A most successful and well-attended Summer retreat took place at the Abbey from 2nd to 5th August this year 2025 (a month later than last to catch the higher temperatures!)
Sister Tamsin Geach OP gave the Retreat---three talks over two days bracketed by the arrivals day and departures day-- and Storm Floris!
The theme was the Beatitudes, which have a special place in most peoples' hearts, while sometimes opaque to our understanding and practice. Sister Tamsin dispelled much of this and intrigued us by her explanations based on St Augustine and St Thomas including the Beatitudes as the basis for a spiritual examen and programme.
About twenty Oblates and aspirants were in residence and/or taking part on each day, and many met in the Visitor centre for discussion after the talks in the Church. Sister Tamsin has enclosed her texts. Storm Floris challenged our Oblates' homeward travels as did the days following without power!
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
During the next couple of days we shall be meditating on the Beatitudes, firstly as a portrait of Our Saviour, then as an examination of conscience, and finally as a rule or patten for our lives, including our lives of prayer
One of the main differences between Christianity and other religions is that Christianity is not a system of thought, according to which you gradually perfect yourself. Rather it is an invitation to relationship with God the Father in the God the Holy Spirit, through God the Son. At first glance the Beatitudes do seem to present a systematised programme for action. And so indeed they do, but that is not all. Primarily they show us Who Christ is. As it says in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1717 ‘The Beatitudes depict the countenance of Jesus Christ and portray his charity.’
The Beatitudes, that is, are an invitation to the imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. It is He Who pre-eminently is the exemplar of the programme for action that is laid before us here: We see Him poor in spirit, Who
‘though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form … humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.’
This gains for Him the Kingship of ‘the kingdom of heaven,’ and the name which is
‘above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ (Philippians 2, 6-11)
We see Him as one who mourns: He weeps at the death of His friend Lazarus (John 11.33-35).
He weeps for Jerusalem,
‘ And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it, saying, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of your visitation.”(Luke 19. 41-44),
and He sweats blood in the garden of Gethsemane, contemplating His coming death. (Luke 22.44).
He weeps and suffers, that is, for every kind of human sorrow both personal and universal. It is in this last sorrow that we see the angel sent from God to comfort Him (Luke 22.43)
Jesus describes Himself as meek, when He says
‘Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”, Mt11.28ff,
and we see His meekness throughout the Passion narrative, when as Isaiah had prophesied, He
‘was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so He opened not His mouth.’ (Isa 53.7).
As a result He has inherited the earth: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given’ to Him (Matt. 28. 18)
We also see Him ‘Hunger and thirst for righteousness’: twice in His earthy life He expresses bodily thirst, and on both occasions there is an ambiguity: In the Gospel of John He says to the woman of Samaria at the well: “Give me a drink.” (Jn. 4.7), but when His disciples come back with stores and beseech Him to eat He says: “I have food to eat of which you do not know.”, and explains that His food is “to do the will of Him who sent me, and to accomplish His work.’’ – He has received the conversion to righteousness of the Samaritan woman as food and drink. (cf John 4.31-4)
In the crucifixion narrative, also in the Gospel of John, this is echoed. At the point of death Jesus says
‘“I thirst.” A bowl full of vinegar stood there; so they put a sponge full of the vinegar on hyssop and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the vinegar, he said, “It is accomplished”(Jn 19 28ff).
The verbal echo in ‘it is accomplished’ is in the original Greek verb ‘τελευταω’ used in both places. It is our redemption, our conversion, our salvation that He thirsts for, and He is satisfied by the conversion of sinners.
The Gospels also show us Christ as the supremely Merciful one – not a mercy that is bestowed simply from above, at the disposal of a sort of merciful dictator such as the god of the Muslims is supposed to be, but One Who stoops down to us and shares our life so as to give us His own, so as to redeem us.
His earthly life is replete with examples – Zachaeus called down from his sycamore tree, the palsied cripple let down through the roof by his friends, the repentant Peter after the Resurrection all experience His mercy. Here though, in seeing Christ as our exemplar, there is a difficulty with the promised reward: how can Christ be shown mercy? In His earthly life He experienced little of it, and in His glory how can we show Him mercy? He answers us:
‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me….as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ (Mt. 25.35 ff)
We can, that is, show Him mercy in His mystical Body here on earth, in the poor the lonely and the needy.
Jesus is pure in heart. You sometimes get modern theologians who want Jesus to have struggled with concupiscence – with temptations precisely to sin that come from inward dispositions – though it is noticeable that they only want Him to be tempted to do ‘nice’ sins – they do not ascribe to him temptations to spite or envy, or cruelty or the sort of impatience that makes one feel murderous towards the old lady in front of one in a queue. Rather they like the idea of Jesus struggling with lust, for example. However, over against these more deconstructionalist theologians, theology within the tradition of the Church does not imagine Jesus struggling with sexual temptation or sinful anger. Rather the temptations that He is seen overcoming are the primeval ones that we see in the account of the temptations in Eden – the temptation of bodily need, of power and of seeking some other source of authority than God, and these temptations coming from an outside source are readily dealt with by Christ both in the desert and then again and again in His earthly ministry, culminating in His repudiation of all three in His passion and death. And so He sees God in His human flesh as well as with His divine nature.
