We Christians can turn to the Beatitudes in our search for true discipleship. They provide a course of training that develops our vulnerability so as to recognize the poor in spirit. In this sense, they are a remarkable guide to life.
In my own growth in understanding the Beatitudes, I have learned much from the late Yiu Sing Lúcás Chan, S. J., about the Beatitudes in The Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes: Biblical Studies and Ethics for Real Life. The Hong Kong-born Father Chan, who died in May 2015 of an apparent heart attack just a few weeks before his 47th birthday, was a gifted and widely published scholar of biblical ethics who taught at Marquette University.
Father Chan showed us that the Beatitudes have a much greater coherence than is normally acknowledged by insisting that they need to be read dynamically, in that each Beatitude builds one upon another; once we begin to take the first few steps, we realize that each successive step empowers the next. The steps are internally transformative. Like any notion of personal or communal growth, we really are not able to see where the program is taking us until we begin it. And it is only by heeding Father Chan’s admonition to climb this figurative ladder that we begin to see their internal connectedness and logic.
Insofar as the Beatitudes are a training course to fix our gaze on the poor in spirit, they also help us to become more fully realized disciples of Christ. By heeding the steps of the Beatitudes in recognizing the poor in spirit, we become more vulnerable to the other—the other who calls us further forward on the way of the Lord.
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James F. Keenan, S.J., a theological ethicist, is the Canisius Professor at Boston College.
With thanks to America and Fr James F. Keenan SJ, where this article originally appeared.
