Apocalypse 7:2-4,9-14
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12
“Blessed are the pure in heart.”
Holiness or even the desire for holiness is God's doing, His initiative. So holiness is not an achievement from the part of humans, but their response to God's active love here and now. Sanctity, as many might think, is not a merit, but a mere beautiful response. That is why the lives of saints never point to themselves, but always and forever beyond themselves to the One who chose them, uses them and loves them.
But very often we tend to talk about our love for God, and how we should “do” it. This is secondary, I'd say. In the saints and mystics, we find an overwhelming experience of how God loves us! God is the initiator, God is the doer, God is the one who seduces us. It’s all about God’s initiative. Then we certainly want to love back the way we have been loved. I want to love back the way I have been loved. But it’s not like I’ve got to prove my love for God by “doing” things. It’s never about earning the love, it’s always returning the love.
All human loves, fortunately, are an increasingly demanding school preparing us for an infinite divine love. Today we recognize this school as the only real training ground for “All the Saints,” and it can never be limited to those who have fully graduated. As the entire New Testament does, we must apply the word “saints” to all of us who are in kindergarten, primary school, middle school, high school, college, and doing graduate studies. Love is one shared reality, and our common name for that one shared reality is “God” (1 John 4:7-21).
Saints are those who move beyond their “private I” and into the full reality of we. Jesus seems to be saying in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) that our inner attitudes and states are the real sources of our problems. We need to root out the problems at that deepest interior level. Jesus says not only that we must not kill, but that we must not even harbor hateful anger. He clearly begins with the necessity of a “pure heart” (Matthew 5:8) and knows that the outer behaviour will follow. Too often we force the outward response, while the inward intent remains like a cancer.
Saints are those who move beyond their “private I” and into the full reality of we. Jesus seems to be saying in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) that our inner attitudes and states are the real sources of our problems. We need to root out the problems at that deepest interior level. Jesus says not only that we must not kill, but that we must not even harbor hateful anger. He clearly begins with the necessity of a “pure heart” (Matthew 5:8) and knows that the outer behaviour will follow. Too often we force the outward response, while the inward intent remains like a cancer.
If we walk around with hatred all day, morally we’re just as much killers as the one who pulls the trigger. We can’t live that way and not be destroyed from within. If we’re walking around all day thinking, “What idiots!” we’re living out of death, not life. If that’s what we think and feel, that’s what we will be—death energy instead of life force. We cannot afford even inner disconnection from love. How we live in our hearts is our real and deepest truth.
Those Saints who have graduated show us, the saints who are still struggling on this way, how to be, how to live from the heart, how to love. But above all, they show us how to receive this love, and how to return this love.
Many of us, therefore, first have to learn to embrace the leper within us before we can embrace the leper outside. In the final analysis it's the same act of compassion. And it's not a compassion that we produce, but a compassion that's given to us. If we learn to acknowledge and love the poor man and the poor woman in our soul, we'll understand the truth that is hidden in the poor man and the poor woman whom we find outside ourselves.
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