Christ is pre-eminently the Peacemaker. He makes peace between God and Man since:
‘in Him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.’(Colossians 1. 19ff)
Elsewhere St Paul says ‘He is our Peace’ (Eph. 2.14). In His peace-making role as the Son of God, He is our foremost exemplar.
Christ suffers for righteousness’ sake - He is the proto-martyr, on the pattern of Whose death all those who suffer for righteousness whether before or since are modelled. Throughout His life He suffered first for us, so that through Him and with Him and in Him we might be able to become possessors of the Kingdom of heaven. He has been reviled and persecuted and had all kinds of evil uttered against Him falsely on our account, even until this day.
This is the briefest account of the Beatitudes as being in the first place an invitation to imitate Christ, but much more could be said. I invite you as part of your meditation during this retreat to focus on the Beatitudes in prayer and see how, throughout the Gospels, Jesus is the exemplar of each of them, and how we in our turn are invited through the Beatitudes to receive Christ into our hearts and minds as the pattern or the template of our lives. For example when we contemplate the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, consider the humility of Christ, the ‘poverty in Spirit’ by which He Who rules both heaven and earth lacks even the security of a proper shelter at His birth; consider how even as an infant He mourned, knowing the fate that awaited Him on the cross, and with His mother’s milk tasted gall; consider His meekness in accepting poverty, exile and obscurity; consider how in His hunger and thirst for justice, He became a child for our salvation; consider His mercy as He accepts the flight into Egypt, rather than smiting Herod and His minions in their atrocious cruelty; consider His purity as an infant, a purity that unlike the rest of us is never lost; consider how He is born the Prince of peace; consider how He endures the flight into Egypt, the first persecution in a life of persecution.
Or if you look at the Passion, consider the humility of Christ, the ‘poverty in Spirit’, that has the One Who could summon legions of angels to defend Him, or Who could set the proceedings at nought by the thought of His mind, allow a man, Pontius Pilate, to pass judgement upon Him; consider how He suffers all of this – He ‘mourns’ for our salvation; consider how meek He is in receiving the Cross to carry; how through His hunger and thirst for justice He stands in the place of sinful man and endures literal thirst on the Cross for our salvation so as to free us from the just penalty of our sins; consider the super-abundant mercy of Him Who even on the road to Calvary comforts the women, and on the Cross forgives those who have crucified Him and prays the Father to forgive them in their ignorance; consider the outrage against His purity when He is stripped of His garments, but the inward purity of heart of Him Who even in the face of the stripping, the nails and the Cross does not seek to use His divine power to prove His Divinity, though the mocking crowds tempt Him to do so; consider the Peace brokered through the Passion and death, by this Christ Who is our Peace, Who endured persecution, reviling and calumny even for the unrighteous, even for us.
This acceptance of Christ as our exemplar, ideally should emerge in spiritual growth, that growth in virtues, which comes about through grace. This ‘grace’ is the working of the Holy Spirit in our hearts to change our innermost dispositions, our hearts. Individual virtuous-looking acts are not enough if there is no change of heart – we need to be changed in such a way that it will emerge in real action, and such action needs to become somehow ‘co-natural’ to us. We need to become people who truly live the beatitudes.
Why should we? So as to be happy! ‘Beatus’ is sometimes translated into English as ’happy’, and while I think the Gospel reading is impoverished by such a word, it is true for most of us that what we most desire is happiness and seeking it is an inevitable human trait, though the direction of that search may lead us to different conclusions – St Thomas Aquinas says that we may seek happiness in material or physical pleasures, in active charity, or in the contemplation of God. However the real happiness for which we are made is the sight of God, and each of these other modes of happiness bears some relation to it, positive or negative. The beatitudes are in fact the ‘Be happy attitudes’!
Seeking physical happiness as an end in itself gets in the way of spiritual happiness, and in fact even physical happiness is impeded by simple self-indulgence. To achieve real happiness we need to purify our desires and turn ourselves away from the things that obstruct us and prevent us from attaining social joy, and ultimately heaven. If we follow the logic of the Christian life we should grow, so that we shall no longer seek primarily external goods, such as honour and wealth, nor be swayed by the bodily passions of fear and desire. The virtues and gifts which the beatitudes show to us bring us through a process of purification progressing to an active charity, firstly giving what is justly owed, then, for the love of God going beyond that to considering not so much what we owe, or whether we owe anything at all to this particular poor or sorrowful or otherwise needy person, but rather through reverence for God to consider only the other person’s needs. Finally in contemplative prayer we are purified in our hearts and brought to the kind of peace that arising from within causes peace in others. [1]
During the next couple of days I will seek to unpick the modes in which the Beatitudes give us a programme for action. Departing slightly from St Thomas’ schema, I believe all of the Beatitudes lend themselves to a programme for each of the stages of the spiritual life, the turning away from sin, the programme for action and the life of contemplation, and these will be the themes in the remaining talks I shall be giving.
