Rejoice and Be Glad

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you

Matthew 5:10-12

Reflection – So now we come to the last two beatitudes, which are so interconnected that they are numbered together. The eighth beatitude, and what a corker it is.

We have to tread carefully here, I think. Too often today we are quick to use the ‘p’ word (persecution) for things that don’t really rise to that level. When Richard Dawkins says that Christians are big fat dummies (OK, I’m paraphrasing him), that may be annoying but it’s hardly persecution.

When people scoff at religion, or casually and groundlessly accuse all Catholic priests of heinous crimes against children, or express their disagreement with this or that Church teaching with, perhaps, a certain amount of vehemence, anger, profanity—that is not persecution.

When the surrounding culture in which we live is more and more removed from Christian values and mores, and we have to be vigilant and sparing in our exposure to mass entertainment and culture so as not to be corrupted by its false values—that is not persecution.

Many people have seen the pictures of Archbishop Leonard of Brussels being attacked with water and pies to the face by screaming, topless women. He has, throughout this rather painful ordeal of public humiliation and ugliness, said that this too is not persecution. He happens to be a good friend of Madonna House, being the bishop who invited us to Belgium when he was in the diocese of Namur, and he is very clear eyed and simple about this fact.

We have to be careful about claiming the mantle of persecution, lest we make ourselves appear ridiculous to others. People being nasty and mean and contemptuous to us is not persecution. So what is?

Well, how about having marauding gangs of thugs burning your churches down, sometimes with you in them? Like the Christians in Nigeria. Or being faced each day with either death or exile as a militant group of radicals assumes greater power in your country. Like the Christians in Egypt. Or being arrested for any kind of public display on one’s religion. Like the very few Christians in Saudi Arabia. Or being allowed the exercise of your religion only under strict government control and supervision. Like in China. Or having no right whatsoever to practice any kind of religion and being jailed, tortured and killed if caught doing so. Like in North Korea.

These are the people of the eighth beatitude today (I haven’t tried to provide a comprehensive list here), and we need to be very clear about the vast difference between the challenges we face and the reality they are living. We who live in North America and Europe—OK, so it’s not easy to be a Christian now. But when has it ever been? We are not persecuted, not yet, not now.

But if we are in the future, or even to whatever small extent people say nasty things about us and are hostile and angry towards us—well, blessed are we, right? I mean, that’s what Our Lord says here. We have to be careful and tread lightly here, and not take ourselves too seriously in all this. The Lord promises us that if the world hated him it will hate us too. So, the world hates us! A little bit, anyhow! Big deal! Who cares! Grow up and get used to it! C’est la vie! La vie de l’evangile!

OK, I’ll stop writing in exclamation points now. I do think, though, that we have to take hold of the Gospel on this point a bit more deeply than we have. Christianity has moved over the past fifty years in North America from being the overwhelmingly dominant world view of the culture to being not so dominant, to having less influence. This may increase, or not, may get uglier and nastier, or not. Who knows, really?

But to whatever extent we are opposed, reviled, spoken falsely of, or even (maybe) persecuted, the Lord tells us to rejoice and be glad, for our reward is great in heaven. It is All Souls Day today, when we pray for all the faithful departed. And so between yesterday’s celebration of All Saints and today’s sober call to prayer for our brothers and sisters in Purgatory, we are called to remember that this world and this life is temporary, quite short really in light of eternity, and that the sole beatitude, the sole happiness and joy in life is to be with Jesus, to live as Jesus lived by the power of his grace and mercy.

There is no other way to live a blessed life, so if our portion of that Christ-life happens to involve some unpleasantness, with people treating us the way they treated Him, let us not whine about it or complain or get all worked up. Rejoice and be glad—we are being blessed, and the kingdom of heaven is ours, alleluia.

Making Peace With God

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God

Matthew 5:9

Reflection –  Happy feast day, everyone! All Saints is truly one of the great feasts of the church calendar, ranking with Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, the solemnities of Our Lady. In fact, in the Eastern calendar it falls the Sunday after Pentecost, appropriately, since the first fruit of the Holy Spirit is, in fact, the holiness of the saints.

