The Pilgrimage T-Shirt, and the Pursuit of Beauty

This morning, my daughter was telling me about her desires. She loves beautiful things -- creating them and enjoying others' creations. The desires she told me about centered on acquiring beautiful things, and items that would help her create more beautiful things.

And then she started telling me about how maybe she should get this instead of that, because it would be cheaper.

And I knew I was hearing a sad re-echoing of myself. She was trying to accommodate her desire for the Beautiful to my ingrained habit of frugality that frankly borders on occasional closed-hearted, fear-provoked stinginess.

So as we later drove on an errand, I told her my story about The Pilgrimage T-Shirt in order to let her know that my tendency to closed-fisted spending is not always a virtue to be imitated, but a weakness to be avoided.

Here is my Pilgrimage T-Shirt, old and wrinkled now:

And here is a close-up of the Scripture text, which is Is. 32:7: "Break forth into joy, sing together you waste places of Jerusalem. For the Lord has comforted His people. He has redeemed Jerusalem."

The story goes, I was on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in May of 1993, right after having come into the Catholic Church. Our group walked in to yet another gift shop along the way one day, and I saw this shirt hanging on the wall. I was so struck by it; it was like the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. (Those who know me well, including my daughter, know that I don't react this way to many things that I see. I just don't.) I was so moved by how beautiful it was that I said out loud, "Oh! I want one of those!" There was a motherly-like woman from the pilgrimage group near me who clearly heard and understood that I saw speaking from some deep place in my heart that needed a response. She said to me, "Well, honey, you just go right ahead and buy one for yourself, then."

Her prompting moved me to follow and act on what was happening in my heart. Without her words, I may have followed instead my deeply ingrained habit of squashing all of my desires until they were safely dead. But she made me bold, and I bought the shirt. As you can see, I still have it, and I occasionally still wear it.

As I told my daughter this (I was driving), I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was smiling powerfully. She understood that pursuit of Beauty sometimes involves, yes, buying things. It involves giving what I have to unite myself with the One I desire. And she was bouncing in her seat as we drove, telling me how much money she had, and she was delighting in the prospect of pursuing her desires, too.

It is entirely possible that I really was moved to buy that shirt in 1993 in order to move my daughter in 2017 to pursue God's will for her. I still need the same message echoing in my heart: I don't serve money; it serves me, and I serve God. Every part of my natural fiber says that spending money is essentially a necessary evil. Every part of my natural fiber needs to be transformed by grace. "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of love, power, and a sound mind." 2 Timothy 1:7

And, that Scripture, though. It makes the T-Shirt story complete:

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Break forth into joy, sing together you waste places of Jerusalem. For the Lord has comforted His people. He has redeemed Jerusalem. Is. 32:7

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