The Magi’s Star: declination and right ascension
Blessed are the poor in spirit.
These are the ones who know the truth of tomorrow, who have felt the night.
Who look at the red kettles, the ringing of the hand bell, with their little girl perched in the shopping cart, knowing that they are one check away from needing that ministry of the bell, who put in a dollar anyways.
These are the ones who are invited by every revolution, every liberation and movement, every march on the streets and radio blast right and left, who are called to rage at conspiracies and alien involvements, but still, remember that even the privileged have children and feeble aunts, and even the rich too know the cold ache of empty plates, set for children who looked once upon a time for Santa, and who are now, simply, looked for.
These are the ones who are grown up enough to know that the worst is the next bare moment, alone, uncoated before the winter cold weight of the abyss.
Who are child enough to recognize the Friend, in that very moment.
For theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn.
These are the ones who know the right answer to that facile question, “Do you have any regrets? Is there anything thing that you’d do over?”
And that right answer is, of course, “Of course.”
No one who has ever lived is without regret, and no one who regrets is ever able to forget.
This is the burden of repentance, folks, and we are condemned in penance to remembrance for the rest of these days, under this sun that knows no new thing. This is the Sisyphean feeling of vanity, and the vanity of human wishes, the inescapable knowledge of oldness that waits for you at the coming of age. Man up. Courage. Gird your loins and all that. Take your place. Shoulder your burden.
Mourn for the sins of man. And for your own, for you cannot but remember at the small hours, can you not? Drink your shots. Play your games. Pursue your diversions. Employ your opiates, there are many, many.
It is time to complete the mourning. Turn your regret into repentance.
For they shall be Comforted.
Blessed are the meek.
These are those who stand outside. Outside history. Outside business plans and agenda. Outside the guarded gates.
Who mean no harm. Who are not important. Who cannot defend themselves in an argument, who cannot remember evidence in their defense, who cannot advance their own rights and platforms, who have not the brashness to advance the prosecutions against they who oppose them and oppress them.
Who always think, only when it’s too late, the really good comebacks, the perfect bon mot, whose ship will not be coming in.
They are open-minded, open-hearted. They are willing and able to change their opinions, which as all adults know, is next to impossible. They know the way out of the dark house of doubt.
Who have not the stuff to join the oppressors, the mongers, the raiders. Who cannot exploit, for they have not the smart hardness of John Galt. Who think the only Atlas there is was suspended once on a tree -- the meek are the Bethlehem shepherds, who know that the world can be held up only on theanthropic shoulders, cruciform.
The meek are shepherds enough to know what makes a shepherd Good.
These are those who’ve missed their fifteen minutes of fame, and say that’s okay.
For they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.
These are those who know the terrible secret of the world. A secret deeper than goetia, than the darkest files, the files that will never be leaked. A secret so ubiquitous that it is hidden by its ubiquity, like the invisibility of the wind.
The signs are everywhere, like the redness of dusk. Nature is everywhere turned to tragedy. Things fall apart. The center, here and wherever, will not hold. The deer thrown to the median barrier on the interstate is just as shattering as a toxic spill, an armed incursion, a defeat by cancer.
None of this was meant to be, and yet it’s happened. Man and nature have fallen, and broken is the world.
It may be fixed, but the secret lies in the fact that all repair points to the next world -- or rather, the Person Who mediates this transfiguring revolution. All healing is predicated upon the Resurrection.
Every resolution is rooted in the Manger.
And in this philosophical honesty, in this confession of limits, the Wise Men followed the Star -- the mystic intimation of the beautiful infinite.
The question that remains is this:
Do we want this Manger enough? Are we hungry enough for righteousness?
In this desert of fading wishes, are we thirsty enough for the way things should have been?
The real Christ comes to those who want Him, really.
For they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful.
They are those who try to forget only the sins of others. At first, their inability to forget worries them, and they fear they fail to forgive.
