|
By Rob Des Cotes
 Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven. Matthew 5:3
The assurances we hear in the Beatitudes that the hungry will be filled, that those who mourn will be comforted, and that the meek will be victorious can sound like pie in the sky being offered to those who have no other hope on earth.
But to see them as invitations through which Jesus calls us and reveals to us important identifiers of the spiritual life would be a more likely interpretation. St. Francis of Assisi certainly understood the human predicament in these terms. He knew, first hand, how we are fundamentally incomplete, fragile and broken people. It would be easy to think that such a state of affairs is a serious problem that needs correcting. But anyone who has studied the saint's teaching knows that his description of humanity refers not only to our starting point, but to the end we must accept as well. According to St. Francis, the most accurate theological definition of the human race is that it is made up of people who are stricken with egoistic tendencies, always tempted to affirm themselves as self-sufficient.
Francis identifies this as resulting in them abandoning themselves far too often and disfiguring the image according to which they have been fashioned. But, according to St. Francis, there is also good news in this diagnosis. Jesus, in the Beatitudes, has proposed for us a way of conversion. He invites us to embrace our poverty our fragile, broken and incomplete self as not only the beginning, but also as the end of our spirituality. In order to enter into the full blessing (literally, the happiness) of the Beatitudes we must, according to Francis, learn to both experience and assume the radical poverty of our being. To adopt this tack will immediately challenge the direction that most of our efforts at sanctification take.
Continue article >>
|
Most of us have spent years, and much psychological energy, trying to distance ourselves from the poverty of our being. Or we have tried to correct our inconsistencies on our own. We tend to see our brokenness as a temporary problem, an impediment that we hope to overcome on the road to true freedom. But if Jesus, in the Beatitudes, is teaching us the proper disposition of blessing, then our attempts to undo the poverty of our being might actually be spiritual energy spent in the wrong direction. If Jesus is right, we should be learning instead how to accept, even to embrace, our deficiencies rather than trying to distance ourselves from them. Like it or not, they are the truth of who we presently are meditations for spiritual direction.
The call of the Beatitudes is to a radical change of agenda from how we normally understand our spiritual direction. This is the call to deeply experience and to assume as our spiritual path a growing acceptance of the incompleteness of who we are. This is the call to welcome our fragility and so discover a new type of blessing that we have perhaps never known. Jesus sees our poverty as blessed. This is reason enough to embrace the teaching of the saints in this matter.
Rob Des Cotes is a spiritual director and pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He teaches Contemplative Traditions at Trinity Western University, as well as courses on spirituality and the arts at Carey Theological College and Columbia Bible College. Rob also directs Imago Dei (www.imagodeicommunity.ca) a network of faith communities that encourages the practice of prayer and a transforming relationship with God. Rob is a regular contributor to canadianchristianity.com
To obtain 'Higher than I' go to: www.clementspublishing.com
May 15/2008
|
