Blessed are the pure in heart: they shall see God.
—Matthew 5:8
Richard Rohr explores Jesus’s metaphor, connecting the eyes and the heart:
In this beatitude, Jesus is saying, “When the heart is right, seeing will be right.” He ties together heart and sight. We might have heard the saying, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”—so is God. All we need to do is keep the lens clean and the heart pure. If our heart is cold, our vision is distorted. If we hold coldness and unforgiveness, the desire to do violence with words or actions, or avert our loving gaze so that another will feel our rejection, we will not be able to see clearly. Our heart is not pure. Jesus calls us to purity of heart with the promise that correct seeing will follow. [1]
The author and spiritual director Carl McColman reflects on what Jesus might have meant by “purity of heart,” calling it “the beatitude that points toward the goal of every restless heart—to see God”:
Over the centuries, purity has been used for religious and political control. It can be a dangerous concept—used to justify genocide like the Shoah (Holocaust) as well as a code word for controlling people’s sexual behavior. But the word Jesus uses—the Greek word katharoi— carries a different meaning. Katharoi is a root of the word catharsis. Catharsis, in the annals of Western mysticism, is the necessary first step on the journey toward union with God. Here pure not only suggests a freedom from contaminating elements; it also could simply be rendered as clean. We might rephrase the beatitude as “Blessed is a free and cleansed heart, for it shall see God.”
“Seeing God” doesn’t happen automatically. The God of love is gentle and not willing to force the divine presence on those who just don’t want it. Most of us are a paradox: we want it, and we don’t want it. We have mixed hearts, hearts that know the only true rest is in God but nevertheless remain invested in all sorts of other pleasures—some perfectly benign and others not so good. With this reality in mind, it’s important to read Jesus’s beatitude as a challenge as well as an invitation—not as an accusation or a shaming.
Jesus knows that no human being has a perfectly clean (pure) heart. But in his wisdom, he’s asking, “Are you willing to show up? Are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to clean up your mess?” To answer yes to these questions is to commit to the path…. There’s the cleansing right there. Are we willing to begin to let go of gratuitous cynicism, nursed resentments, dispiriting bitterness, and the kind of negativity that leaches away our energy and gives us nothing in return? Letting go of those kinds of afflictive thoughts launches us on the journey of catharsis, of inner cleansing, that prepares us to receive the presence of the One who is already there. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 147–148.
[2] Carl McColman, Eternal Heart: The Mystical Path to a Joyful Life (Broadleaf Books, 2021), 27–29.
Image credit and inspiration: Malek Larif, untitled (detail), 2019, photo, India, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a raindrop poised on a leaf, the Beatitudes provide a drop-by-drop prescription to counter-culturally create the kin-dom of God.
Story from Our Community:
Thank you Brian McLaren for reminding us that God’s blessings are open to all. We are in this salvation train together. We are many parts, but we are all one body of hope, love, faith, and salvation. We are all God’s favorites because God could not possibly be a God of only a few favorites. Blessed be God!
—David S.
