The Beatitudes - Eight Steps to Inner Peace and Happiness

Introduction

The world is in anguish. In the last twelve years, the use of anti-depressants has soared in the most prosperous countries, doubling in some, even quadrupling in others. Canada, the United States, the European countries, and Australia consistently rank among the top users. In the U.S. alone, thirty-three million adults now use antidepressants.[1]

Why has prosperity resulted in such unhappiness? It can’t be blamed on the pandemic or the effects of the Ukrainian war because the trend started well before these events.

We all seek fulfillment, meaning, and contentment, but life gets in the way. So, we cut corners, and the marketplace is always glad to help. The result is that there is now so much competition to provide us with whatever passes for happiness that many people have become confused and disillusioned. Millions, unable to find the contentment they had sought, hope to at least reduce life’s inevitable dissatisfactions and irritants by bringing their “happiness gage” out of red, negative territory and cranking it all the way up to zero. But getting what we think we want is often easier than knowing what our soul deeply needs and craves.

Given our costly efforts to be satisfied, it may seem strange to say this, but I believe our problem is that we don’t aim high enough. In our pursuit of happiness, we don’t look hard enough for what truly provides it, so we settle for an absence of dissatisfaction. In other words, we may not know what we want, but we sure know what we don’t want.

If your plans to find inner peace and joy have failed too often despite your best efforts, if you’re not as happy as you’d like to be, if the doors you’ve knocked on for lasting contentment in your life have not really provided it, then it may be time to re-think what happiness is.

In our perpetual search for lasting satisfaction, we often become self-exiled from who we really are, from our innermost identity, to varying degrees. We dismantle ourselves early after childhood and then spend the rest of our lives trying to put ourselves back together. In those outskirts of our lives where we spend much of our time searching for lasting contentment, we often compensate with “stuff”, and with façades that we’d like the whole world to synchronize with. In that disharmony with ourselves, we often put up defences – some people more than others – against what’s actually the whole purpose of our existence. We need to find our way back home.

If you’re like most of us, then as hard as you’ve pursued happiness all your life, not only has it been mostly elusive, but, in the pursuit itself, you’ve likely suffered many injustices, humiliations, and even some forms of persecution… so you’ve hungered for justice. It’s also likely that, at some point, you’ve felt some remorse about your past, for which you’ve mourned your poverty of spirit, and craved peace of mind. Maybe you’re still suffering from some of these afflictions today. Jesus’s solution to our difficulty in being released from these afflictions, and for acquiring inner beatitude, was laid out in detail in his Sermon on the Mount.

In his Sermon, he acknowledged all these painful burdens that you’ve likely carried or are still carrying. His divine advice for turning those negatives into positives, into beatitudes, may seem surprising at first, but he is asking you to trust him.

The aim of this book is to help renew your confidence in his message for acquiring that inner beatitude. But what exactly is beatitude, and why does it matter? It’s about true happiness, our heart’s deepest desire, and it matters because acquiring it is what drives our lives’ greatest efforts. Our happiness is ultimately the object of our most profound thoughts and reflections. Every thinker throughout the history of the world has pondered deeply about it, chin on fist. This book offers a new way of looking at God’s version and his advice for what we all seek every moment of our lives.

Here is the list of Jesus’s views on inner peace and happiness, summed up in the eight beatitudes revealed in his Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5:3–12. Remember that God’s ways are seldom our immediate, instinctive ones:

Blessed (Happy) are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the land.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall have their fill.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’s sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I believe these beatitudes are the answer to all our worries, yours, mine, and those of the whole world, because they address their root causes. The eight beatitudes actually build upon each other in succession, as you’ll see, toward a big picture for the only kind of happiness worth pursuing. They even lay out how the pursuing should be done.

I pray that Jesus’s advice may transform your future by transforming you, and that you will see, beyond the circumstances and stresses of your life, that everything you need for your lasting inner peace and happiness is already within you.

Having helped nurture human potential throughout my career, and spoken about it around the world, I’ve come to realize that many people’s on-going pursuit of happiness is often really a search for something much deeper than they may realize, something they already have deep within them. Since my retirement, my volunteer work with dying patients, and hearing their stories, has confirmed this fact for me. So, I wrote this book with the single hope that it will help you discover, or rediscover, that buried treasure that Jesus so valued in you, while respecting your unique individuality.

It's about God’s recipe for your beatitude through a new look at the ingredients. I pray that Christ’s advice, as the Word of God, will touch something deep and true within you that will inspire both your mind and your heart, and help you see the world in a different, brighter way.

With that goal in mind, the book is structured in the following three parts:

Part 1, The Most Travelled Road, looks at why most people are searching in the wrong places in their failed pursuit of a fulfilled life, liberty, and happiness.

Part 2, The Least Travelled Road, offers a new way to look at Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount about how to acquire lasting inner peace and beatitude.

Part 3, Making it Work, suggests practical ways to apply concretely in your life what Jesus said, and why his advice is also the only solution to the world’s mounting crises.

If you are searching for increased positivity and meaning for your daily life, then I pray that you’ll find here and there in this short book some little treasures from Jesus that you can keep, some pages you can meditate on that will help reveal God’s never-ending dawn.

