A filmmaker, a singer, and a flamenco dancer. Such was the richly varied trio of artists who accompanied Pope Leo XIV at his meeting with the world of culture during his visit to Spain. Though the guests' contributions differed in emphasis, they all reflected the same conviction: that history is threaded through with an unceasing dialogue between faith and art. The Pope recalled some of the contributions of the country he was visiting: the saetas of Holy Week, the mystical poetry of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, the literary mastery of authors such as Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca, and the wondrous architecture of Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Familia.
To these extraordinary works we might add countless examples from every corner of the world. The Pope could have carried on in that vein, but instead he opened up another avenue, no less charged with meaning: he invited those present to consider "whether eternity — which burst into time and space through the incarnation of Jesus Christ — can still be reconciled with everyday life."[1]
Indeed, art is a privileged place for expressing and understanding realities that go beyond us. But wouldn't it be a shame to confine our aesthetic attention to the extraordinary, and miss the beauty held within the small things of each day? "Let me see with your eyes, my Christ, Jesus of my soul!" St. Josemaría often repeated.[2] The Son of God's eyes — his contemplative gaze — let us discover "something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations."[3] But how do we make that discovery? How can we recognise beauty, wherever it surrounds us?
"Their eyes were opened and they recognised Him"
Among the accounts of encounters with the risen Jesus, there is one that sheds particular light on this challenge. "Now when He was at table with them, He took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized Him" (Lk 24:30–31). The disciples have walked for hours with Jesus, listening to Him closely the whole time, and yet they do not recognise Him until the moment He performs a gesture with his hands: Jesus breaks the bread. The text does not tell us that the Lord's appearance changed, as happened at the Transfiguration, but that the disciples' eyes were opened. They bear witness that encountering the risen Jesus — like the life of the Holy Spirit within us — allows us to recognise God in the reality of our lives, and in an entirely new way.
Let us reread, in the light of the experience of the disciples of Emmaus, that passage in Genesis in which the serpent seduces Adam and Eve with the effects of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: "your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God" (Gen 3:5). It was a trick, a lie tempting them to seize divine sight for themselves, to determine good and evil on their own terms, as though it were possible to satisfy our infinite thirst apart from God. Since that deception, human nature — our eyes, our way of looking, our sensibility — has been wounded in such a way that God Himself chose to become man so that man might recover the depth of vision for which God had created him. After the resurrection of Jesus, we can speak of a "redemption of the senses." Emmaus announces that healing, and perhaps that is why St. Luke echoes the same words as Genesis: "their eyes were opened." It is not that they now see new objects: it is that the heart from which they look has been transformed; they can now perceive the truth, goodness ,and beauty of reality.
Jesus is recognised through a gesture of his hands, meaning that the disciples only saw the image for only a moment before it vanished. Yet once that gesture is gone and "breaking of the bread" has ended, the inner transformation remains. Looking back on what they have just lived, the disciples no longer have any doubt: "Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked to us on the road, while He opened to us the scriptures?" (Lk 24:32). The experience utterly transforms them: they can now understand what the prophets had said, the meaning of what had happened to them, and even what they were called to in the future. It is this new way of seeing, transformed by grace, that makes them get up at once and return to Jerusalem to tell the others.
This Christian transformation of sight found an extraordinary flowering in the religious tradition of the icon. When someone stands before an icon, they are not merely observing something; in some sense, they discover that they themselves are being looked at. The large, wide-open eyes of the figures portrayed there do not reproduce a physical feature. Rather, they symbolically represent a redeemed sensibility: a wakeful, purified, simple capacity to receive unsuspected depth within what is sensible and material.
