Blessed are the Poor in Spirit
ONE
Beatitude means Happiness. The Beatitudes are God’s eight step plan for true happiness. It begins with the poor in spirit.
To be poor in spirit is to direct everything to union with God, our perfect and lasting happiness.
Prayer is the most direct way to the goal because prayer is friendship with God.
By prayer we mean daily meditation:
· To read or recall some teaching or event from the Scriptures, the lives of the Saints or the Church;
· Exercise your mind and think about it, try to understand it.
· Then finish your mediation by forming a simple concrete resolution to put the teaching of Jesus into practice.
The Rosary is a great start. But as our friendship with Jesus grows our prayer should simplify.
Allow yourself to just sit with God in silence, attentive to God in loving stillness.
Is there a desire growing within you for more time with God?
TWO
The Beatitudes are God’s plan for happiness but we are complicated creatures who need many good things to be happy and the problem is that we get our loves out of order.
So we need a hierarchy of good things – three levels of good:
1. Superficial natural goods:
a. Protein and carbs
b. Money, power and a good reputation
c. Books
d. Coffee - means to higher goods and not ends in themselves
2. Profound natural goods:
a. Physical goods, nutrition, sleep, exercise, safety, security
b. Family and Friendship
c. Knowledge,
d. Achievement
e. Beauty – which is very different from entertainment
3.Divine Goods
a. Friendship or Union with God, sharing in His Life by means of the sacraments, prayer and virtue
b. To be poor in spirit we need to keep these in order.
c. Love the lesser things less and love the greater things more for virtue is rightly ordered love.
THREE
The way to keep everything in life in order so that we always seek friendship with God as our top goal is to live a well ordered and balanced life.
To do that we need a Rule of Life;
A Rule of Life helps us get to be on time in order to get sufficient sleep; get up with enough time for daily meditation and or daily Mass; to give enough time to work to be responsible but not so much as to neglect other good things in life; to spend time in relationship with family and friends; grow in knowledge, and experience beauty.
A Rule of Life is like a recipe. Life needs the right ingredients, in the right order and the right proportion.
C.S. Lewis; “put first things first and we get the second things thrown in; put second things first and we lose both first and second things.”
FOUR
I want friendship with God above all and I want to get to Heaven.
But when I honestly examine my motivations, what consumes me is striving to be successful in my work, physically healthy and strong, I want good relationships, and to grow in knowledge and experience beauty.
God designed us to need these good things. So how do we keep them from consuming us?
We must practice detachment, practice detaching ourselves from these good things by prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
By prayer we sacrifice our time for the sake of friendship with God; by fasting we give up our comfort and pleasure for the love of God; and by almsgiving we give up our reliance on our money and learn to rely on and love God more.
If you want to be poor in spirit, then you must pray, fast, and give alms.
FIVE
To be Poor in Spirit we need to identify the things that keep us from a deeper friendship with God and get rid of them.
Things like too much work or always being available to work through our phone.
The distraction that comes from entertainment in the form of news, sports, shows, YouTube, FaceBook, Tik-Tok, Candy Crush – it’s the screens – those damn Screens!
We have more leisure time than any generation in the history of the world, but we are so tempted to waste it on things that will never satisfy and always leave us restless.
Jesus is calling you to a deep friendship with Him. Give into the call.