(from Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places)
If we listen carefully to the Beatitudes through the lens of the Exodus journey, we may well hear Jesus saying, “I’m announcing to you the character of kingdom life beyond the confines of slavery in Egypt and self-salvation at Sinai.” Knowing Israel’s story well, Jesus offers a counter-vision, a transformative way of seeing ourselves, as well as our mission, while leaving the baggage of our old enslavements behind. He gives us a vision of the blessed life, that is, the happy life.
Blessed are the poor in Spirit, Jesus says, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them.
Blessed are the poor, the spiritually impoverished, the helpless, the beggars, those who are dependent. Jesus sees us at our most needy. It’s common knowledge in the rehab world that addicts may need to hit bottom before they can discover freedom. Most parents know that some of the toughest and best lessons come when their children stumble and fall. We wish it could be different, of course. But as we’ve explored wilderness life, we’ve realized that its spiritual geography requires humiliation.
What’s puzzling to us is that, according to Jesus, this is the road to happiness. It’s utterly confusing for those of us raised in a culture where we feel entitled to happiness, a basic right of American society. Happy are the broken? This kingdom announcement sounds like a downer, the wisdom of a depressed Messiah. Parker Palmer, however, sees this wisdom as inherent to nature itself:
The wilderness constantly reminds me that wholeness is not about perfection. I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds. Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness—mine, yours, ours—need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.
But I believe that this brokenness can also be misunderstood. It has become a cliché among many who critique the ethic of success, particularly within Christian communities. In 2002 the late Mike Yaconelli wrote Messy Spirituality, a wonderful little book designed to invite stuffy, perfectionistic Christians into freedom. Instead, a new generation picked up on this as an invitation to “be yourself”—warts and all. But what if “being true to ourselves” is actually an exercise in self-deceit? What if these selves to which we’re supposed to be true are really false selves? For some people the mantra of “messy spirituality” took a direction Yaconelli didn’t intend: it invited them out of moralistic and deadening ways of living but failed to cast the vision for the truly broken life as a manifestation of God’s kingdom.
Dominican priest and teacher Simon Tugwell summarizes this alternative vision of the broken, spiritually impoverished life:
Blessed are the poor in Spirit, those who have allowed themselves to be stripped of the old spirit, the spirit of acquisitiveness and security, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven, because they no longer seek to possess but to be possessed, to lose themselves and all that is “theirs” in the ecstasy of simple receiving and simple giving again, or, more accurately, without even any giving or receiving, in the simple being which is the authentic image in us, that divine ecstasy of being which is the living God.
Tugwell’s vision is of dispossession that, as we’ve seen, requires us to be stripped of everything that vies for authority in our hearts. It’s a way of costly discipleship. A life of messy spirituality, in other words, does not mean the freedom to cuss, to drink, and to dance just because you weren’t allowed to when you were a kid. It’s more than Celtic tattoos and nose rings, just because you you’ve been freed from the rigid standards of Mom and Dad’s faith. Brokenness strips us of everything that is false in us, including the new personas we exchange for the older, rigid ones. It manifests not necessarily in a more raw or edgy ethos but in humility.
A few years back I got to know someone who loved to drop the f-word in every possible context and every conceivable syntactical usage. He especially saw it as his mission to detonate an f-bomb in every fundamentalist, conservative Christian context he could. He talked often of Christian freedom and told many people about his struggles with drinking and pornography. This friend had not yet discovered the brokenness and neediness Jesus envisions in Matthew 5. In his insecurity, he continued to live out of a false self—this time clothed in the persona of a radical, messy, “honest” Christian. He desperately needed to know that he was loved but continued to manufacture affection in his life through this false persona. As Tugwell writes,
like runaway slaves, we either flee our own reality or manufacture a false self which is mostly admirable, mildly prepossessing, and superficially happy. We hide what we know or feel ourselves to be (which we assume to be unacceptable and unlovable) behind some kind of appearance which we hope will be more pleasing. We hide behind pretty faces which we put on for the benefit of our public. And in time we may even come to forget that we are hiding, and think that our assumed pretty face is what we really look like.
When Jesus envisions the happy life as the life of spiritual poverty, helpless, and brokenness, he sees us stripped of every kind of persona, every manufactured form of righteousness or unrighteousness, everything that gets in the way of our flourishing.
The first four Beatitudes flesh out this vision of spiritual humiliation that leads to a life of happiness and virtue—a life of flourishing.
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