It would be nice if the progress in virtue were a seamless progress from strength to strength, but the reality of a life lived towards God is that there are many new beginnings of belief or conversion, many re-commitments to active charity, and (to help us on our way, bending to our weakness) God does not leave it to the end of a life lived perfectly to begin to reveal Himself, but is Himself the beginning of our conversion in Christ, the motive for our life of virtue and the ultimate goal on which our lives should be fixed – the beginning, middle and end of the ‘Why?’ underlying all our belief, conversion, and lived experience.
The Beatitudes as an examination of conscience
In Summa Theologiae (q69 a3,corpus) St Thomas sees the beatitudes as being, a, an instantiation of the progress of the spiritual life: The purgative state – the process of turning away from sin and turning away from seeking happiness in the wrong places - he sees as belonging to the first three beatitudes. The next two he regards as relating to the life of active virtue, while the final two he sees as relating to prayer. I will discuss this schema in more detail in the third talk. Meanwhile, I want to focus on the Beatitudes as being directed towards our conversion – as capable in general of being used as an examination of conscience, a tool of self-knowledge and a preparation for the sacrament of confession.
Sometimes a person who uses the sacraments regularly will feel that they are not going forward. One thing that may contribute to this feeling is the sense of ‘always confessing the same things.’ Of course this is natural – we remain much the same, and God allows us to be weak in certain ways so that we do not become proud. As He says to St Paul : “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” We do not decide that washing our body or our clothes is redundant because they ‘will only get dirty again’, and we should not decide that confession is pointless because the same faults crop up again and again.
At the same time, a good book on the subject of confession which I read once made the sapient remark that if your confession is general, the advice given by the priest will also be general. You may have an uncomfortable feeling that somehow you are not going forward, or that fixed patterns of behaviour remain stubbornly ingrained and do not move however often you confess them. Sometimes it makes sense to revisit one’s ‘list’ of sins and reconsider what should be on it, and also perhaps to focus in on a particular thing. I remember once deciding towards the end of a confession that what I was seeing as a ‘smallish’ sin that floated into my mind was not even worth confessing. I focussed on it in my next examination of conscience, and it unravelled a whole pattern of behaviours that was getting in the way of my spiritual life.
In the task of re-evaluation, a new examination of conscience can be a great help. However an examination of conscience is a tool with a double edge, and it is important to recognise as we consider what follows that the purpose is to learn the deepest truth about oneself as a beloved child of God, so as to be healed and strengthened in love and service. It is not intended to cast us into a state of despair over our state, but as a means of conversion. Confession is the sacrament of liberation. We sometimes make the error of thinking that we have to be holy already in order to use this sacrament – but it is here in particular that the Church should be seen as a ‘field hospital’ for the wounded. A regular habit of confession, if seriously undertaken, will promote and strengthen us in those good qualities we long to have, and which so often evade our merely human efforts. So, what I will now say is not intended to make you feel bad, but to encourage you in truer self-knowledge. Some of it will be obvious and standard, but you may hear something that had not occurred to you before, or be shown a way to see the truth about sin in a new light. Most of the thinking today comes from the great saints, St Thomas and St Augustine, and one of the functions of the saints is to help us to see and understand the light of grace.
‘Blessed are the poor in Spirit’: St Augustine in his commentary on the sermon on the Mount says ‘the poor in spirit are rightly understood here, as meaning the humble and God-fearing, i.e. those who have not the spirit which puffs up. Nor ought blessedness to begin at any other point whatever, if indeed it is to attain unto the highest wisdom; but the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ St Thomas relates this Beatitude to the virtues of humility, reverence, fear of the Lord and piety. So we might ask ourselves in relation to this beatitude Do I give to God what belongs to Him in terms of love and reverence? Do I pray daily, and attend Mass on Sundays? Do I treat the name of God with reverence and respect? Do I work on Sundays? Have I taken communion in a non-Catholic Church? Am I proud? Do I relate truthfully to myself, to others and to God? Do I wallow in self-pity or self-aggrandisement? Do I boast? Do I go in for self-harm of any kind, either physical or mental?
Blessed are those who mourn: St Augustine says: Mourning is sorrow arising from the loss of things held dear; but those who are converted to God lose those things which they were accustomed to embrace as dear in this world: for they do not rejoice in those things in which they formerly rejoiced; and until the love of eternal things be in them, they are wounded by some measure of grief.’ (On the Sermon on the Mount, Ch.2 sec. 5) St Thomas relates this beatitude to the virtue of moderation. So we can ask ourselves: Do I cling onto unreal values, or go in for excessive attachment to physical pleasures? Do I eat or drink too much, or go in for excess in some other part of my life? Do I spend too much time on the internet, or watching television? Do I indulge my sexual appetites in ways that attack my own dignity or the dignity of others? Do I see others as objects rather than subjects? Do I allow my work to take over my life to the neglect of my other duties towards my family and friends and my own health?
