The Beatitudes

The Beatitudes

Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement and spent her life serving the poor, described her life's work as living out the Beatitudes in reverse: 'The world calls the poor unfortunate. Jesus calls them blessed. I had to decide whose economy I was going to live in.' She ran houses of hospitality for the homeless during the Depression, was arrested for pacifism, and died having owned almost nothing herself. She described the first Beatitude as the key that unlocked everything else. 'Poor in spirit doesn't mean defeated. It means you've stopped pretending you're self-sufficient. That's where the kingdom starts — in the acknowledgment of need.'

The Beatitudes open Jesus' greatest sermon and establish the economic system of the kingdom — which runs exactly counter to every human value system. The world blesses the powerful, the wealthy, the cheerful, the aggressive, the pure-in-worldly-success. Jesus blesses the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry. 'Poor in spirit' in Greek is ptochos — not merely having little, but being entirely dependent, like a beggar. This is the entry point to the kingdom: the recognition that you have nothing to bring, nothing to leverage, nothing to offer in exchange for God's favor. It is the undoing of self-sufficiency that opens the door. The rich, self-sufficient, and self-satisfied have already claimed their reward; the poor in spirit discover that they are, astonishingly, heirs of the kingdom.