Dear Friends,
I want to thank all of you who have expressed your sympathy and condolences with the death of my grandfather, Ross Frisbee. I deeply appreciate your prayers, care, and concern. My grandfather was 92 and was quite the character. I will miss him, but I am also comforted by Christ’s promise of the Resurrection and by being surrounded by the Communion of Saints at Mass, in which we see all of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist.
We move on to the next Beatitude: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.” Hunger and thirst are basic desires we have. Hunger and thirst motivate many of our actions for happiness. We cannot help hungering and thirsting for happiness; it is a natural desire placed in us by God. Nevertheless, we need to discover what it really is and learn how to direct it. One of the tasks of the Gospel is to cultivate and foster our desire, our hunger and thirst in the right direction. As St. Gregory the Great said, “The whole of the spiritual life is the education of desire.” Our chief problem is that we are often satisfied merely by earthly, physical nourishment, leaving us insensible to that which is spiritual. A full stomach can leave us impervious to the Word of God.
In biblical language, hunger and thirst are not limited to the merely physical plane. This Beatitude teaches us that there exists in our depths a yearning for God as vigorous and relentless as any bodily hunger and thirst, and that it corresponds perfectly to our heart’s thrust toward happiness. The chief purpose of this Beatitude is to form in us that spiritual appetite which is the prerogative of the poor, the humble, the meek, and all who follow Christ on the road of suffering.
Our hunger and thirst is meant to be directed toward a specific end: blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. What exactly is righteousness? Pope Benedict XVI says that the New Testament notion of righteousness corresponds to the Old Testament notion of righteousness as faith: the man of faith is the righteous man who walks in God’s ways. In our times and in our cultural milieu, righteousness has a negative connotation: we hear about those who are “self-righteous,” and we picture someone we don’t want to be around or know. A quick translation of righteousness is that it is justice: blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. Traditionally, justice has been formulated giving what is due to another, and we could say that this beatitude challenges us to rightly order our relationship with God and our relationships with others.
Let’s go another step further: righteousness and justice is holiness. Holiness is not defined, as we sometimes do, by a mysterious aura or as hidden powers, but by the conformity of the mind and the actions of a man to objective truth of which God is the source. Righteousness, justice, and holiness is the fulfillment of God’s will. Such justice—fulfilling the will of God—is to be the universal nourishment besides which all else becomes superfluous. In other words, to hunger and thirst for righteousness and holiness means to refuse to be satisfied with anything less than God, and that in their pursuit of God, of holiness, and of fulfilling the will of God, they are satisfied—nothing else is really all that important. Pleasure, wealth, power, and prestige will not satisfy us, and we will always try to obtain more. It is holiness that brings fulfillment, and therefore, holiness and becoming a saint ought to be the #1 goal of life. It is reminiscent of the words of Paul Claudel: “The only tragedy in life is to not become a saint.”
We are saints under construction, hungering and thirsting for righteousness and holiness. Have a great week!
In Christ,
Fr. Matt