What a wonderful display of images of the saints in the
alcove in our Gathering Space! I thank
our Arts & Environment team for assembling it:
The Gospel reading for today was the Beatitudes (Mt
5:1-12). Living the Beatitudes is the way
of the saints. Those holy men and women
lived the meekness, humility, poverty of spirit, courage, love and thirst for
justice asked of them by Our Lord. And
by walking that simple path, despite the challenges, struggles and crosses they
faced, they found joy.
The Dominican theologian Servais Pinckaers calls the Sermon
on the Mount, of which the Beatitudes are a foundational part, a “charter of
the Christian life” (Pinckaers, Morality:
The Catholic View, 8). “The
Beatitudes focus the hope of the disciples upon the kingdom of heaven, paradoxically
directed to the poor and those persecuted for Jesus’ sake.” They are the “response of Christ to the
question of happiness” according to the Fathers of the Church (Pinckaers, 9).
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| The Sainte-Chapelle, a royal medieval Gothic chapel in Paris, France, built by St. Louis IX |
The saints have “competed well.” They have “finished the race.” They have “kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7).
“They have washed their robes and made them white in the
Blood of the Lamb” (Rv 7:14; today’s Reading 1).
May we follow on their path by living the Beatitudes!
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