But this is a freshman fear. Then comes the middle-aged acceptance of the persistence of memory … the middle-aged faith of believing through the night and trudging along through the valley of the shadow of death -- also known, in the less gracious english of modernity, “disappointment.”
But then comes the richness of vintage, the perfection of complexity and correlated memory, despite the weakness of age. Then comes the near-paradoxical meditation that remembrance of trespasses and injuries affords the soul another opportunity to utter the grace-filled sentence, “I forgive.”
A true revolutionary, anarchical cry. “I forgive.” Over and over. With every reminiscence. With every echo of hurt, with every new appraisal of all the implications and meanings. “I forgive, even that.”
Merciful ones have no trouble finding the right cave, the Silence, the Light. They are not sidetracked by the Herod’s along the wayside, even the raving Herod’s who are about to slaughter another Jewish population.
Mercy draws the merciful, inexorably, to the very Font of Mercy.
For they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart.
No: purity of heart does not mean to will one thing. That is surely a worthy intention. But it is not the content of purity. It is the symptom of this age that “willing” is so conflated with “being.” It is like the confusion of the mind with the heart.
No, the pure in heart are those who are attached to God, and God alone. Of course the phrase “God alone” is unnecessary, because any attachment to the Holy Trinity will displace and prevent any other attachment, for God is a jealous God.
Mary, the sister of Lazarus, is pure in heart, as she beheld in wonder the One Thing Needful. She stayed in that moment and chose the good part.
The pure in heart are the only ones in this world who can really see, really hear, really know. The only ones who perceive substance directly.
Purity of heart is only about epistemology. Not about voluntarism. This is the problem of the West, and why western wisemen get distracted by shooting starts that do not abide.
I want to abide with the One Who said Abide in Me. I want more than anything to be pure in heart -- and in the West, that statement would be a redundancy, but not in the East, where we know the dark night of the soul is not to be embraced or endured, but to be traversed to the Star. Deserts are meant to be crossed, under the Star Sign of the Cross.
I want to choose that better part, like Mary, like the Theotokos.
So that it will never be taken away.
For they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
They are those who know peace. And they know it enough in the first instant to be something that must be given away.
And with every bequest, with every establishment of peace, the presence of Christ is amplified, magnified. The music of His Voice and the ineluctable, terrible reverberation of His Word, thunders through the fine gossamer curtains of universal substance.
Peace is the liturgical, mystical, ascetical, charismatic, self-sacrificial, cross-bearing, compassionate, piteous, divine and humane establishment of a historical unlikelihood.
It is unlikely, in this world, that arms are ever thrown down, and the rifles on both sides are pyramided. It is unlikely that lawsuits are torn up and claims are surrendered, that denunciations are renounced and vendettas are sundered. It is unlikely that armories are emptied. It is unlikely that children will wake up one day and go through an entire day without hearing adult rages. It is unlikely that Aegisthes and Clytemnestra would ever stand, still, against the Furies -- whose existence, if not essence, cannot be doubted.
But in the unlikeliest of all possibilities, He, the singular Maker of Peace, the Son of God, stood in the prow of the boat one day and said “Peace, be still.”
Only God does the work by the saying of it.
Peacemakers are those who sail into storms all the time on little boats, and say, apostolically, “Peace, be still.” But they make peace by having communed with Peace, and by prayer having apprehended the storm.
Peacemakers will apprehend this power, this storm-stopping Peace, deep in the Bethlehem Cave.
The substance of Christmas Light is Peace. The reason why there is so much adumbration of the Cave today is that there is so much unwillingness to enter peace-making, so much war in so many hearts.
Christians are known best by making peace. This is the only way the world will know them.
For they shall be called the sons of God.
Thank you Father - what a fine exposition of the Beatitudes for us on this Nativity.
I especially needed to hear your words about the Meek this year.
I will say, a bit early,
Christ is Born!
Posted by: Eric John | December 22, 2011 at 01:53 PM