I am writing each day on my inner world and the insight the Beatitudes are providing me in self-quarantine. I am hoping these words might be a place for you to reflect, ponder and help in some way.
“Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8).
“You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.”—The Message
To read this particular Beatitude is a challenge for me this particular day. Why? Because I feel so impure—so conflicted on the inside. My “inside world” feels like a total mess. Here I am working through the beautiful Beatitudes offered me by Jesus. I’m seeing new insights; gaining fresh perspective and feeling pretty good about myself and how I’m handling the pandemic. But this one feels as if I have fallen into a trap—a bear trap which has closed its sharp teeth around my soul and will not allow me to escape.
Here I am in self-quarantine now for fifteen days and one might think my efforts to keep the disease out of my house might have worked. But what I am realizing is that all of this social isolation is only exposing how diseased my very soul is. Let me try to help you understand.
In my wonderful and beautiful times of reading Scripture, praying and writing these devotionals, I feel so single minded; so focused; so clear in my heart. But when I finish and take a look at Facebook—I am triggered. I see people who I thought were my friends saying things that anger me; their political rants are still broadcasting across the pages of social media. And I mistakenly thought we were all becoming poor in spirit; that we were all finding ourselves on the same page of grieving; that meekness might actually be gaining as the new economy. (Please, please, please no one needs to waste their time in telling me not to look at Facebook. Don't judge me or teach me--that would only make me get triggered again.)
I am triggered and as I trace and follow the thin, red thread of my trigger into the deepest part of my dark and messy heart, I don’t like much of what I can see. I do not like some of the people on Facebook. I am sick of their pious platitudes and their easy answers to almost everything. I want to unfriend them. I want to distance myself more than social distancing might allow. I have had to stop watching the press conferences because I am triggered. I can’t believe what I am hearing or watching. I feel anger. I sense devastating disappointment in a flawed effort to show what it means to be a leader. I know this--that I am not pure in heart if I am anything at all. I am a conglomerated mess and I am not pure at heart at all.
So if I discover, yet again, that I am not pure in heart, will I then not be able to see God? If I follow the logic of Jesus—I may not. So,I am triggered again. How in the world, then can I ever make progress in my efforts to become pure and to see God?
I am not alone in my dilemma. It was the predicament of the Apostle Paul when he confessed what I am confessing to you here. He just said it better. Let me quote Paul at length:
Yes. I’m full of myself—after all, I’ve spent a long time in sin’s prison. What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God’s command is necessary.
17-20 But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
21-23 It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.
24 I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question?”( Romans 7 in the Message).
Paul obviously struggled too and he did not even need Facebook to trigger him. All he needed to do was to look within his own blighted heart like I am looking at mine and see that purity of heart seems like a long, long way off. It's not about Facebook. Is it about my heart and my lack of purity, isn't it?
Soren Kierkegarrd, a Danish philosopher and theologian, told us that “purity of heart is to will one thing.” That helps—all the many things I want, long for and will need to be reduced to one thing. Perhaps that is what the pandemic can do—it can be a melting pot for all my impurities of thought, mind and heart to be distilled. The problem with that line of thinking is that monks have self-quarantined for scores of years and all of them say, the struggle continues—even within the cloistered walls of a monastery.
Mary Oliver is right. “The heart has many dungeons…” So our hearts, so full of dungeons, needs more renovation. And this renovation will happen for all of us little by little and step by step. Oliver's poem actually says, "The heart has many dungeons. Bring the light!” Bring the light? Could this realization be one small step towards purity of heart? Each day of the pandemic is a little more light for me to work out my salvation. Each day of the pandemic and in my quarantined world is a layer by layer process that all true renovation is. It's not quick. It's not easy. It's radical work. Purity of heart then will require radical work. The work of more awareness of God and more awareness of self. the work of more understanding of my triggers and how my wounds, though dealt in childhood, are still festering after all these years. As I write these words, I can see some of the things in the pandemic that I actually can be thankful for.
Isn’t that Paul’s realization that the only way out of the dungeon of the heart is through the door that leads to Jesus? Is that what Jesus meant when he elsewhere said, “I am the way…” (John 14:6).?
I have found great solace in the words, autobiography and books of Thomas Merton. I was fortunate to have visited his monastic cabin twice in my life. There he wrote like Paul and prayed like Peter to will one thing and to be pure in heart. Merton wrote this prayer which I am beginning to understand in these pandemic days of having to see my impurities all too closely it seems:
O Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going,
I do not see the road ahead of me,
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
And that fact that I think
I am following Your will
Does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe
That the desire to please You
Does in fact please You.
And I hope I have that desire
In all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything
Apart from that desire to please You.
And I know that if I do this
You will lead me by the right road,
Though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust You always
Though I may seem to be lost
And in the shadow of death.
I will not fear,
For You are ever with me,
And You will never leave me
To make my journey alone.
Contemplative Question: What does this beatitude and my lament of my inside world mess, stir in you?