One could argue that at least half of Jesus’ beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-10) greatly esteem those bereft of strength, jubilance, and security. Blessed are the persecuted…the poor in spirit…those who mourn, etc.
Jesus abided in the low places. While other religious leaders performed piety and policed the clean from the unclean, Jesus introduces an embodied spirituality for suffering and weakness.
Many of us have found ourselves in faith environments that turned out to be malignant with abuse and falsehood. In my own and others’ encounters, I am struck not only by the presence of arrogance in many faith systems, but the aversion to beatitude community.
How will people learn the blessedness of grief when all that is modeled for them is triumph, hustle, success, and oral expertise?
Leaving Behind the Unspiritual
In nearly every case of spiritual abuse and institutional betrayal, I would argue that the abusive organization or community shows themselves not only to be hazardous to people, but also quite hollow, spiritually speaking. And more often than not, some form of religious, political, or cultural fundamentalism has hollowed them out.
Part of what maturing spirituality reveals to us is the difference between being religiously astute and being spiritually alive. The beatitudes are like a map for navigating true spirituality.
When I left an abusive church several years ago, it wasn’t just that I realized we had been wading in very narcissistic waters. More fundamentally, I realized I was never captured by anything beautiful—or beatitudinal—in the inner life of the senior leader. His relational world orbited predominantly high places. He scarcely gave his attention to anyone Jesus deemed ‘blessed’ in Matthew 5.
A Growing Spiritual Appetite
If I were to put my finger on one area I sense a growing and collective longing among both new spiritual seekers and the deeply disillusioned, I would say there is a divinely prompted impetus to move from the hollow to the whole. To offer a charitable lens for those of us with church backgrounds, we may acknowledge that early in our faith development, propositions were all that mattered. But now, Presence concerns us most.
People are realizing, perhaps for the first time, that the faith they inherited never spoke the embodied language of Low Places, or at best, made nominal reference. People are done with a religious aversion to grief and doctrinal recitations that keep us at safe distance from our interior lives.
People want to heal. They want to learn the way of Love. They want to offer hospitality and warmth to all rather than pretend that our phobias toward people remotely reflect God’s heart.
A religious organization awash in pride or selfish ambition will invariably sequester the reality of suffering, because suffering invokes compassion and slows us to a pace compatible for inward change—rather than controlled outcomes. It also levels the playing field. It makes us companions to one another rather than experts or authorities.
In his book The Pandora Problem, Neurotheologian Jim Wilder describes the New Testament vision for community not as organizations led by power-broking pastors, but as relationships formed and nurtured through shared weakness, a hesed (loving-kindness) community.
The beatitudes, I think, offer us an earthy and embodied spirituality. A sobering dose of realism, too. To mourn is to be human, for example, but it is also to be Held in a tender and reciprocating union.
This is what so many people are longing for. And they’re willing, when necessary, to leave institutional structures to find it.
Thank you Ryan for supplying language for us. I love that the lowly, the beautiful, is beatitudnal. --pat
"To mourn is to be human, for example, but it is also to be Held in a tender and reciprocating union." This is so beautiful. I know people are searching outside of churches for what they could not find within ... I don't judge them for it. But these principles are what we continue to emphasize at our church. As I see it, we are being influenced by a large recovery community that we are getting to know... and they are helping us grow in these areas. I am going to share this. Thank you.