In The Afternoon of Christianity, Tomáš Halík sets out the aporias between a universal Catholicism and its current application. His diagnosis is one in which secularity and spiritual traditions have territorialized the traditional spheres of religious belief. Yet despite the position of religious music in the world there is no mention of music's role in this colonisation. Yet there is implicitly a call for creative solution to this impasse. This paper locates this creative space in terms of risk. It discusses the musical discourse of the French catholic composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-92) and the Estonian Russian-orthodox composer Arvo Pärt (1935-), and the gap between what their aesthetics and what their music could do to fill Halík's space. This is rarely discussed in the literature on the composers (Sholl 2025). This gap could be thought of as attending to the mystery of God. Through their complex languages and their respective catholic traditions there is an attempt to approach the burning bush of the Logos, the form of the word of God (Steiner 1999, Balthasar, 1925) through authenticity and particularity. This paper examines these composers from two counterpoles: as public evangelists of the word in secular spaces (partially fulfilling Halík's call) and as private seekers. It returns to some fundamental ideas in Messiaen's thought (colour and birdsong), using sketch material as well as Pärt's Compositional Diaries to show moments where religious belief and language coalesced: where the spark of an idea approached the word. My focus here is not merely on the transcendent effect but on the beauty of the disruption that occurred in their work that is an exemplar of their risk. I therefore argue that their religious modernist art should be understood as this form of radical intervention (rather than as some form of balm or therapy) that reveals and promotes the universal aspects of Catholicism through the particular.