In the West, the feast originally was at that time as well, but was moved to November for practical reasons: large numbers of pilgrims would come to Rome for the celebration, and there would not be enough food for them in May, when the winter stores were run low. Moving the feast to November 1, at the end of the harvest, was both practical and had its own symbolic value: the saints are the ‘harvest’ of God in the world.

Anyhow, celebrate well today. Do something fun! We’re having homemade pizza here at MH, a rare treat for us, followed by a party in celebration of these great men and women of God who bear witness to His victory.

So, back to the Beatitudes. Blessed are the peacemakers: this one may seem out of place in the list to us. The poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure—all of this seems to do with attitudes of mind and heart, which of course are expressed in action, but principally are interior realities, states of being, if you will.

This one takes us squarely into the field of action. Not ‘blessed are the peaceful’, but blessed are the peace-makers, those who do works that build up peace in this world. Personally, I find that a cause for great meditation, that Our Lord would choose that particular aspect of human action as one of the great Beatitudes of the Gospel.

Of course we look at the world and see the devastating harm war and violence wreak in human lives. Off hand, I cannot think of anything else in the human world that does more damage, more deeply, more extensively. War, on a societal, national level, and violence, on a domestic, personal level. In fact, I would ask: is there any real human tragedy that does not have, at its root, some manifestation of violence and hatred as its cause?

As a priest and spiritual director, I have seen as well that a person can be suffering greatly, can have all sorts of problems and afflictions and genuine distress, but if there is an underlying peace, a fundamental inner calmness, that person is basically OK. We can handle a lot, we human beings, if our inner core is at rest. Another person may have the same afflictions and problems, or even considerably smaller ones, but without that inner peace be completely overcome by them.

So to be a peacemaker, a worker for peace, is no small thing. Meanwhile, in our digital world, the world of the Internet which you and I are currently engaged in here, conflict and anger, disputation and divisiveness, polarization and invective are the order of the day. This needs to be considered carefully. This is not what Our Lord is calling us to in the Gospel. Evil needs to be opposed and the good and the true need to be proclaimed, but the level of snark and sarcasm, random polemic, name-calling and just plain nastiness that is all too common on the Internet is simply not Christian.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God. Most translations render it ‘children’ in the interest of inclusivity, but the word is ‘sons’ in Greek, and I think there is an important theological truth at stake in that word choice. Namely, when we choose to dedicate our life to peace, to extending the sphere of peace and calm, to reducing the level of violence and hatred in ourselves and in the world, we are doing the work of the Son and become sons with the Son.

Identification with Christ—that is the fruit of this beatitude. And that opens up whole frontiers of meditation, doesn’t it? How did Christ make peace? What did He do for peace in this world? What price was He willing to pay so that you and I could find our way to that deep interior peace and the blessed assurance of God’s merciful love?

Well, we know the answer to that question, and I don’t need to underline it too emphatically. Tomorrow’s final beatitudes will lay it bare for us, anyhow. Happy All Saints Day, mind you – may it be indeed a day of great peace and joy, and may we know just how it came to be that peace and joy were born in the world, and just what our God has done for us to make it so.

What the Heart Wants

Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God

Matthew 5:8

Reflection –  I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I started this series on the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor… those who mourn… the meek… the hungry for righteousness… the merciful… and now the pure of heart. It’s quite something to unpack each Beatitude individually and really look at what each one is. A text we can read in a minute and forget about in the next minute has enough material in it for a life time of meditation.

Blessed are the pure of heart. Purity of heart is an elusive quality in our days of hyper-sexualized imagery saturating the culture, and a million and one distractions, diversions, toys, entertainments. We can know that it is not only about sex—we should know that, anyhow—but that it is about having our desires, our attention, our whole life and being focused on the ‘one thing necessary’ (Luke 10), but that doesn’t make it an easier virtue to attain at all.

