The beauty of the Catholic Church has the potential to comfort me. I feel safe there even if I go alone. My mood is transformed once I enter the angelic building. The Catholic Church is like one big container of love, security and grace. The artistry and burning candles give me light; light gives me hope. My hope is that my grandfather is now in heaven with God, loved and warm. The appealing statues of Mary the mother of God and Jesus the son of God looking down on the congregation encourage that they are with me each day of my life. The elegant but worn furniture reveal I am not dreaming; others believe what I believe. Heaven does exist; my grandfather has been comforted. Each part of the church has a symbolic meaning for us Catholics and is designed to make all members of the congregation feel like participants in the Mass rather than just observers.

Moreover, beauty is often distorted and misunderstood as “something that looks nice.” However, I have learned that that statement is untrue. Beauty is very simple. Beauty is happiness. The beauty of the Catholic Church does not end with its looks or with the objects that have been placed there. The charm of the human beings at church can have profound effects on me. The flawless choir transforms my emotions when I am feeling mournful. The parish priest gives spiritual direction in his sermon which helps me when I am feeling confused with religion. He hears confessions that give a sense of forgiveness after a bad day and offers counselling to those vulnerable or in fact, to anyone at all.

Where would you find a more beautiful scene than the scene of a stunning bride walking up the aisle on the “red carpet “on her wedding day in the Catholic Church? Emotions of pure bliss, delight and joy fill the church, exploding it, almost shattering the stained glass windows. Cries of laughter, enjoyment and glee are shared among different types of families and friends on this special day.

This joy is relived on the day of baptisms marking the beginning of new eras. First Holy Communions, Confirmations bring more delight that is all shared under the one roof of the Catholic Church. The contentment of smiling children sweetly singing their favourite psalms at the altar glare down at their parents in hope of making them proud.

One must recognise the beauty of the word “Catholic.” It means universal. The Catholic Church is more than any one parish church. It is more than a diocese. It is more than just a collective worldwide institution. That is what makes it so special, wonderful and even more beautiful. As a universal church, it is an enticing thing to know that any practicing Catholic can walk into any Roman Catholic Church in the world and know what to expect. Vietnamese, French, German – it doesn’t matter. You still would know what is going on and what part of the mass the priest was at.

Of course everything has its flaws and God, the head of the most beautiful place in my life has his. I can never fathom why he gave me my grandfather, someone so good only to snatch him away again. I know he is safe with God, loved and warm, but I can’t reach him there. But imperfection is beauty. I believe God knows best – he may have given him to me and then took him from me as he felt I was strong enough to live with it. The Catholic Church wouldn’t be so beautiful if he didn’t deserve it to be. Beauty is happiness and without the Catholic Church I wouldn’t be happy. Since the day my grandfather died my heart is in fragments, but this beautiful, powerful, almost magical place has begun to piece them back together. Never lose an opportunity of going to a Catholic Church for the beauty of the Catholic Church is God’s handwriting.

Another very good essay on a related topic

Write a personal essay in which you explore your sense of what a particular place means to you.

Have you ever felt like you’ve been living a lie? For a long time, I felt as though I had forgotten who I truly was. I acted one way with my family, another among my peers, and differently again with my teachers. Even when I was on my own, I didn’t know what to think. I had grown so unaware of myself, completely obsessed with the stress of life and the hustle and bustle of the world around me that I stopped looking inwards to check up on myself. I had forgotten me. It was like I was a satellite, orbiting around a body that was no longer mine. I was merely a passenger that was being forced to tag along for the ride. All of that changed when I discovered my happy place.

It’s somewhere secret. Entirely for me. It allows me to slip away for an hour at a time, unseen. A place where I am free to be alone with the world. It is a place that is open any time of the day, never the same but always feels like home. A space that invites me gladly, where I can be in harmony with nature.

In the morning it greets my groggy and anxious head with a blast of cool air. As I run towards it, I can feel the morning dew blowing down my throat, burning it like a hot shot of vodka. My feet pound the country path ahead of me, sending intense vibrations through my legs as I speed through hedgerows and farm gaps. I can hear the dawn chorus that my grandmother used to speak about; the birds rising from their tiny slumbers, tweeting their harmonic symphonies. The bellows of enormous bulls act as the bass for the morning anthem, my footsteps the tempo, my heartbeat keeping us in tune. The fragrance of wet honeysuckle treats my senses, coupled with the golden smell of petrichor. These secret delights carry me to my final destination: the wild-bird cover. It is an oval-shaped field packed to the hilt with wildflowers and linseed. Here I can see the birds swooping in to collect their breakfast, speedy rabbits fleeing from fearsome foxes, and most importantly, the deafening buzz of thousands of bees. This brief excursion through nature gives me the motivation I need to make the day my own.

Come midday, this country road becomes a museum, stocked with hundreds of my happiest childhood memories. I remember strolling along with my mother, picking blackberries fresh from their bushes for her magical jams. I can see myself bobbing up and down in the cab of my father’s tractor, laughing at the silly jokes he made about the pheasant that wouldn’t move out of our way. I can still feel my dogs’ thick fur and hear the whistling noise he made when I pet him. I can remember taking the short path to the lake with my sisters, kayaks in tow, and baskets of fruit. We pushed one another out onto the still water and paddled from one end of the lake to another. Our laughter was carried by the winds for miles and miles and my troubles went with it. This was my earliest experience of bliss.

This particular field was also the stage for one of my saddest memories, a time when I consoled myself through death. I sat upon a rock at the top of the hill, a few hundred metres from that same lake, and wept. I remember looking around me at the acres upon acres of snow-covered fields, glistening in the evening sun above. Trees crowded me like an audience, their spindly black branches reaching out to shelter me. Tears dripped from my eyes and nourished the warrior daisies at my feet that refused to give in to the frost, their yellow flowers sticking over the carpet of powdery snow. The lake shone like a golden mirror, stretching for miles and miles across the Cavan border. I cursed nature then. How dare it taunt me? How could the world put on such a beautiful show on a day where so much was lost? Like everything in this world, life too comes to an end. This sight showed me that there is more to this planet than my own life and experiences.

Even when the sun rolls around the globe and the moon comes to serve its time, I have still been in this place, running once more. Running from the pressures of school. Running from the responsibilities of life. Running from this urbanised world we have all come to live in. I allow music to take over my thoughts. Sound blares through my skull, drowning out my worries and fears. I look up to the skies to see the stars above. For lightyears upon lightyears, there is space above me. It is impossible for me to comprehend just how vast the world really is, and I don’t want to know either. Our world is merely a speck, and I am barely an atom. Half of my worries are senseless and will never cause me any pain, and the rest bear no meaning at all. My path is always guided by this starlit sky, there is never a light in sight. I can run comfortably in this world we have forgotten, with the knowledge that I am fundamentally insignificant.

No matter what the man-made world tries to throw at me, I will be able for it. I despise all of our man-made enemies, the problems which we have engineered for ourselves. We live in an environment where people panic over economic status, academic grades, and parliamentary position, and none of it is even real. As I move forward in life and become caught in the stream of the mundane adult existence, I will always be able to look back. This natural and cherished location has given me the ability to see things for what they are. I know what is important to me and what doesn’t really matter, and I have this place to thank for that. It means everything to me.