Beatitudes

Review: Passions of the Soul

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Cover image of "Passions of the Soul" by Rowan Williams.

Passions of the Soul, Rowan Williams. Bloomsbury Continuum (ISBN: 9781399415682) 2024.

Summary: An exploration of Eastern Christian writing on the passions that may be distorted into sin, paired with the Beatitudes.

One of the consequences of interest in the Enneagram is a renewed interest in Evagrius, a fourth century Eastern Christian monastic who wrote about the deadly sins, the passions of the soul that may be twisted in temptation to lead us into sin. In this slim booklet, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Willliams, acquaints us with Evagrius and other Eastern Christians as well.

What identifying the passions does is give us a vocabulary to name the propensities within us that turn our hearts away from the love of God and neighbor. Williams counsel as we discern these things is simple. Face it. Give it to God. And get on with our work. Rather than obsessing about self-denial, the real question is “What has God asked me to just get on with?”

With that, Williams briefly maps out eight passions. Then in the next four chapters, he takes them in pairs setting them over and against a contrasting virtue found in the Beatitudes. He begins with pride and contrasts it with the dependence that knows one’s need of God. Likewise, the boredom of listlessness is offset by the invitation to mourn, to truly feel, and find comfort in God. Anger is offset by the blessing of meekness, the knowledge of who we really are that needs no defense. Gluttony, the craving for more than we need, is countered by hungering and thirsting for justice in the world.

Avarice, a longing for control, comes in the absence of a sense of God’s mercy and is offset in the yielding of control to showing mercy to others, in which we know the mercy of God. The inordinate desire of lust is met in the longing for purity of heart. Envy is the zero sum world in which another’s gain means loss. To embrace peacemaking is to embrace the mutual flourishing of shalom. Finally, despair or dejection centers on one’s self assessment that one has failed and there is no hope, remedied by the promise that faithfulness, even in the worst of persecution and seeming failure eventuates in seeing God.

Williams appends two chapters to these meditations. The first, “To Stand Where Christ Stands” explores what we mean when we talk about the “spiritual.” This chapter, I found was not easy to follow. Williams says it is “about what it is for a whole human life to be lived in the ‘place’ defined by Jesus.” He traces how this has been developed by saints as diverse as Gregory of Nyssa and the Spanish Carmelites, John and Teresa. The last chapter, on “Early Christian Writings” reminds readers of the real dangers early Christians faced, even in gathering for the Eucharist. Prayer, doctrine, and ethics all posed a challenge to the state, and formed the early Christians into both a disciplined and inherently political community.

This slim book challenges our modern ways of being Christian, both in reviving the language of sin, calling us to grow in holiness, and defining our life in the world as the place where spirituality is lived. Rowan Williams introduces us to Eastern Christians with a compelling message for our times.

Review: Blessed Are the Rest of Us

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Blessed Are the Rest of Us, Micha Boyett. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023.

Summary: A mother with a Down’s Syndrome child discovers in the Beatitudes a relationship with God based on God’s love rather than our accomplishments.

A message on Lazarus spoke personally to Micha Boyett. The speaker asked why for someone so greatly loved by Jesus, we never hear Lazarus speak. The speaker wondered if Lazarus couldn’t speak–and if that was why he was so greatly loved by Jesus. We do not know for sure, but this deeply touched Boyett as the mother of a Down’s Syndrome child with autism and not able to do more than vocalize a few sounds. Living in fast-paced San Francisco where people are valued for productivity and achievement, it opened her eyes to a Jesus with a very different set of values for things not valued by society. Values that assured her of hope for her son.

In Blessed Are the Rest of Us, Micha Boyett explores the meaning of each statement in the Beatitudes, interweaving this with the story of Ace, her son. She begins with discussing the translation of makarioi, usually appearing as “blessed” in our Bibles but can also mean “happy,” “favored,” or even “flourishing.” What is stunning is that the people of whom Jesus speaks as makarioi or the “weak, the weary, and the worn out.”

For the weak, they are the caretakers of the dream of God. Imagine a parent with a Down’s Syndrome child seeing her struggling work with her child in that light. She writes of the grief of the news of the child she was carrying, the grief even her children felt at Ace’s agonizingly slow progress and the hope of a divine banquet and the foretastes in the joys of their family. She writes of meekness as the release of power and the strange wonder that only in the setting aside of our striving are we free to receive what we cannot earn because it has always been ours from the Beloved.

