LITMIR.BIZ

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and needs under a carpet, but, through Jesus, takes them up and they are transformed. Jesus does not ask who we are, or what we have to offer. He simply accepts us. Acceptance is transforming. Such is the extravagance of free grace. As Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, explains: grace is found “[…] in terms of compassionate acceptance, the refusal of condemnation, the assurance of an abiding relationship of healing love”.

      God’s grace enables us to respond to God in Christ. Grace enables us to answer Jesus’ call to “Follow me”. Jesus is the paradigm of a “graced” relationship with God. This cannot be taken for granted. Nothing hindered the Christ event from taking place, but we can resist its demands on us. Our personal perceptions and conditions can render the acceptance of grace difficult, even impede it, but nothing can make its coming impossible. Grace can prepare its own way, and make the impossible possible. Paul’s conversion illustrates this truth. Grace sanctions the forgiveness of sins, restores relationship, and enables love and hope.

      I cannot claim to have an uninterrupted awareness of the grace that surrounds us. When the presence of grace does strike me, I am taken aback, surprised at how unaware I have been, and grateful for the sense of being held and cared for. I understand something of what French Jesuit priest and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) meant when he wrote: “Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.” The extravagant, indiscriminate spilling of grace on the world makes me feel blessed.

      * * *

      Blessings

      Daring to write of blessings could be seen as an exercise in chutzpah. After all Jesus Christ, the founder of my faith, gave a sermon to his followers that contained a number of blessings (the beatitudes) that have stood as a moral beacon for all times. Sitting down to speak to his followers on a hill some two thousand years ago, Jesus set out an ethical code in what Augustine (354–430) subsequently called the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:1-11; Lk 6:20-26). In his work entitled The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, he wrote: “If anyone piously and soberly considers the sermon which our Lord Jesus Christ preached on the mount, as we read it in the Gospel according to Matthew, I think that he will find in it, as regards the highest morals, the perfect message of the Christian life.”

      Precise yet comprehensive, the beatitudes contain a complete précis of Jesus’ teaching. Their insight into the human spirit is penetrating and full of wisdom. No wonder Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) expressed his delight with this sermon when he said: “It went straight to my heart.” He considered it second only to the Bhagavad-Gita. This sermon changed the life of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). In My Religion he wrote: “As I read these rules, it seemed to me that they had special reference to me and demanded that I, if no one else, should execute them.” However, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) commented acerbically that the Sermon encouraged a “slave morality”!

      Throughout the ages, Christians have turned to this text as the embodiment of Christ’s teachings. There are no teachings in the whole of the scriptures that demand more of us than the beatitudes. The exhortations of the prophets, the cautions of the leaders of Israel, the counsel of the psalms or the concealed truths of the parables, as powerful and insightful as they are, cannot strike quite the same chord in the depths of a believer as the beatitudes. All that I have ever wanted to evade, put off, or disregard, because it quite simply asks too much, is found in these blessings.

      Is my attempt to write about blessings no more than an exercise in personal hubris? I know that the beatitudes Jesus left us are unequalled in their completeness. I believe that they are intended to guide us on how to live freely and fully. I have responded to their all-encompassing demands on my life in different ways, often with monumental failures along the way, but equally with a sense of being blessed because God’s love and patience are inexhaustible. My attempt to describe different experiences of blessing is merely a further chapter in exploring what has made life worth living, not an attempt to trump the Sermon on the Mount.

      What does it mean to be blessed? The Oxford Shorter Dictionary defines being blessed as: “Enjoying supreme felicity, [being] fortunate, happily endowed”. The idea of being blessed is certainly an ancient one. In the Hebrew scriptures, “blessedness” denotes personal trust in God and obedience to God’s will. The desire for blessedness occurs frequently in the psalms and is, in fact, the very first word of the Psalter. “Blessed are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked” (Ps1:1). The idea of being blessed is also familiar in wisdom literature: in the Greek world of those early a blessed person was one in harmony with society and the world.

      It is, however, difficult to capture the meaning of the Greek word makarios in translation. As I have said, it means more than being fortunate or happy. It includes a sense of being privileged with divine favour, of being holy, hallowed. It means experiencing gratitude at receiving unmerited grace. It is about a sense of well-being because the goodness of life is affirmed and upheld against the odds. It asserts certainty at God’s presence, mercy and care. God wants to bless us. All that is required from us is to do our best to love God and one another. Then we will be blessed, for God’s love can do no other.

      If this sounds easy, we need reminding that it is both simple and challenging. We live, as Williams puts it, in “[t]he disturbing presence of grace and vulnerability within the world of human relationships”. What I have attempted here is to strike the italics key in my life by telling the story of certain blessings that have surprised me along the way. I have been taken aback by both their very ordinariness and their supreme extraordinariness. There is nothing spectacular about listening, feeling grateful, curbing my greed and having a good laugh. I am equally amazed by the extraordinariness of finding promise in paradox, of being confronted with the truth that I am holy, and that freedom from fear is possible even when confronted with mortality. I shall settle for God’s grace being “in the order of things”, because this is God’s world, we are God’s people and grace declares God’s love – and God can be no other than loving. This, the man on the borrowed donkey shows me.

      Notes

      My encounter with Jesus as an historical person simply describes the person who entered history at a particular time as related in the gospels. The historical Jesus is, of course, someone we never really encounter, as little is really known about the history of Jesus. Jesus as depicted in the gospels is the Jesus in whom the early Christians placed their faith.

      Albert Nolan’s Jesus Before Christianity (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986) remains one of the most readable and theologically sound accounts of Jesus the human being before he became enshrined in dogma and ritual.

      There was a tendency, rather than a dogma, in the early church that considered the humanity and suffering of Jesus as apparent and not real. This is known as Docetism from the Greek dokesis for “appearance” or “semblance”, and amounted to a denial of Jesus’ humanity but not his divinity, as might be expected. To claim that God walked the earth in human form did not cause a stir in the ancient world. Ancient mythologies were full of gods taking on human form. The Docetists accepted the cross, but on their terms. According to them, Jesus the Messiah could not really have died; what is divine cannot really suffer.

      Compassion, condensed in the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself”, is a fairly common concept in the majority of world religions. When writer Karen Armstrong sought to create and propagate a Charter for Compassion, she found that “[t]housands of people from all over the world contributed to a draft chapter on a multilingual website in Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Spanish and English.” She continues: “The Charter was launched on 12 November 2009 in sixty different locations throughout the world; it was enshrined in synagogues, mosques, temples and churches as well as in secular institutions.”

      The Taizé community is an ecumenical monastic order that was founded in Burgundy, France, in 1940 by Protestant Brother Roger Schutz. It is composed of some one hundred brothers, representing the Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, from about thirty different countries. Today it has become one of the world’s most popular places of

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