"Rejoice when that day comes, and dance for joy." (Lk 6: 23)
Today's gospel sums up in many ways the commingling of joy and sorrow that comes with our saying yes to God. The fiat in joy and sorrow, that we explored in the last study session, is here attached to a rainbow spectrum of human sufferings - poverty, hunger, tears - that, as we know, are to be understood in their spiritual sense first of all. The privation which each of these sufferings carries with it is an invitation to us to take stock of our radical insufficiency and to abandon ourselves to the Father. It is also a reminder that much of our faith comes to us in paradoxes: God is three and one; Mary is virgin and mother; and in the beatitudes, those who have nothing are ready for heaven.
In truth we are likely to run away from this invitation to abandonment and the recognition of our poverty that it entails. Something in us wants to measure up to Jesus' teachings, and when we fall short, we can hate ourselves for it. But, as the great French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest, says at the end of that novel: it is easier than you think to hate yourself. Grace means forgetting yourself. This is genuine poverty: to forgo the satisfaction of self regard for the reformation that can begin - and begin and begin again! - when we abandon ourselves to the loving, piercing regard of our Saviour.
In avoiding the commingling of joy and sorrow - what artful dodgers we are! - I wonder if we are also likely to invent forms of fake spiritual wealth to serve as cheap holiness. There are many necessary weapons in the spiritual armoury - lectio divina, adoration, novenas, rosaries, all manner of devotions - but if we do not approach them with humility and moderation, we risk using them to veil ourselves off from our own emptiness, treating them like conquests (and who has not prided themselves on the spiritual achievement of the unmissed novena prayer?). Sometimes in the storm, they feel like all we have to cling on to, especially when Jesus seems to be asleep in the boat. In this moment, however, we are most at danger of thinking that our fidelity, rather than God's graciousness, will determine the outcome. Save us, Lord, else we perish, is the sentiment that should shape all our prayers. Prayer should involve a revolt against our self sufficiency. In moments of consolation, we should also take care not to let such spiritual armoury, as glorious and as dignified as it is, hinder us from facing our own spiritual poverty, our failure to forgive, our ongoing refusal to let go of our vanity and withstand the hatred of the world that Jesus points to as our lot in life. As another poet said, at that point we're so full of what is right, we can't see what is good.
How, then, can we pronounce our fiat, our abandonment to the Father in the face of joy and sorrow, without looking for pain relief or satisfying our vanity? As mentioned above, I wonder if the beginning of an answer lies simply in St Luke's description of Jesus before he begins enunciating the Beatitudes, fixing his eyes on his disciples. How would it be if instead of measuring ourselves against the outward appearances of holiness, we looked first in every devotion or spiritual practice to catch the fixed gaze of Jesus - the gaze of the One who has already fixed His eyes on us - and meditated on what that loving gaze means and what it requires of us? Would that not change our readiness to accept both who He is and who we are too? Would that not begin to break down the barriers that our pride constructs against the invasion of our divine conqueror?
At the very least, such an attempted gaze might bring us up to the level of the blind beggar Bartimaeus, the patron of those who daily struggle to recognize their purblind poverty. Then, we might alter the words of another piece of poetic wisdom:
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