Beatitudes

1. Beatitudes In Your Spiritual Life

2. Meaning of Beatitude • Beatitude means blessedness, not happiness in the modern sense of the word. • Happy in the modern sense means: • Something subjective, a state of consciousness, a feeling. If you feel happy, you are happy • It connotes a temporary state • And something dependent on fortune (hap is the Old English word for “fortune” or “chance”

3. Meaning of Beatitude • Blessedness is: • An objective state (it is consistent with reality), not a subjective feeling that can and most of the time is inconsistent with reality and therefore not true • A permanent state • Dependent on God’s grace an our choice, neither chance nor fortune. • (quoted from Kreeft, Back to Virtue. P.87)

4. How Can We Know? • The test that separates happiness from blessedness is suffering. • Suffering can be a part of blessedness • Suffering is not a part of happiness

5. How Can This Be? • The beatitudes teach us that those who the world consider least blessed are the most blessed……and vice versa. • This is because there is huge difference between appearances and reality • Especially for us modern and post-modern humans who ignore or don’t accept a spiritual side to reality

6. 1. Poor in Spirit vs. Pride • Pride is the sin of Satan and the original sin of Adam. It violates the first commandment by making ourselves into God instead of honoring the true God. It may bring some happiness in this life, but never true joy, and definitely not blessedness because it is a false understanding of reality. • Rulers make bad lovers You better put your kingdom up for sale (Gold Dust Woman, Fleetwood Mac)

7. Pride cont. • Pride is: • Competitive • Lust for power • Pride looks down, and no one can see God but by looking up. • Pride is focused on self, not God and others • The song sung in hell and the ideal of post-enlightenment culture is “I Did It My Way”

8. Poor in Spirit • While pride puts us in competition with God and looking at self rather than God (thereby keeping us from God and His love) • Poverty of Spirit draws us to God and to blessedness, the joy of being one with God • Humility allows a person to look outside of themselves in self-forgetful ecstasy (ek-stasis, “standing-outside-yourself”).

9. Poverty of Spirit is not • Is not Weakness, But Strength • Otherwise Nietzsche is right to abhor Jesus because he is weak, simply a nice guy • Detachment from the world leads to the power of emptiness. Not being filled with ourselves we are able to be filled with God. That is the power witnessed in the saints. • To get this power we must be humble and admit we are not God and not attach ourselves to the things of the world. If we are filled-up with ourselves and the stuff of this world there is no room for God.

10. Goal of Poverty of Spirit • The goal of detachment is not emptiness, like Buddha, but to be filled with God • “We are to become spiritually poor (humble) only for the sake of becoming spiritually rich, detached from what we can own so that we can be attached in a different way to what we cannot own, detached from consuming so that we can be consumed by God”

11. Giving Mercy vs. Getting Things • Avarice, covetousness, greed • Immoderate desire for external things with the result of making them into ends, into gods • Avarice is foolish for we can only possess what is less than ourselves (objects). But our happiness only occurs when we possess that which is greater than ourselves • Truth, Goodness, Beauty – the attributes of God • And most importantly God himself

12. Avarice Continued • We have a God-shaped hole in our being that will never be filled by finite things. • Alexander the Great in someway understood this. He directed that his hands hang out of his coffin to show the world that you can’t take it with you.

13. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Instead of greedily trying to appropriate mercy is the opposite attitude. Mercy is with open hands forgiving an injustice done to you. Instead of greedily trying to appropriate mercy is the opposite attitude. Mercy is with open hands forgiving an injustice done to you.

14. Mercy continued • Mercy is not forgetting, it is forgiving. • There still is a debt to be paid, therefore mercy is going to cost me something. • Mercy cost God – the cross • Mercy will cost us as well, yet will end in blessedness

15. Blessedness of Mercy • First, unlike avarice, the logic of mercy is that it understands that joy comes from not possessing things. Joy comes from giving of ourselves to others. • Second, God has designed His world so that our self-sacrifice is more than compensated by His grace. • Third, being merciful opens us up to God’s mercy. God can not force his mercy on the unmerciful. They would not accept it.

16. Blessed Mourning vs. Mourning at Other’s Blessedness (Envy) • Envy is the sorrow over another’s good • Aspiration looks up and says, “I aspire to be up there too.” • Envy, looks up and says, “I want you to be brought down and become less than me.” • Envy removes joy because it is the opposite of gratitude • Deadly sin because it leads to other sins – the worst sin of hatred and lifelessness

17. Envy Continued • We are commanded to “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” • Envy weeps at those who rejoice and rejoices at those who weep. • Envy refuses to accept that we are communal, familial creatures

18. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted • This beatitude is about suffering, the thing we fear more than death. • All mourn, but all are not blessed. Why? • Because this mourning is based on love. The more one loves, the more one suffers. • The one who loves can feel so much more pain than the one who avoids the risk of love

19. Joy in Suffering • Because in true love we enter into the other, become the other in some sense we can experience extreme suffering • That same entering into the other also allows us to experience extreme joy, even joy in suffering • “who for the joy that was set before him endured the Cross” (Heb 12:2).

20. Joy in Suffering • Suffering does not cause the joy, but we can have joy in suffering. Suffering connected to love. • Even physical suffering can be connected to the choice to love and become a source of joy. • Offer it up in love for Christ and others • The Church will not canonize a saint without proof of extraordinary joy in their life.