Blessed are the pure of heart. But our hearts are wayward, obstinate, changeable, fickle. Mine is, anyhow. Nor has it been my experience, 47 years into the experiment of human life, that I can simply make my heart be otherwise by a sheer act of will. ‘The heart wants what it wants’, wrote Emily Dickinson—and most of us, almost all of us, find within our hearts a welter of wants, a tangled profusion of contradictory desires and muddled up longings.

We hunger and thirst for righteousness… and for other things, too. And that’s the fact of our fallen, fragmented humanity, and never more so in this age of distraction, diversion, culture-wide attention deficit disorder, of serial monogamy of the mind. I want what I want… now. Ten minutes later, it will be something else.

Blessed are the pure of heart. So are we to despair, then? Is God the ‘beatitude Nazi’, like the soup Nazi on Seinfeld, demanding an impossible standard of performance and exactitude before doling out his blessing? ‘No beatitude for you!’ if we don't do it just so?

It is, perhaps, in this beatitude that we are forcibly impressed with the fact that all the beatitudes, and holiness itself, resides first and always not in the frail human heart with its adulteries and idolatries and compromises, but in the Heart of Christ which is given over to us to be our first and greatest treasure.

Christ is the pure one, as he is the merciful, the meek, the mourning, the poor, the one hungry for righteousness. It is Christ and Christ alone who is our beatitude, and who draws us along on the path of the beatitudes. There is no holiness but Jesus, no virtue but Jesus, no love but Jesus. This is, fundamentally, our Christian faith.

I think here of the Madonna House practice of poustinia. Catherine Doherty brought this from her native Russia to us, and brought it forth as a spiritual practice for the community in the turbulent 1960s when so many things in our world were tossed up in the air like wheat and chaff. To sort it all out, to allow the winds of God to winnow our hearts and purify them in truth, she knew it would take radical prayer and silence.

So… poustinia. I realize many of my readers know what I’m talking about, but some don’t. It is, for us, a little log cabin or perhaps a spare room, sparsely furnished, with no decorations save perhaps an icon or two, and a cross without a corpus. There is the Bible to read, bread and water for sustenance, you, and God.

And… that’s all there is to it, really. Poustinia is the Russian word for desert, and that’s the desert: Bible, bread, water, you, God. 24 hours in silence and prayer with no structure, no rules, nothing but the living you and the living God.

Catherine saw that this was the great path to the purity of heart, the refinement of the soul, the washing away, the emptying of our beings of so much junk and folly and useless noise. And so in Madonna House we have poustinias for the past 50 years, and it has blessed our apostolate immeasurably.

I say all that because I think something like poustinia is needed in everyone’s lives today. Our world has gotten noisier and noisier and noisier. The pitfalls and traps and wild clamor of the world abound. If we want to attain any sort of purity of heart, we need some degree of silence, some degree of empty space in which the living God can dwell and drive out the money changers and merchants from the living temple of our souls.

Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. It is in silence and prayer that we ‘see’ God, and so I leave you with that: we need this, and we need to find our way to it today, one way or another.

To Have Our Life Made Beautiful

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy

Matthew 5:7

Reflection – Well, this is either the easiest beatitude for me to write about or the most difficult. Easy, because I’ve written an entire book on the subject. Difficult, for the same reason—what else could I possibly say that I haven’t already said.

I have decided to take the easy route today, slightly bleary with sleep as I am still. Here is a section from my book Going Home, from the last chapter called, indeed ‘Blessed’. I have been meditating on the parable of the prodigal son all through the book. Here, I am in the person of the elder brother, grappling with the revelation of the father’s mercy, and struggling to know how to make it my own. I hope you enjoy this excerpt, and if you do, that you buy the book:

I Don't Want to Waste Anything

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.

