The Liturgy That Doesn’t Look Like Transcendence

A reader’s letter responding to Stephan Pax Leonard’s conversion essay offers an unexpected lesson in what beauty actually does for the soul. Recalling a visit to St. Petersburg, the writer describes being “rapt and yearning” in Russian Orthodox churches — then stumbling into the city’s lone Catholic parish, its interior “scarred and barren, still undergoing renovation after being ransacked and used for storage during Soviet times.”

What the visitor found there was not the beauty of restraint. It was two dozen French-speaking Africans in brightly patterned clothing, “singing and swaying to percussive rhythms.” The liturgy was not, by the writer’s own admission, “culturally available” to them at all.

Yet the joy was undeniable. Here is a quiet rebuke to any spirituality that equates transcendence with a single aesthetic register. The letter’s own conclusion — that this was “a vivid display of the universality of the Church” — suggests the deeper truth: reverence takes many forms, and the Spirit is not bound to the architecture that moves us most.