The Beatitudes remind us that what we get wrong about peace, equality, and generosity is that it ever comes at anyone else’s expense.
celebrating Sarah Josepha Buell Hale
Matthew 5:1-12
Few pieces of Scripture return my heart to its center like the Beatitudes.
These short, repetitive verses from the gospel we attribute to Matthew are as comforting as they are daring. Removed from context, and put in the mouth of a governor or a president, we would collectively freak out, especially when it sounds like he’s saying there’s blessing in suffering and persecution.
But in the mouth of Jesus, who we know suffers, and turns so much of his attention to those who suffer and to provoking the whole world to attend to those who suffer, a phrase like “blessed are the poor in spirit” is not so shocking. He isn’t condoning poverty or suffering spirits.
It’s a countering principle.
Blessing doesn’t come to the happy.
The well off don’t have the market on blessing cornered. Even if they can rig all the other markets to their favor.
Blessing comes in sadness, mourning, and dis-ease. It comes in worrying about your neighbors and in trying to make the world better. So in a sense, blessing is more directly connected to bringing others joy than in being joyful.
the personal and the political
Sarah Buell Hale is a profound example of this principle. She was married for nine years before her husband’s death—while she was pregnant, no less. For the rest of her life (another fifty-seven years!) she wore black. In our age in which people feel all too free to say to the grieving “get over it,” such sustained mourning is iconic.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
Sarah Buell Hale spent the rest of her life writing and advocating for equality in its truest sense. Ideas that seem strangely obvious, but no less polarizing.
In this way, she is very much the opposite of the late Phyllis Schlafly, who drew consensus around the politics of equality on behalf of a conservative view of traditions. Hale’s vision of equality, tradition, and our common spirit transcended the political interests of a singular movement.
And yet, even this is used as a political cudgel—rendering the cause of equality itself as being “too political” and not transcendent enough. Much like telling those who protested the death of Michael Brown that they aren’t sympathetic enough or the poor that they aren’t suffering enough to warrant help.
These are the sort of responses to discomfort that make equality itself seem like a pipe dream. But it isn’t. It is more or less just as given as oppression.
There is something both remarkable and utterly normal about a widow making a new career. An idea that is now so common, we wonder how revolutionary it was. And it shocks the modern sensibility to consider Hale such a pioneer, in just the last two centuries.
Pure of Heart
Perhaps then, we consider the sixth blessing; the one I usually skip over in my own thinking.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
We tend to condemn one another, not only for our actions, but for our motives. Even when we don’t really have any. Not in that way anyway.
We ignore motives like equality, generosity, peace, and compassion—even when we are motivated by God. It is easier to dismiss these as being more political than pure. An idea so clearly politically motivated, it screams hypocrisy.
Nonetheless, Hale’s example is no less pure than the march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge or Gandhi’s salt march, movements which put equality, peace, and justice at the center. These are the only true avenues of peace we have.
And the promise itself is that through pure-heartedness, we will see God.
True Peace
The seventh blessing may be the hardest:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
For as much as we want peace, we don’t so much like the idea of making it. It is hard anyway. But it isn’t so much about the idea that its hard. It’s why.
We know that the inevitable response to the making of peace is violence in support of oppression. A fact we too often attribute to flip sides of a coin: peace-to-war, then war-to-peace. But making peace is not “the other side”. The other side of the coin from war is more war. For the political opposite of one party rule is another party’s rule.
Peace is an interruption to war.
It is the delegitimizing of the coin-flip. It is the presentation to the whole world, saying Our way of being is unjust and lacks the very notion of peace. There can be no purity this way.
While it is certainly disruption that Hale sought, it was also a kind of obvious reallocation of political power. Not to “the other side” or to flip the dynamic to its opposite conclusion, but to correct its impurity. To bring just relations between people. Offer new hope where none was possible.
The kind of new peace we take for granted; and yet many continue to make space for. An equality in leadership that is so evidentiary, it must be manifest universally.
And seeking that is so revolutionary, we struggle to frame it. We foolishly toss it into a “politics” bin so full of common sense dualisms, we hardly consider what we’re even thinking. But this, a politics of peace, justice, human dignity, is so uncharacteristic of dual thinking, we hardly understand it.
And sometimes we do understand. And we all work to make peace.
May those times be ever greater and much more frequent.