Unexpected beauty
St. Josemaría cultivated a way of seeing that knew how to give weight to everything ordinary, and he never let even the most trivial thing pass without letting it lead him to God. "Haven't you noticed," he once asked, "the way families look after valuable ornaments or decorative pieces, a vase for example; how they take care lest it get broken? Until one day the baby happens to be playing nearby and knocks it over. The precious souvenir is dashed to pieces, and all the family are very upset. But they immediately set about repairing it. The pieces are gathered up and carefully glued together, and in the end it is restored to its former beauty. However, when the broken object is a simple piece of crockery or just a piece of earthenware, it is usually enough to get some simple rivets, clips of iron or other metal, to bind the fragments together. The pot or vessel thus repaired takes on an original charm of its own."[4]
This observation about beauty touches on something similar to what in Japanese art is called kintsugi: pieces that, rather than concealing the cracks left by a break, highlight them with visible material, often mixed with gold dust. But whereas that tradition encourages us to embrace our wounds on a purely human level, St. Josemaría moves from the mended vase to the interior life. And back again: from the interior life to the mended vase. Divine contemplation in the midst of everyday objects.
On another occasion, speaking specifically of a soup tureen mended with rivets that had been given to him in Portugal, he said: "I felt that that old pot was me. I prayed about it, because that’s exactly how I see myself, like that earthenware soup-tureen, broken but stapled together. I love to tell the Lord, 'Staples and all, I love you so much!' We can still love the Lord when we get broken, my children."[5] We might then ask ourselves: how can an apparently unremarkable object awaken love for God in us too? How can we live a life of prayer, discovering the beauty of the things and the people around us?
From the surface to the depths of reality
Works of art have an extraordinary character that we cannot enjoy all the time with the same intensity. Even among people who have cultivated a particular sensitivity to art, not everyone manages to appreciate every art form. And while it is good to go deeper into that kind of formation, it may be even more important to develop a sensibility capable of attending to the aesthetic dimension of everyday life. Yet this is a capacity we rarely train.
All reality possesses an aesthetic dimension, because everything presents itself to us in a sensible way, with a particular shape, texture, volume, colour, etcetera. These characteristics shape spaces, objects and gestures… and they also influence how we react to them. Recognising this aesthetic dimension of everything around us does not mean claiming that everything is beautiful, but rather that the aesthetic dimension of our surroundings influences — often without our realising it — our judgement of reality.
"Most people have a plane-like vision, stuck to the earth, of two dimensions. When you live a supernatural life, God will give you the third dimension: height, and with it, perspective, weight and volume."[6] God's grace, the action of the creative Spirit within us, is the fundamental force driving this process to its fulfilment. Because becoming aware of the aesthetic — and symbolic, and sacramental — dimension of reality does not turn us into aesthetes: rather, it develops a contemplative spirit that allows us, little by little, to discover that invisible world which sustains the visible world and overflows it in breadth and richness. We learn to read in everything the presence of a God who seeks us out; we welcome reality and other people just as they are. That contemplative spirit leads us, finally, as Joseph Ratzinger put it, to "acquire a new and deeper capacity to see, to perform the passage from what is merely external to the profundity of reality, in such a way that… what actually appears in what can be perceived [is] the splendor of the glory of God, the 'glory of God shining on the face of Christ' (2 Cor 4:6)."[7]
"Alarm clocks" for the soul
For this challenge of transforming our way of seeing, those small aids that St. Josemaría, borrowing a classic expression from the spiritual tradition, called "human devices" can prove useful. These simple, everyday reminders form part of the search for, and discovery of, beauty in the ordinary: they help us not to lose sight of God's presence, or to pick up the conversation with the One who has never, for a single moment, stopped being in us and beside us, even when we have let ourselves grow distracted.
"Human devices" are so called because they are personal initiatives that make it easier to discover the depth of what we hold in our hands. St. Josemaría also called them "alarm clocks," because they wake us to the splendour of what is real, to its "dynamic echo of eternity."[8] Keeping some phrase of Sacred Scripture more present during the day, performing everyday gestures such as opening a door or climbing a flight of stairs with warmth and serenity… "These pious practices will lead you, almost without your realising it, to contemplative prayer. Your soul will pour forth more acts of love, aspirations, acts of thanksgiving, acts of atonement, spiritual communions. And this will happen while you go about your ordinary duties, when you answer the telephone, get on to a bus, open or close a door, pass in front of a church, when you begin a new task, during it and when you have finished it: you will find yourself referring everything you do to your Father God."[9]
Besides pointing to the divine value that even the seemingly most trivial gesture can carry — Christ himself speaks to us of the immense value of "giving a cup of water" (Mk 9:41) — St. Josemaría also saw, in the most inconsequential objects, with no religious content whatsoever, "alarm clocks" for the soul.
