one point in it, of course we must not underrate the importance of theological

reflection of exact and precise theological thought.

It remains absolutely necessary.

But to move from here to disdain, or to reject the impact produced by the response of the heart

in the encounter with beauty

as a true form of knowledge would impoverish us and dry up our faith and our theology.

We must rediscover this form of knowledge.

It is a pressing need of our time. A pressing need of our time.

In a world with so much access to beauty, we seem to be blinded to it.

Because beauty has been, I think in a lot of ways,

cheapened by the very access, by the fact that we always

have it at arm's reach. It's been distorted for the sake of convenience.

In our current society we want to have beauty, to possess it, to own it.

With little to no sacrifice, and with little to no sacrifice and with little to no longing.

Because beauty is one of the greatest gifts that God gives us.

And I just want to remind you that the devil does not have the

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