Blessed are the meek: St. Augustine says ‘the meek are those who yield to acts of wickedness, and do not resist evil, but overcome evil with good,’ (On the Sermon on the Mount, Ch.2 sec. 4), while St Thomas relates this Beatitude to the virtues of fortitude and piety, or reverence. I have already talked about reverence towards God, but there are other focuses for reverence, under God. So in relation to this Beatitude we might ask ourselves: Do I show respect to others as being made in the image of God? Do I respect the right to life and strive to uphold that right in our society? Am I bold in proclaiming the truth, and when I do, do I also do this with gentleness and respect? Do I quarrel and fight for earthly and temporal things? Do I support and show reverence for my parents, even when they fail me? Do I obey the law, pay my taxes, and honour my debts as far as I am able?
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’ These, St Augustine says (op.cit 2.7) are ‘lovers of a true and indestructible good[who] will therefore be filled with that food of which the Lord Himself says, ‘My meat is to do the will of my Father,’ which is righteousness’ St Thomas relates this and the following Beatitude to the virtues of the active life, which he says consists chiefly in our relations with our neighbour ‘either by way of duty or by way of spontaneous generosity’. The virtues he links to this Beatitude are justice and fortitude. So we may ask ourselves, do I act justly in relation to God, my neighbour and my family? Do I do my duty in work, honestly performing the tasks I am paid to do, not deliberately wasting time that I am paid for? Do I stand up for what is right? Do I speak the truth, avoid backbiting, and strive to promote all that is good, honourable and beautiful? Do I show love to those whom I owe it to, my family, my community, my neighbours? Do I respect marriage, and live so as to promote and cherish the bonds of family life?
Blessed are the merciful: Blessed that is are those who ‘relieve the miserable,’ according to Augustine. In our way of thinking mercy is opposed to justice, but St Thomas interprets this beatitude interestingly rather as a sort of extension of justice, rather than a contradiction of it ‘With regard to spontaneous favours we are perfected—by a virtue, so that we give where reason dictates we should give, e.g. to our friends or others united to us; which pertains to the virtue of liberality—and by a gift, so that, through reverence for God, we consider only the needs of those on whom we bestow our gratuitous bounty.’ So we may ask ourselves: Am I merciful? Do I forgive, or do I exact revenge? Do I bear grudges? Do I apologise when I have done wrong, and do I accept apologies generously when they are given? Do I try to relieve misery and suffering in the world? When I do promote justice, do I ‘tie up heavy burdens’ for others without trying to help them? Do my words build up or tear down?
Blessed are the Peacemakers: According to St Augustine the peace that is chiefly intended here is of those who bring their mind and reason into perfect subjection to God. ’ bringing in order all the motions of their soul, and subjecting them to reason…and by having their carnal lusts thoroughly subdued’ St Thomas says about this beatitude that ‘to make peace either in oneself or among others, shows a man to be a follower of God, Who is the God of unity and peace’ and relates this beatitude to the virtue of justice and the gift of wisdom. So we may ask ourselves: Do I seek first of all to be at peace in my soul, or do I allow bitterness, greed, pride and resentment to disturb my peace? Do I set God’s will above my own? Do I consider the claims of God in making decisions in my life? Do I seek to promote peace in my family or community, or in my place of work? Do I pray for peace in the world? Do I promote peace so far as this lies in my power?
‘Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ Augustine says a propos of this beatitude ‘Let anyone who is seeking after the delights of this world and the riches of temporal things under the Christian name, consider that our blessedness is within; as it is said of the soul of the Church by the mouth of the prophet, ‘All the beauty of the king's daughter is within’ for outwardly, revilings, and persecutions, and disparagements are promised; and yet, from these things there is a great reward in heaven, which is felt in the heart of those who endure, those who can now say, ‘We glory in tribulations’: knowing that tribulation works patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope makes not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.’ Aquinas says of this beatitude that it is ‘is a confirmation of all the beatitudes,’ and that ‘ the kingdom of heaven is promised to the poor in spirit, as regards the glory of the soul; but to those who suffer persecution in their bodies, it is promised as regards the glory of the body.’
So do I seek the glory of this world and temporal riches rather than the kingdom of heaven? Does my lifestyle proclaim that I belong to Christ? Am I prepared to suffer the loss of reputation, advancement or promotion, for Christian values? Do I uphold Christian values in my voting, my political decisions? If people at work, or my family, speak ill of Christ, or His Church, do I respond by upholding the truth? Do I accept calmly and meekly the disadvantages that come my way because of my faith, be it casual insult or outright discrimination? Do I stand up for the rights of those persecuted in a more open way? Do I stand up for the rights of or visit refugees, looking out for my Christian brothers and sisters who suffer persecution even in the places they have fled to in order to escape persecution?
It is common in British circles to mock at something they call ‘Catholic guilt’. I think this is absurd – there is a mental condition in which a person does not feel guilt for the wrong they have done, and the name for this is variously ‘psychopath’ or ‘narcissist. Normal people should feel the sting of wrong done as a spur to virtue. As a riposte I will conclude this talk by referring you to another section of St Thomas’ Summa Theologica altogether, where he explores the question whether penitance is a virtue . He answers that after the general definition of repentance has been posited, that is ‘to deplore something one has done’ the word penitence may be taken in two ways: firstly as ‘a passion of the sensitive appetite, and in this sense penitence is not a virtue, but a passion.’ (a feeling). But secondly ‘it denotes an act of the will, and in this way it implies choice, and if this be right, it must, of necessity, be an act of virtue. For…virtue is a habit of choosing according to right reason. Now it belongs to right reason than one should grieve for a proper object of grief as one ought to grieve, and for an end for which one ought to grieve. And this is observed in the penitence of which we are speaking now; since the penitent assumes a moderated grief for his past sins, with the intention of removing them. Hence it is evident that the penitence of which we are speaking now is either a virtue or the act of a virtue.’ ST85 A1 corpus
That is to say, penitence is not meant to be [simply] a feeling: you are not supposed to wallow in grief over your past, but to appraise it sensibly, and to take the right action, which in the context of a retreat is to determine to make a good confession at the earliest opportunity, presenting to your loving Lord the things you have done and left undone, that He may cast all your sins behind His back.
