6-8 February 2025
This month, I offer some reflections on three of the Beatitudes which will help us work towards the coming of God’s kingdom, and obtain the answers to our monthly prayers. If we can implement them, our hearts will be more pure and our prayers and penances more pleasing to the Divine Majesty. And we will be ready for Lent which commences a month from now.
First of all, Blessed are the poor in spirit. It is most significant that these are the very first recorded words of our Blessed Lord when He began His preaching. He seems to place the entire perfection of the spiritual life under the aegis of poverty. Not just any poverty, but poverty of spirit. What does He mean by this? Poverty of spirit is best understood as the interior attitude of detachment from all things. It means that, even though we might – and we do by sheer necessity – have any number of things at our disposal, we do not put our hopes in them. We make use of them, because, being flesh and blood we need nourishment, clothing and shelter for our weak bodies, but we remain detached from them so that if some of them are lacking, we remain at peace. Poverty is the first of the evangelical counsels. To have poverty in spirit is necessary in order to make any progress in the spiritual life. This is why Our Lord gave us such a potent example of it in the extreme poverty of His birth and life, and above all in the total destitution of His death.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall have their fill. The word justice here refers to holiness. This beatitude is therefore about the great desire that we should have to become holy. Our Blessed Lord chooses the most imperative needs of our bodies (hunger and thirst) to show that, just as we crave food and drink each day, so each day we must long for holiness. In other words, holiness, no more than the daily bread, is not a luxury; it is a necessity. When we consider the brevity of life on earth, this becomes apparent. People make so many things the object of their desires, and yet these creatures cannot satisfy. Only justice, only holiness, can satisfy the wants of our hearts, for our hearts are made for God, and only God can satisfy them.
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God. Even though purity in the sense of chastity is one of the essential ingredients of this beatitude, to be clean or pure of heart means much more. It means not to allow one’s heart to be cluttered or unduly preoccupied with any creature. Just as the virtue of chastity refuses to use another person – or to allow another person to use us – as an object of personal gratification, so the evangelical purity of heart of which Our Blessed Lord here speaks, refuses to allow any creature to become a screen between God and ourselves. Purity of heart means that we are able to see God, already in this life. We see Him in the beauties of nature; we see Him in the eyes of a child; we see Him in Holy Scripture; we see Him in the sacraments; we see Him in the poor and the sick, and more generally, in all those who are in need. And by learning to see Him here below in all these manifestations of His presence, we become gradually fit to see Him face to face in eternity.