Matthew 5:6

Reflection – If the first three beatitudes confound us with their reversal of worldly notions of a good life—blessed are the poor, the mourning, the meek—then this fourth one simply challenges us deeply to examine our hearts. How much do we really want to be good? Do we hunger and thirst for it? Is righteousness, goodness, a fire blazing within us, a yearning of our whole being? Do we strive with every fiber of our being to seek what is good, to chase after virtue of conduct, speech, thought? Are we willing to pay any price, risk any danger, essay any arduous task, for the sake of righteousness?

Or is it a little more of a milk water affair: ‘it’s nice to be nice!’ Or, ‘Well, of course I want to be a good person, but… (fill in your conditions, exceptions, and limits here)’. A general vague commitment to being somewhat decent most of the time, as long as it’s not too hard or I don’t really want to do something else badly.

The saints—and remember, I’m doing this whole series on the beatitudes in light of the coming feast of All Saints—lived this beatitude to an extreme. That is why we remember them as saints. The phrase the Church uses is ‘heroic’ virtue—not simply a general commitment to a more or less OK life, but heroism in the pursuit of goodness.

So you have young girls getting devoured by wild beasts rather than break the vow of virginity they made to Christ, and countless other martyrs dying rather than denying Him. You have missionaries leaving the comfortable familiarity of their homes to lives of certain deprivation and almost certain death under foreign skies.

You have the great reformers of Church and society, and the servants of the poor—people like Vincent de Paul, Theresa of Calcutta, Philip Neri—who labored hard every day at great personal cost to make the world they lived in more compassionate, just, faith-filled, holy. And all the hosts of ascetics and monastics and mystics, abandoning all worldly good for the righteousness that comes from belonging to God and God alone.

The saints lived this fourth beatitude each in his or her own way, according to the specific call of God and the circumstances of life. But they blazed with a fire, each of them, to do what is right and to see that righteousness take root in the world.

Well, like I say, this beatitude is plenty confronting, certainly for me, and probably for you who are reading this, whoever you may be. We are not made to live comfortably and easily in this world. There is a task, a work, a labor God has given to us, and we really shouldn’t be too at ease for as long as it is ongoing.

But what are we to do? I can’t go to, say, Egypt and offer myself up as a martyr, nor is my specific vocation precisely that of the old school missionary. God has made it quite clear to me that I am to stay here in Canada until further notice. My scope for being a social or church reformer is fairly limited, although I am doing what I can on that score, I think. And asceticism… well, no one will be confusing me with Anthony of the Desert, at least not today.

My mind turns at this juncture, though, to another saint, who was neither martyr nor missionary nor great reformer nor (at least relatively) a great ascetic. I am thinking of St. Therese of Lisieux, who has been my personal best friend among the saints from way back. She hungered and thirsted after righteousness, and this hunger bore her into the Carmelite cloister.

But there, she found the way of this beatitude that is open to all of us, today, no matter what the circumstances of our life may be. Namely, she never missed an opportunity to do what is good, to deny herself, to make acts of faith, hope, love for God. Her life in the Carmelite cloister was a very ordinary one, really. She wasn’t much good at prayer, falling asleep in meditation. She was singularly devoid of sensible mystical graces. And without those kinds of graces, the life of a Carmelite is a fairly stark one: living in a drafty unheated convent, cooped up for life with a bunch of people you didn’t exactly choose and may not like, doing simple manual labor interspersed with long hours of (dry) prayer in a freezing cold chapel.

She simply chose to make the most of everything that happened to her. If she was sweeping a floor, she swept it for love of Jesus. If a sister was unkind to her, she received it with a smile for love of Jesus. If she had a bad cough (first sign of the tuberculosis that would kill her at age 23) she offered it for love of Jesus.

‘I don’t want to waste anything’ – a holy nun of my acquaintance says this. This is the way of the fourth beatitude. At every moment of our life, something is presented to us—a person, a task, a situation. Something. Don’t waste it! Do what is righteous, now. And, now. And, now again. That is the way of hunger and thirst for what is right, and that is the way of the saints.