The Beatitudes: A programme for action
So far we have seen the Beatitudes as a description of how Christ Himself lived on earth, and we have used them as an examination of conscience. Both of these entail something further, the invitation to the Imitatio Christi. The Beatitudes ‘express the vocation of the faithful associated with the glory of his Passion and Resurrection; they shed light on the actions and attitudes characteristic of the Christian life; they are the paradoxical promises that sustain hope in the midst of tribulations’ CCC 1717 ‘
And:
‘The beatitude we are promised confronts us with decisive moral choices. It invites us to purify our hearts of bad instincts and to seek the love of God above all else. It teaches us that true happiness is not found in riches or well-being, in human fame or power, or in any human achievement… but in God alone, the source of every good and of all love’ (CCC1723)
St Thomas sees in the Beatitudes the invitation to the threefold life of grace, dividing them in perhaps too rigid a framework into those that relate to the purgative state, those that relate to the active, and those that relate to the illuminative state. He is however pointing to a three-fold growth in ones spiritual life that does ring true: We can do nothing until we turn from sin; then we seek to serve God through action, and finally we are invited into a deeper and deeper relationship with Him.
This ‘threeness’ is part of a pattern set for our lives in many and various ways throughout the scripture: At the beginning of Our Lord’s public ministry we see His temptations in the wilderness, in which He re-capitulated and overcame both the primaeval temptations of Adam and Eve, and the temptations faced by the people of Israel in the wilderness.
As St Gregory says. ‘The old enemy tempted the first man through his belly, when he persuaded him to eat of the forbidden fruit; through ambition when he said, You shall be as gods; through covetousness when he said, Knowing good and evil.’
In the desert the whole nation of Israel is tempted and overcome in the same manner – they crave the fleshpots of Egypt, they turn to false gods, and they mistrust the God Who has saved them. However ‘By the same method in which [the devil] had overcome the first Adam, in that same was he overcome when he tempted the second Adam. He tempted through the belly when he said, Command that these stones become loaves; through ambition when he said, If you are the Son of God, cast yourself down from here; through covetousness of lofty condition in the words, All these things will I give you’
This three-fold temptation of the Lord continues throughout His earthly life, and has been resisted by Him even as a tiny infant – He Who could have had every luxury, been born in a palace, been worshipped as the True Messiah instead is born in absolute poverty, in a stable, as one soon to be driven into exile in a foreign land. In His public ministry the temptations come again and again – He hungers and thirsts, though He is able to make food out of nothing; the people wish to make Him King, and He evades them; the demons proclaim Him as the Holy One of God, and He silences them.
In the Gaden of Gethsemane Theophyllus comments that the devil ‘having tempted Him in the desert with pleasure… retires from Him until the crucifixion, when he was about to tempt Him with sorrow.’ We see Christ in an agony, such that He sweats blood and praying that the Cup of suffering pass Him by, abandoned and betrayed by His friends who should be with Him to strengthen and defend Him, and arrested by soldiers when He could summon legions of Angels to destroy them.
In Christ’s three-fold prayer in Gethsemane there is a relationship between the temptation of Adam and Eve and the trials Our Lord is about to face: ‘To the temptation of curiosity is opposed the fear of death; for as the one is a yearning for the knowledge of things, so the other is the fear of losing such knowledge. To the desire of honour or applause is opposed the dread of disgrace and insult. To the desire of pleasure is opposed the fear of pain.’(Augustine)
Jesus goes through three trials – The Jewish authorities condemn Him for blasphemy, Pilate on the ground of expediency, Herod as a rival king. Each legal entity inflicts their particular form of torture and humiliation upon Him – The roughing up by the Jewish soldiers, the mockery of His Kingship, and the judicial beating. As Augustine has it: ‘That they did spit in his face, signifies those who reject His proffered grace. They likewise buffet Him who prefer their own honour to Him; and they smite Him on the face, who, blinded with unbelief, affirm that He is not yet come, disowning and rejecting His Person.’
The three-fold denial by Peter corresponds to these levels of temptation – the seeking of the fire leading to the first denial; the second denial when confronted; the third with an oath are brought to a swift end by the crowing of the cock – upon which Pseudo-Jerome comments ‘Who is the cock, the harbinger of day, but the Holy Ghost? by whose voice in prophecy, and in the Apostles, we are roused from our threefold denial, to most bitter tears after our fall, for we have thought evil of God, spoken evil of our neighbours, and done evil to ourselves.’