Boyett writes of the Beatitudes not only re-orienting what we value; they speak of the value intrinsic as the Beloved of God when we feel valueless. It moves us to forgive and seek justice, and show mercy. And it moves us to serve peace. Boyett in the chapter on peacemaking describes what, to her was a failure in such efforts, motivated out of concern she, her pastor and elder board had that the LGBTQ+ part of their church community experience greater peace. It all blew up two weeks before Boyett’s due date, This all culminated in a hard evening with their closest friends, part of the same church, who didn’t share her and the elders convictions. They say hard things, including the poor way this was implemented where it seemed a small group decided made decisions for a whole church. And then they show up when Boyett has to go on full bed rest. Boyett writes movingly of a hard, painful process of pursuing peace both with each other and for LGBTQ+ people in their congregation, and a friendship sustained by nothing other than the peace of Christ.

Along the way, Boyett writes both of the love and wonder she has for Ace, love that makes her a fierce advocate for him and others with disabilities, and how much harder it is for many persons of color. Whether you agree or not with all of Boyett’s ideas in this book, this is a profoundly prolife book in which Ace’s value, and that of others on the margins, is grounded in the counter-cultural values of the Beatitudes and a God who loves in our weakness, poverty, failures, and suffering. Ace is all of us–we just don’t know it–and through Boyett’s work, we can learn what it means to be among the makarioi.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Our Good Crisis

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our good crisis

Our Good Crisis, Jonathan K. Dodson. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, Forthcoming March 17, 2020.

Summary: Underlying the various crises of our culture is a moral crisis, a crisis of good into which the virtues of the Beatitudes can speak, leading to moral flourishing.

Sexual assault and other misdeeds. Financial misdealing. Political divisiveness. Consumerism that is consuming the planet. Jonathan K. Dodson contends that underlying all of these crises is a moral crisis. A crisis of good. Dodson speaks from experience. He grabs our attention in the opening words of this book:

   I picked up the phone and said hello.

   “Jonathan, this is Amy.” I hadn’t spoken to my old girlfriend since she’d moved to Alaska a decade ago.

   “Well, okay. I’ve been meaning to call you for a long time. I need to tell you something. When we were dating, I got pregnant and had an abortion. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it. I just felt like it would send you on a different path, away from ministry, so I kept it to myself.”

Our crisis of good reflects that we live in a context where we no longer clearly know what is the good, nor are learning the virtues that lead to virtue, to acting with integrity in personal and public settings. For Dodson, the Beatitudes in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, offer a pathway to grow in the virtues that lead to goodness and foster our moral flourishing.

Dodson devotes a chapter to each of the beatitudes. In an age of self, “the big me,” poverty of spirit grasps our bankruptcy before God, how desperately we fall short of his righteousness, that brings us into the kingdom and a humility that becomes a gift to others. We live in an age of distraction that diverts us from the mourning that brings real comfort and not mere diversion. Meekness calls us out of a culture of comparing with others how big of piece of the world’s pie of glory we are getting. Instead, the meek inherit God and all that is in Him. We move in a culture of expedient values rather than being rooted in the righteousness of God that pursues justice for all and not just ourselves.

Dodson goes on in succeeding chapters to discuss mercy in an age of tolerance, purity in an age of self-expression, peacemaking in an age of outrage, and persecution in an age of comfort. One thing I thought he nailed with regard to peacemaking, was how often we are either more concerned about being right than making peace or more concerned about keeping a superficial peace to tell the truth about grievances that are coming between us.

Dodson weaves three helpful elements through his discussions: astute cultural analysis that relates to each of the Beatitudes, elaboration of the meaning of the Beatitude, and helpful practical examples of how the moral goodness of each of these Beatitudes might be expressed in our lives. Each chapter concludes with several reflection questions.

We are in an age of moral outrage coupled with a lack of moral compass. Even in the church, we mobilize around moral crusades while an onlooking world is disgusted with our moral hypocrisy. Dodson both diagnoses our moral crisis, and offers the Beatitudes as our course of treatment.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.