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Template of the Good Life

Whenever the Benedictine Sister from Erie, Joan Chittister, writes something new, I read it.  And then I usually figure out how to share it with folks who may not know her or miss something new from her fertile mind.  The good nun and I are not personal friends, but I feel like I have known her for years.  I laugh, because a few years ago, I gave a lecture at her monastery to a wonderful gathering of nuns and greater Erie community folks.  It was well-received, but she was not in attendance!  She probably never heard of that Quaker guy who was also talking about Thomas Merton.  I even spent the night at the monastery and enjoyed their hospitality, but no Chittister.  

So, it is appropriate that her new little article on the Beatitudes begins with some human---a joke in fact. She shares a joke, which she said makes her laugh.  Here is the joke.  "Computers are so powerful that pretty soon the country will be run by one computer, one man, and a dog," the teller says. "Really?" says the hearer. "How's that work?" "Well," the teller says, "The man is there to feed the dog." And the hearer says, "Great, but why's the dog there?" And the teller says, "The dog's there to make sure the man doesn't touch the computer."  I did laugh.

Chittister begins her commentary, which is quite interesting.  She notes that our world today is very different from the one she (and I) knew when we were kids or even young adults.  Dogs have always been around, but not computers, email, zoom and all the rest.  She describes this new world in her own inimitable way.  “We live from screen to screen now.  Our children ‘talk’ to one another on their smartphones sitting across the room from each other instead of across fences.  Our cars run on electricity, which means that gas and oil have suddenly become a liability rather than a miracle.  Robots are about to become our closest companions.”

She describes our world today as a “runaway train.”  Maybe she has a point.  “The point now, is that life is no more a process that we think through and work out one step at a time.  It is ‘virtual’ now, seemingly real, but not really.  Instead, it lunges from error to error…with no one, apparently, capable, or maybe even interested in, stopping the runaway train.”  There are days when I do feel like I have climbed on board this train.  Things might feel out of control.  No place of stability or dependability seems to exist.  Do we despair”

Chittister says that we should not despair.  There is hope.  This is how she describes out hope: “And yet, as seriously wrong as these things may be, there is also an eternal reason for hope.  After all, the dimensions of public power describe only our institutions.  Not our people. Not our hearts.  Not our souls.”  She turns to scripture and to the Beatitudes.  Confidently, she observes, “In Scripture, we find the Beatitudes, the signs of what it means to be a good human being, an ethical government, a moral country.”  Who does not long to be a good human being living within an ethical government in a moral country?  Count me in!

We should not dismiss these Beatitudes as merely “poetic piety,” but rather see them as teachers of “the essence of personal development, the backbone of communal goodness, and a seedbed for the re-emergence of ‘the common good’ in the 21st century.” Rightly she quips, the Beatitudes are a “model of the essence of the Jewish scriptures and articulated as a lodestar of human development in the Christian scriptures.”  Maybe we should take a moment and re-read those Beatitudes found in Matthew and Luke. 

They tell us the poor in spirit will be blessed, as will the merciful.  Blessed will be the ones seeking righteousness.  And we should read all the Beatitudes---all eight of them.  Think about how to adopt them as your model for personal development.  They are a template of the good life, Chittister tells us---and I agree.  The best reason for adopting them is not to get into heaven---as nice as that might be.  Rather it is to have hope in this world.  The Beatitudes are the hope we have in this world and this life. 

We’re not there yet.  But as Chittister claims, “until we say that this is precisely where, as a people, we hope to be and want to go, there is little hope either for national unity in this pluralistic population of ours and even less hope for human unity in a world of historically competitive tribes.”  There is no good alternative.  I appreciate how the Benedictine Sister labels the Beatitudes a “call.”  She says, “the call of the Beatitudes is to humility, to mercy, to integrity, to compassion, to justice, to peacemaking and to courage”

There are so many calls and claims on our lives these days.  But they are not all worthy calls.  Personally, I can confess many of the claims on my time and life are not worth it---not worthy.  People spend too much time on email, Tik Tok, tv and all the rest.  We feel busy, but struggle with pointlessness.  We complain, but don’t create.  We wish “someone would do something about all that is wrong with our world,” but we never stop to think we may be contributors to the wrong in the world.  

Too many are living non-Beatitude lives---feeling cursed, instead of blessed.  The good news is we don’t have to invent an answer.  It exists.  We can read it in a minute.  More good news: the Beatitudes are actions, not theology.  We can do them and live them.  And we can be blessed and create a wonderful world---for all.



https://www.ncronline.org/news/spirituality/column/where-i-stand/beatitudes-revisited-template-good-life





 


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