BEATI

A meditation on the Beatitudes

I wake up. Take meds. Walk the dog. Make something to eat. See a man get shot in the street by ICE. Shower, get ready for work. Drive. Work. The president wants to invade another country. Eat. Work. Drive. A five-year-old was abducted and taken across state lines. Go to the gym. Try to relax. A friend is trying to flee the country. Go to sleep.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

I am a human being. A worker. A trans woman. A theologian. I am trying to get more involved in my community. I run a podcast and a blog. My neighbors all fly Trump flags and the like in my neighborhood. I work nights, most often alone. I am trying to find a way out of that life, but the academic world simply isn’t hiring. Nobody is hiring. The jobs aren’t there.

The world is falling down all around me, and I am struggling to tread water. I am not alone. Everyone I know and work with is in a similar position. The world is not letting us breathe. We haven’t been able to tread water for over a decade now. And things keep getting worse.

I lament a future I might have had in a better world. I grieve for those this world has decided are expendable. Each day, new terror, new death, new social decay. I am lucky. I am alive, employed. It can always be worse. It can always get worse.

I wake up. Take meds. War in the streets. Work. Make sure to take pepper spray with you. Drive. Grab some extra supplies, it’s supposed to freeze this weekend. Children are dying of measles in large numbers. Sleep.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

It is a Monday in El Salvador. 1980. Springtime. A priest is offering Mass at a funeral. Gunshots ring out. The priest elevates the bread and wine. Another gunshot. A clatter. The priest falls. The village around his body burns.

Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death, St. Oscar Romero.

It is 45 years later. The war has come home. Clergy in my own country are being called domestic terrorists. I am writing the day after the murder of Alex Pretti, a nurse. I am writing a few weeks after the murder of Renee Good, a poet.

God, thy subtlety is lacking.

There is precious little I can do. I write these missals, sermons, screeds in the dark. I go to church. I volunteer. I work. I try not to lose myself in gloom, in despair.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”

When, O Lord? When does thy justice arrive? I am hardly the one in need right now. Entire communities, entire neighborhoods are being terrorized as we speak. Children are afraid to leave their homes to go to school, and for good reason. Parents who thought they were going to find a better life in America now find themselves the scapegoats of a mad, senile emperor. More and more people find themselves homeless, begging for change to feed their children. We almost beat child poverty, goddammit. A couple of years ago, we almost solved the problem of childhood poverty. And now, we are abducting 5-year-olds in the name of Security, Justice, and Peace.

The amount we have lost in the past year is incalculable. Thousands have been deported, mistreated, and abused. Countless have died in ICE custody. For-profit prisons, filled to bursting with people who committed no crime. Immigration is not a crime. Legally, it is equivalent to unpaid parking tickets. I don’t believe we should even have borders, anyway. This is the logical endpoint of all borders, all policing. Empire loves one thing and one thing only: subjugation. Protecting hierarchy, at all costs, and creating it wholecloth from nothing.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Good people mobilize. They learn fast how to communicate. Neighborhoods are filled with the sounds of whistles and noisemakers, signalling the invaders, the jackboots. People who have never protested in their lives pick up a camera and a whistle to protect their neighbors. They deliver casseroles to neighbors afraid to leave their homes. They pass around lists of people in their churches who are at risk of being taken.

The president and his scheming viziers lie on national television. They call a poet a terrorist. They call a nurse an imminent threat. Forked tongues and rabid muzzles champ at the bit to imprison, terrorize, kill, kill, kill. No honor is found in these cruel fiends, these impostors and frauds who masquerade as government officials. Situation rooms with Twitter on the screens. AI doctored photos, erasing dignity, flooding the space with falseness and fear.

The good are mobilizing. They share tactics. They pool resources. Streets flood, businesses halt. Good work is being done. People are remembering how to be a neighbor.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”

The impulse to match cruelty with cruelty is strong. Fire with fire, venom with venom. I try not to stoke that flame, but I cannot deny the warmth it promises. It feels good to be wrathful. It feels good to dream of vengeance. The irresistible call of the match’s flame, the whisper of the old guard down the years: “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”¹

But, no. No, we must not. That way lies devils, a hellish cycle all its own. If revolution is to come, it must be different. It must make space for compassion, though it must take seriously the threats to its own fragility. The way of Christ is not to meet aggression with aggression, but with love. The way of the cross is not with a swift and terrible sword, but with a dedication to resist evil with love. To end the war is to imagine a world where war is unimaginable. The way of life is a hot casserole for a scared neighbor, and a whistle just in case.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

What good is a pure heart if it is no longer beating? What good is a nobler aspiration for a better world when there’s too much month at the end of a paycheck and no end to the humiliation in sight? What good is a job well done when the entire economy is based upon scams, graft, and con jobs? What good are ethics when the Adults In The Room deem such unnecessary, save that which will gain them the most revenue this quarter?

Yet still, I resist the rage, though it torments me forever. Anger can be righteous, but a burning rage will reduce the village to ash and cinder. I keep my head down. I go to work. I help feed hungry neighborhood kids. I am trying to build a better world within the ruins of the old.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

It is dispiriting to think that the world that I used to know, the world that made sense, no longer exists. It is almost quaint to think that I would quote Gramsci in earnest in years prior. I was safely in the old world, then. But the time of monsters is only beginning, unfortunately. The time of monsters has an undefined end date.

History will struggle to name the moment it all turned upside-down. Was it 9/11? Perhaps the economic crash of 2008? Or was it further back, with Reagan and Thatcher? Or was it Nixon, in the 70s? Was it the 60s, with the death of MLK Jr, or JFK? Or was this tower of cards always doomed to crumble, and trying to pin it to a moment kind of naive and simplistic? Was it everything, or none of it?

History will have its pick of villains, for sure. But will it also remember the good? The just? The peacemaker among the maddening crowds? Will it remember love, mercy, and justice? Will it remember the neighborly or the kind? I would hope it might. Perhaps it won’t be as attention-grabbing. Perhaps it will look boring, plain. And perhaps, it ought to be such. I still believe, despite it all, that people are basically good, if misguided. Goodness and justice seldom catch headlines.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Heaven knows, there are plenty out there being persecuted. We are not lacking for want of oppression. Immigrants, nonwhite people, LGBTQ+, disabled, take your pick. Persecution is abundant. I could easily go another day without facing the fury of the xenophobic, the homophobic, the racist, the ableist. Perhaps one day those things will indeed be a memory, like a bad dream.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

I do tire of waiting. I tire of dreams being deferred, like raisins in the sun, like Mr. Hughes once mused. I tire of the promise of a coming day when justice rolls down like an ever-flowing stream. I yearn for such a day right now.

I wake. I work. I write. I sleep.

Perhaps a world is coming. Perhaps heaven waits on us to get with the program. Perhaps the kingdom truly is among you, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Perhaps, we must not tire in trying to bring heaven to earth.

The people Jesus said those words to, were they not just as tired? Were not the peasants of Judea under Roman occupation just as tired, just as oppressed? Were they not murdered in the streets, terrorized by the guard? Were they not as poor, as overworked, as underpaid? Were they not on fire with rage at the injustices they faced?

And has this not simply been the repeating chorus, 2000 years and counting? Are we not the same? And do we not still look towards heaven for rest from these troubles?

Blessed, he said. Blessed, we are. Blessed, we shall be.

1. From Karl Marx, Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 301.