21. We are all called to suffer • In particular we are all called to die to self, to self-will, to self-interest. This dying process is suffering. • Following God’s law on sexuality will be a cause of suffering, but will lead to greater joy.

22. Death & Joy • Even death, the greatest cause of human suffering, is to be a source of joy. • A joy to know my loved one, or I am finally going home. • “Death, where is thy sting.”

23. The Meek and the Peacemakers vs. the Anger-driven • Anger is only an emotion and not a sin because we can not initially control an emotion. • Anger is only a sin when • Our will is involved • And the anger is inordinate (wrong, irrational, too strong for the occasion or the person we are angry at.

24. Anger continued • Anger can be justified • God got angry • Jesus got angry • “He who is not angry when he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices.” St. John Chrysostom

25. God’s Anger • God hates the sin, not the sinner • God, in hating our sin, is like a surgeon who hates the cancer only because he loves the patient. • Example of Jesus with the Pharisees.

26. Anger as Sin • Anger becomes a deadly sin when it turns to hatred of another. When anger’s heat turns to rigid coldness, it is rigor mortis.

27. Blessed are the Meek • Meekness is not weakness • Proper image of meekness is the medieval knight who combines great strength and great meekness. • He has the ability to use force and the strength to forego using force

28. Jesus’ Meekness • The Lion of Judah is feared, so feared he is crucified • Jesus like the knight is gentle to the repentant sinner and roars hell fire at the proud Pharisees hoping it will shock them into repentance

29. Jesus • Jesus is meek when he is submissive to the Father, but his submissiveness is strength. It revolutionizes the world. • When we submit to the Father we also become strong because we open ourselves to God’s power

30. Peacemakers • Did Jesus come to bring peace • ultimately yes • Immediately no, because he would demand people make a choice about who He was • Peace is not the absence of war • Peace is when we are at peace with ourselves, and we are only at peace with ourselves when we are at peace with God. Thomas Merton

31. Peace • Peace is not a comfortable niceness. Jesus was not nice. Jesus was love, and love sometimes makes people uncomfortable. • Jesus came to bring primarily spiritual peace between God and Man • The only way to truly bring about peace is to become a child of God in Christ

32. Hungering for Righteousness vs. Satisfied with Sloth

33. Sloth • Sloth is sorrow over spiritual good, or joylessness when faced with God as our supreme joy • Kills God’s life in our soul • Robs us of our appetite for God, our zest for God, our interest and enjoyment for God. • Sloth stop us from seeking God and that mean we do not find him

34. Sloth as Sorrow • Sloth leads to depression, because it finds our highest joy, God, a source of sorrow. • There is deep spiritual sorrow at the heart of modern civilization because we are the first civilization to not know who we are, why we are, or what our purpose is.

35. Effect of Sloth on Society • To cover-up our sorrow • We have become a civilization focused on physical pleasures. • Modern society has also become the most active with less leisure. Why? • No matter what we try we can not cover-up the sorrow, so we are depressed and/or bored. For we have given-up the one thing that is never boring; God.

36. Hungering for Righteousness • Hungering for Righteousness is the cure to sloth. To seek for truth, goodness, and beauty will lead to happiness. Such seeking will lead one to find God in this life or in the next. • All who seek will find. The saints have immense joy because they have found God. • All believers have great hope, because they know they will experience the joy which is God.

37. Pure of Heart vs. Lustful of Heart • Lust: of all the sins lust is the most popular because it is the most fun. • Definition: natural attraction that becomes detached from reason and true love of the other • To defeat lust we must love with a pure heart

38. Problem of Lust • Problem #1: The leap between noticing and lusting, between the first glance and the second look, is often small and easily made. • Problem #2: Lust like infatuation is blind and may lead us to enter harmful relationships. • Problem #3: Lust is a replacement for the real joy that we long for.

39. “Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures.” • St. Augustine • Therefore the only solution to lust is God’s grace (a grace which leads to experiencing God’s love) which we open ourselves to through prayer and the sacraments.

40. Pure of Heart Shall See God • “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing” • Kierkegaard • Purity of heart comes from knowing our goal, our destination, our home = God. • Our love is not divided. It gives its all to God. • The pure of heart are given grace by being united with (incorporated with) Christ.

41. Knowing God is an Action of the Heart not the Mind • “This the reason why it is saints, not scholars, who understand the Bible. It is God’s word, and God is not an It but a Thou, or rather and I (the I). Scripture is a love letter,…And only a lover understands a love letter. In fact, the Word of God is not first of all a book, but first of all a Person.” (Kreeft, 175-176)

42. Courage under Persecution vs. Self-indulgence (Gluttony) • The danger of gluttony is that we can make the pleasures of food and drink and end instead of God. When this happens we are definitely addicted. • This sin comes from the illusion that we can be made happy by cramming our inner emptiness, of body as well as of soul, full of things of this world. This is a definite recipe for disappointment.

43. Courage & Persecution • The opposite of gluttony is the courage necessary to be persecuted for our faith • The strength of self-sacrifice • “Because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘a servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” • (Jn 15:19-20)

44. Persecution Today • “There are segments of the world where you can find acceptance even if you are a pervert, a punk, a sadist, or a snob. The world can digest any food made of its own substance, grown in its own garden. But it simply cannot digest heavenly food. It will always vomit up Christ and his Church as alien and threatening….” (Kreeft, 181-182)