This three-fold patterning continues in the Passion: Our Lord on the Way is forced to carry the means of His own death, driven to such weakness that the soldiers get Him the unwilling assistance of a passer-by, and stripped of His garments.
On the Cross again the pattern repeats – He is offered wine mixed with myrrh, which modern commentators think was a kind of pain-killer, so He was rejecting any kind of physical comfort; the passers-by promise belief if He will only come down from the Cross, and He reaches the point of desolation which wrings from Him the cry ‘My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?’
In death he is given the sketchiest sort of preparation for the tomb; The tomb itself is a favour granted by the political leader who condemned Him and the religious leaders who refused to acknowledge Him publicly; and yet His power is still feared, and the tomb is under guard, in the wise foolishness and courageous cowardice of those who set a lock on a tomb and a guard over a man dead.
What does this mean for us? It means that the daily temptations- to pleasure at the expense of our own dignity or that of others, to controlling others, and to pride in all its many-facetted manifestations- are part of the process that nailed Our Lord to the Cross. However, they are also thereby healed and forgiven, things which need no longer tie us down. If we fear the pain of denying our desires, of humiliation, of loss of control, we should know He has been there before us, and is with us to hold and sustain us in our weakest and lowest moments. And if we feel we have failed, that as vines we have produced only bitterness, we should remember that though He refused the wine and the myrrh, Our Lord accepted the vinegar. And He lay during three days in the tomb, and on the third day He rose again.
So let us pursue this three-fold patterning in our lives, taking the beatitudes as the model for our lives. The turning from sin, seizing the life of grace, or rather being seized by it, directing us towards glory constitute a single movement.
The Beatitudes, as well as being a self-portrait of Our Lord are a programme for action. They are positive in tendency, though rather strikingly counter-intuitive. Sad, humble, justice-seeking, meek people do not generally head the world’s lists of ‘happy’, and Christian peace-making and mercy sometimes baffles or even outrages the onlookers. Nonetheless we are bidden to these things, a way of life that is strange and counter-cultural, but offering the most astonishing rewards both in this life and in the life to come, while in St Luke we have the health warning of a corresponding set of woes which will pursue the rich, the satisfied, those who laugh, those who are well-spoken of.
St Thomas sees the Beatitudes as a set of ‘habituses’ – fixed patterns of behaviour that emerge in action. A nice analogy I saw was of a needle scratching a mark on wood. The first mark is insecure, but after a few strokes there is a fixed groove for the needle to continue to deepen. So it is with human behaviour. A single act of clothing a naked person does not make you merciful. It is when you no longer know how many poor people you have fed, or how many children you have instructed in their faith that you have a ‘habitus. ’Now the ‘habituses’ of the Beatitudes are graced actions, but what types of behaviour are as it were in tune with them? As Catholics we are given lists, based in scripture, of the types of action that might count, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy: To feed the hungry; give drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked; harbour the harbourless; visit the sick; ransom the captive; bury the dead, and to instruct the ignorant; counsel the doubtful; admonish sinners; bear wrongs patiently; forgive offences willingly; comfort the afflicted; and to pray for the living and the dead.
Like the Beatitudes, these positive prescriptions do not regulate particulars: you do not have to feed every beggar etc., but if you reach day of judgement without having done any of these works of mercy, you may be in some trouble! The corporal and spiritual works of mercy must form the back-drop of our striving to live the Christian life, the sine qua non, the activities that form us as practitioners, livers of the Beatitudes. In this way we will acquire the habituses, through grace, and merit the rewards Our Lord has promised. Not to acquire these habituses in some way is to court disaster, in this life and in the world to come.
So let us be poor in spirit, and in our actions put the demands of God and the needs of our neighbours before our own, the two-fold movement turning us away from self-obsession and towards true charity towards our neighbour. Let us mourn for our own sins and for the injustice in the world, but in an effective way that emerges in action and prayer; let us be meek, and not pursue our personal rights to the detriment of others; yet let us hunger and thirst for justice, seeking always to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. Let us show mercy as we would have it shown to ourselves, placing the need of the individual rather than his or her just deserts at the centre of our actions towards them. Let us be pure of heart, and in a culture that pursues power and money and bodily pleasure choosing rather to uphold the values of the kingdom, using well the good things of God, but not being ruled or dominated by them. Let us be peacemakers, seeking in our relations with our families or communities, with the people we work with and in the wider society to seek and promote peace, as well as within the political sphere so far as we are able. If we do all this, we must expect in some way to be persecuted for the sake of righteousness, and when this happens we must remember to ‘rejoice and be glad’ that we have some share in the sufferings of Christ.
Suffering is the universal experience of any attempt to follow Christ, either at a microscopic level that we ourselves alone see and experience – the wounding remark about our attempts at virtue, or simply the suffering of not retaliating in kind when people mistreat us, as they will, or at a macroscopic level, like the Christians whose blood stained the waters of the sea and formed a cross therein in Libya on 10th February 2015. Their faithful witness had been such that there was included among their number Matthew Ayairga, who though a non-Christian, when asked if he denied Jesus, said “Their God is my God,” and for this he died with them a martyrs death.
