Wednesday, September 7, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Songs of slaves
Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours.
Jesus’ beatitudes might be a surprise to the homeless people who ask passing drivers for a five dollar bill. Not that they don’t know the bible … many of these folks grew up in healthy homes, often Christian, learning the tenets of Jesus’ teaching. But something went wrong along the way, and here they are now with signs like “Even 25 cents helps.”
They sit or stand or walk back and forth on street corners, waiting for their stoplight to turn red. They walk back and forth, hoping for help.
Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.
“In America you get food to eat.” Randy Newman sang a song of slaves hoping for the best. “Won’t have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet. You just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day. It’s great to be an American … Sail away.” At least here there are dumpsters full of unspoiled food every night behind restaurants across whatever city you happen to be in. Starvation beckons in many other countries.
And really, I don’t have the right to speak about starvation here in the US of A. I know nothing about it. Ever since I was a boy there’s been a freezer full of meat somewhere nearby, carved from one of our own cows. Mom made a garden, so does Margaret. What do I know about being hungry?
Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.
When Margaret spent seven weeks in hospitals last summer, we rarely saw anyone weeping in the corridors or in the atrium. I don’t know what was happening in the rooms. Not everyone was getting well. Not everyone had either internal or external support, and some people laying in those beds were wham-bam alone. Released from the hospital, they would go home to … no one.
Pain comes in many sizes and disguises, and much of it burrows itself into my brain. Maybe it starts in my body, but how do I learn to slow down its inexorable progress into my mind? Should I even try? Can I follow Jesus’ plan to “take no thought for the morrow,” and live with whatever it is one day at a time … one moment … now? Let the pain lead me to the cross, perhaps? I am a busy person, addicted to accomplishments large and small, but now there is no thing to be done. Except I can learn to stand still, learn to sit and wait, learn to hold my breath and pray. The one thing.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day, for great will be your reward in heaven!
This always catches my attention, and I feel guilty because it has not much happened to me. I don’t always make it clear that my only allegiance is to God. Peter Kreeft, catching on the coattails of St. Augustine and Brother Lawrence, says in Prayer for Beginners:
What the world really is, is a highway on which God comes to us and we go to God. Everything in this world is a Between, a relativity. It is relative to God and to us. Everything except God and us is such a Between, for it is between God and us.
At one end of this Between, the highway, is the divine “I AM,” the Absolute. At the other end is his created image, the human self, which also utters the sacred word “I AM.” Nothing else exists except the universe, which is only the large and complex road between these two … as well as fellow travelers, both humans and angels, also on this road.
This is realism. We do not usually see reality so clearly. (p. 97-98)
To see this clearly, we must know ourselves as slaves made in the Image, learning for all our lives to trust and obey. Kreeft concludes, as does Chesterton, as does Lewis, as does every Christian writer worth their salt, that we children of God are slaves to Christ and always will be, and for that we can and must rejoice.
(1 Corinthians 7, Psalm 45, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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