St. Josemaría "played," in this sense, with all sorts of objects: a map of the world, a little donkey, a photograph… For many years he kept on his desk, as a paperweight, a glass insulator of the kind once used on electricity poles, to stop the current escaping and to prevent fires or electrocutions. This object reminded St. Josemaría of his "duty not to be an insulator, but to transmit the spirit of the Work."[10]
St. Josemaría encouraged each person to find their own objects, ones that would help them "see God in all earthly things: in people, in events, in big things and little things, in what pleases us and in what we regard as painful."[11] José Esparza, a supernumerary, told him, for example, in a letter, how he found God through his musical instrument, the bass drum: "I'm the one who livens up the festivities, so with every single beat of that bass drum you see, I've made thousands of aspirations, because I've been playing it for seventeen years."[12]
Then the whole world is Emmaus
As St. John Paul II said in his Letter to Artists, not all of us are called to be artists in the professional sense of the word. And yet, all men and women "are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece."[13] The horizon of aesthetics thus extends far beyond the realm of the arts, right to the very heart of human existence. All of us are called to carry creation forward — through our work, of course, but also through each of our decisions, which shape the world. Every human action takes a particular form and gives rise to ways of inhabiting reality that affect others, for good or ill. The aesthetic dimension of our actions brings out the importance of the way we do things, as Antonio Machado put it, in the lines St. Josemaría liked to quote: "Write slowly and with a careful hand, for doing things well is more important than doing them."[14]
Careful, contemplative action does not seek efficiency, nor is it content with doing the bare minimum, or fulfilling our duties in some detached, clinical way; instead, it is charged with the gratuitousness proper to love. This care for what is real takes on an immense, new depth when it is lived in union with Christ. St. Josemaría liked to express this by recalling an old story: "How often have I reminded you of the myth of King Midas, who turned all he touched into gold! We, despite our personal failings, can turn all we touch into the gold of supernatural merit."[15]
The gold of everyday life does not come from striving to do different things, but from the love with which we do them, from a relationship that runs through them and illuminates them. In this light we can fully grasp what St. Josemaría glimpsed when he said that "the entire world has become an Emmaus, for the Lord has opened up all the divine paths of the earth."[16] Only through the new way of seeing, the new sensibility that the Risen One gives us as a gift, can we "turn the prose of each day into heroic verse."[17]
[1] Leo XIV, Address at the meeting "Building Networks with the World of Culture, Art, Economy and Sport," 7 June 2026.
[2] St. Josemaría, Notes from a meditation, 19 March 1975.
[3] St. Josemaría, Conversations, no. 114.
[4] St. Josemaría, Friends of God, no. 95.
[5] St. Josemaría, quoted in J. Gil and E. Muñiz, Wanting Jesus Alone to Shine, chapter 25.
[6] St. Josemaría, The Way, no. 279.
[7] J. Ratzinger, "The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty," Message to the Communion and Liberation meeting at Rimini, August 2002, on vatican.va.
[8] St. Josemaría, The Forge, no. 917.
[9] Friends of God, no. 148.
[10] A. Sastre, Tiempo de caminar, Rialp, 1989, pg. 174 (our translation)
[11] St. Josemaría, In Dialogue with the Lord, no. 182.
[12] "José Esparza, the Opus Dei supernumerary who played the bass drum for 17 years at his village festivities," at www.alfayomega.es, 6 March 2026.
[13] St. John Paul II, Letter to Artists, 4 April 1999, no. 2.
[14] Conversations, no. 116.
[15] Friends of God, no. 308.
[16] Ibid, no. 314.
[17] St. Josemaría, Christ Is Passing By, no. 50.