The Beatitudes as a pattern for prayer
A little while ago I was travelling to London and I was handed a free magazine. Normally I don’t open these things but this time I did. It was a very worthy magazine, mostly about how to improve - how to eat the best food, drink the best drink, exercise and so on. I was struck by something that had been bothering me in various explorations of the non-theist aspects of the internet. There are many pundits who give advice to the young, and it follows more or less this pattern: If you organize your life and eat well and exercise a lot, if you establish what you really want, and pursue your goals single-mindedly, or even ruthlessly, you will be healthy and wealthy and wise. Occasionally they mention love or relationships as well.
What they seldom mention is God, and when they do it is often as a part of this general package, so that God is seen as a human construct, as a means to happiness. So there is a modern version of the Beatitudes: Happy are you when you are rich, healthy, fulfilled, confident, ambitious, strong. The problem with all of this is that very often these pundits seem to mistake a second order level of behavior with the first principle of our lives. They are correct in their assumption that everyone seeks happiness, but we are all incorrect insofar as we set happiness on these exterior goals, either of the material or the active life as the fulfillment of that goal.
Rather our happiness lies in God. Augustine in the Confessions says ‘Since in seeking you, my God, I seek a happy life, let me seek you so that my soul may live, for my body draws life from my soul, and my soul draws life from You.(Confessions 10.20) It is only in seeking God as our ultimate end that we shall achieve the goal of true happiness. Beatitude in this sense is not about our relating to God as a source of happiness. Rather He is the end to which we are all called. This message is reiterated throughout the Beatitudes in the rewards we are offered in them.: we are to inherit the earth, have mercy sown us, have our thirst for justice satisfied, but more, we are to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven; we are to ‘see God’, be called ‘Sons of God’ (even the women!), enter into the joy of the Lord (Mt. 25.21) and into His rest (Heb. 4.9) We are to become ‘partakers of the Divine nature (2.Pet. 1.4), sharing through Christ in the Spirit the life of the Holy Trinity. We shall ‘see God.’ And seeking all of this should be part of our lives even here on earth: in the hierarchy of values, or in the ordering of our days or in the decisions about priorities, this last end should colour and order all our actions. This is achieved through prudence, according to which, as an internet friend of mine says, we act in this order: ‘Pray. Discern. Decide. Act. Rethink. Repeat.’
So how should we pray? There is a fourfold dimension to prayer according to the mnemonic ‘PACT’: Petition, Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving.’ This is a good model, but all prayer comes with a health warning. It is ‘results based’ not feelings based. And the results we should be looking for are whether there is an increase in faith, hope and love. If not, no amount of good feelings will make the prayer ‘real.’
The pattern for prayer set before us by Our Lord is the ‘Our Father,’ and most Christians I suspect say this prayer many times a day, at Mass, in the Divine Office, or in private devotions such as the Rosary. St Augustine writes: Everything that pertains to prayer is embrace in the Lord’s Prayer (Handbook on Faith, Hope and Love ch. 114) and ‘whatever else we say when we pray, if we pray as we should, we are only saying what is contained in the Lord’s Prayer.' (Epist. 121.12)
So, how can we, or should we, use the Beatitudes in prayer, and if we pray the Beatitudes, how do they relate to the ‘Our Father’? What follows is a suggestion of how to pray, and how to pray the Lord’s prayer in relation to the Beatitudes.
When the disciples asked Jesus how to pray, He suggested three contexts for prayer: ‘When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.’ (Mt. 6.6) ‘I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my father in heaven, for where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them. ‘ (Mt 18.19-20) and ‘If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. (Mt.5.23 ff.) The three contexts for prayer then are in private, in a small group, and in public liturgy. What prayer is not - and here there is a massive health warning from Our Lord – is a spectator sport. You may pray on street corners, no doubt, but you must not go to street corners to pray – or at least to be seen praying.
So we pray the Our Father – in private, in common and in public liturgy. What does it mean? What can it mean? And can we move beyond the lip-service of automatic recitation to something deeper?
We say ‘Our Father.’ Jesus here invites us to the divine filiation, the divine Sonship. He has called into His brotherhood the peoples of the nations; and the Only Son has 'numberless brethren' (Augustine Sermon 7 on the New Testament). The One Who called God ‘Abba’ invites us to do likewise. In the Beatitudes the ‘peacemakers’ are to be called Sons of God, and in this Beatitude we come closest in likeness to the Son, Who was in the beginning with God, but has become our reconciliation and our peace.
‘Who art in Heaven.’ Already in Christ, God, Who is in Heaven, is our Father, in that Kingdom of Heaven which is the reward in two of the Beatitudes, of the poor in Spirit, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. We should understand that this Sonship in Christ answers the deepest poverty, the sharpest longings of our hearts. Augustine says about this ‘Of such a Father, what shall we ask?’ He replies that we pray for rain. An answer my parents were given in preparation for being received into the Church was: ‘anything it is alright to want.’ Augustine goes on to say ‘How much [we ought] to cry to Him, that we may come to that place where we shall never die!'(op.cit)
‘Hallowed be Thy Name’: God’s name is always Holy. In a certain sense, Jesus Himself is the ‘Name’ which is above every name, at which every knee in heaven and on earth an under the earth shall bow. When we say ‘Hallowed be thy name’ we are reminding ourselves ‘to desire that His name, which in fact is always holy, should be considered holy among men.' (Augustine Letter to Proba) On earth we ‘mourn’ and are’ persecuted in the cause of righteousness’, but in the hallowing of the Name, we shall be comforted, we shall inherit the Kingdom.
