Now that Halloween has passed and we've been greeted by the usual onslaught of blood and gore, it leads one to think about why our society is so enamoured of all this ugliness. Every October we are bombarded by blood, death and violence: the stores sell everything from dismembered limbs to rotting gravestones, Hollywood releases its most violent movies and occultism temporarily becomes mainstream. Why this fascination? One significant reason has to do with Satan. Where he goes, ugliness follows, and a society as steeped in sin as ours can't help but be inclined to wallow in it. Just as beauty uplifts the soul, ugliness pulls it down, and this is why Satan tries to destroy anything beautiful and replace it with filth. He uses ugliness as a tool to distract those he wishes to lure away from God.

But the fascination with ugliness isn't just a sign of being associated with Satan-it can also be a sign of the despair one feels at not finding beauty (or truth, for that matter). The more one desires the good life, the more poignantly one feels the lack of it. Then in anger and despair the soul says, "Well, if this is all there is, I might as well revel in it." And so the degree of reveling is in direct proportion to the intensity of the frustrated desire. It's partly what they mean when they say "The propensity for evil is equal to the propensity for good." So we can never judge someone who seems given over to ugliness, whether visual or otherwise-we don't know what's in their heart and whether they are merely frustrated in their longing for the good, the beautiful and the true. As Catholics, we have the duty to bring them to the fulfillment of that desire, and away from the ugliness.

Finally, there is also one major reason why ugliness (merely in itself) can never be totally despised: Our Lord Himself embraced ugliness at the most crucial point in His life: Death by crucifixion was the most violent, disturbing and well..just plain UGLY death in existence at that time in the ancient world. But Our Lord didn't just die on a cross, which would have been bad enough. No-first He was scourged to a bloody pulp and THEN crucified. This is what the Psalmist is referring to when he says "But I am a worm and no man..." (Psalm 22:6) So the "good" ugliness can't be totally despised because if Our Lord embraced it, and we are to imitate Him, then we must embrace the "ugliness" in our lives also. Sorrows, loneliness, disappointments, and even failures are all to be accepted (and even LOVED, if you can manage it ;) ). Then we can truly imitate Our Lord and really be worthy of Him.

"There is no beauty in him, nor comeliness...there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him." Isaiah 53:2