‘Thy Kingdom come’ Jesus Himself is the King of that Kingdom we wish to inherit, which ‘will surely come whether we will it or not. But we are stirring up our desires for the Kingdom so that it can come to us, and we can deserve to reign there.’ (op. cit). In that Kingdom the poor in Spirit and those who are persecuted for the cause of righteousness shall be the inheritors, so we should be praying here for humility and a willingness to suffer for the Name.
‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ Here according to Augustine we are asking God ‘to make us obedient so that His will may be done in us as it is done in heaven by His angels’ (op cit). This part of the prayer should be very dear to us as it is one of those which Our Lord prays on His own behalf as He suffers in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is also the very firs word that God speaks in the Bible ‘fiat Lux’ – even in Hebrew – and the word that initiates our recreation in Christ with the ‘fiat’ of Our Blessed Lady at the Annunciation. Fiat in Latin means ‘be, become, be made’ and the word in Hebrew relates to the very name of God, the YHWH that was too holy to be spoken. God’s will being done is righteousness, so we should strive to have a soul-thirst in us for righteousness, for that purity of heart which the Beatitudes enjoin upon us. We are promised that this soul thirst will be satisfied, that purity of heart will ensue in the very vision of God.
‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Augustine interprets this in a two-fold way as referring either to the things we generally need or ‘the sacrament of the faithful, which is necessary in this world, not to gain temporal happiness but to gain the happiness that is everlasting.’ We need to relate to God as a merciful Father, to be ‘the merciful’ and show mercy in both material and in spiritual things so that we may expect mercy of our loving Father. As St Ceaesarius of Arles says ‘human mercy makes you concerned for the hardship of the poor…divine mercy forgives sinners…when you come to Church give whatever alms you can to the poor in accordance with your means’ Christ is that Bread which we pray for and is in Himself the fountainhead of the mercy that we show through His grace.
‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ Here according to Augustine we ‘are reminding ourselves of what we must ask and what we must do in order to be worthy in turn to receive.’ Christ Himself shows us the example we must follow, when on the Cross He prays the Father: ’Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’ This forgiveness and reconciliation is fundamental to the law of prayer. In each of the places where Jesus speaks of prayer He also speaks of reconciliation. Here the ‘peacemakers,’ the ‘meek’ come into their inheritance and are called ‘Sons of God.’ So pray this with sincerity, and if there is some unresolved conflict in your life, make a private act of sorrow and repentance each time you say this prayer. This is life-changing.
‘Lead us not into temptation.’ Lately Pope Francis said about this part of the Our Father that no-one is tempted by God. The original Greek reads: μη εισενεγκης ημας εις πειρασμον which does seem literally translated to mean ‘Do not carry us into temptation/testing’ However no text of scripture can be interpreted alone, and if we search further we find this written by St James ‘When tempted no-one should say “God is tempting me” for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone (James 1.13) Augustine, often austere on the subject of predestination also interprets this in such a way as to clear God of guilt: ‘When we say “Lead us not into temptation”, we are reminding ourselves to ask that His help may not depart from us; otherwise we could be seduced and consent to some temptation, or despair and yield to it.’ I think the general trend of this is something like this: the way the prayer appears in Greek and in Latin does remind us that everything comes about through God’s will either creative or permissive, but the constant tradition of the Church in interpreting this, from St. James on, sees the responsibility of sin lying within ourselves. At the same time there are temptations, and we should pray not to be put to the test. We may hope that we would be steadfast if we were ‘persecuted for the sake of righteousness’ but in fact we now of ourselves that we are weak and easily swayed. We should rather ‘mourn’ for our weakness, remembering the mourning that Christ went through both in the desert and in the Garden of Gethsemane, and be comforted by understanding that whatever temptation has come our way, He has conquered it by going ahead and suffering, being tempted in every way that we are but without sinning: it is He Who pre-eminently has been ‘persecuted for the sake of righteousness’ and has thereby won for us the Kingdom of Heaven.
‘Deliver us from evil’: Augustine says that this final petition of the Lord’s prayer ‘has a wide application: In this petition the Christian can utter his cries of sorrow, in it he can shed his tears, and through it he can begin, continue and conclude his prayer, whatever be the distress in which he finds himself.' (Ad Proba) It relates very directly to the final Beatitude: “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in Heaven, for so men persecute the prophets who were before you.’
I have rather sketchily attempted to show you the ways in which the Beatitudes are an invitation to the imitation of Christ, a way of examining the conscience, a programme for the active life and an invitation to prayer. There is much more that could be said, but I hope that what we have looked at during these days of Lent will help us all to live more truly according to the spirit of the Beatitudes and to take them more seriously as a programme for beginning to live with the life of the Holy Trinity.