Come walk with me.

Part 1: The Most Travelled Road

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Your will be done,”

and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”

C. S. Lewis

Repeating the Same Mistakes

God has been telling us that the only way we can be truly at peace, content, and happy is his way. But his way, the high road, is rarely travelled. The fact that so many people keep trying everything else, despite their unsuccess, suggests that, even though they may believe in God, they don’t believe God.

In our pursuit of happiness, we keep making the same mistakes. It’s remindful of the story of two hunters who chartered a small plane to get to a remote forest. After a few days, the pilot returns to pick them up, sees the two moose they’ve shot, and tells them his plane can only carry the two hunters and one moose. “But last year’s pilot allowed us to bring back two moose in a similar plane,” say the hunters. “Well, in that case,” the reluctant pilot finally concedes, “I suppose it should be ok.” The small aircraft takes off but, failing to gain enough altitude, crashes on a hill. The men stumble out, shaken, and look around. “Where do you think we are?”, one hunter asks his friend. Scratching his head, the other hunter assesses the surroundings and replies, “We seem to be about two kilometers west of where we crashed last year.”

Why do we think repeating our old mistakes will eventually yield different results? You’ve heard the old saying: “If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.”

To better appreciate Jesus’s solution to our problem, to our recurring mistake in our pursuit of happiness, I think we first need to take a hard look at the problem he wants to help us fix. But to understand that problem, I also think we have to begin by understanding ourselves a bit better, because his solution is tied to how we’re designed. We have a subconscious, boundless desire to fill a void in us that only God can fill, but the problem is that many people keep trying to do so in other ways. There is an infinite value within us, an enormous potential that we’re designed to actualize but, by and large, it remains mostly dormant. We’re built for the high sea but remain moored to the pier.

That on-going search for happiness drives everything we do. But, too often, we try to satisfy ourselves with only what’s under our noses and teary eyes. How often we overextend ourselves at removing one barricade after another along roads which we think will lead us to happiness, before realizing hat they don’t lead very far. And then we just “can’t get no satisfaction”, like in the popular song.

When we lose sight of what is authentic, like Jesus’s beatitudes, we focus more on what is superficial and artificial. We become all width and no depth and miss out on the real thing. It’s equivalent to puffing on a cigarette to get what passes for satisfaction. When that’s the case, we tend to look inward with disappointment, and outward with envy. Many people envy, for example, those on billboard photos who look happy, looking like they’re doing anything except posing for billboard photos. We all know, of course, that what the person is doing in the ad is not real, and that the look is meticulously crafted to appear as though they had been caught unaware, being really happy enjoying the product being promoted. We all know it’s bogus and artificial when we think about it, but yet, subliminally, we see it as real, and we envy the “winners” in the ad, we want to feel like them. The advertisers know this and count on our willingness to fool ourselves as they press us to dream the impossible dream of being happy this artificial way. And what does it say about how far we’ve drifted from the real things in life when movie plots are discussed more enthusiastically than the stories of our own lives? Are some of us becoming reality-challenged, alienated from the real world?

How often do we waste what should be our highest freedom in God’s ways, in what Jesus showed us in the Beatitudes, by investing ourselves instead in the service of illusions that our reason will gladly force itself to justify? The beatitudes are like Christ telling us not to abort our potential by letting the media set our agenda, and that we need to judge ourselves by higher standards than those of the world. As we will see in Part 2, the eight beatitudes fully reveal the extent to which comfort and true contentment are two hugely different things.

Trying to fill, with such placebos as excessive comfort, the void in us that only God can fill, that “hole in the soul”, can often be a labour-intensive, even painful struggle, and we’d like to be freed of that struggle. Our efforts to pacify our insatiable ego’s envy and pride drive everything we do, but it’s an impossible task. I think many of us can sense that fact, and may have thus come to terms, to a certain degree, with our own spiritual poverty, our frustrating… “needfulness”, given every soul’s capacity for something infinitely more than just breaking even with life.

I think we’ve pretty much always sensed, of course, that overindulging in comfort and cheap thrills is no key to happiness – like tasting salt without any food under it – and that true contentment would consist of savoring the full sacredness of life. But it’s one thing to know it, and another to experience it. Walking three thousand kilometers on the back trails of Europe with my wife Annette on a pilgrimage along “The Way of St. James” while carrying only the most basic essentials in our backpacks, has really brought that notion home for us. It taught us how much comfort we can do without and still have an extremely rich and rewarding experience. We will all be rich, I think, when we realize how much “stuff” and comfort we can do without, and are even better of without. Along the trail, someone had appropriately painted a sign to that effect, saying, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

The idea is not to run away, of course, from the many great improvements that have thankfully been made in the world to improve our wellness, or to run away from daily reality. But it’s no less true that the more “stuff’ and comfort we have, the more we want when we try to use them as placebos to artificially fill that bottomless void that only God can fill. In that attempt, even riches and good fortune can become our own prison bars.

When we lose sight of what is authentic, our attempts at liberation won’t get us much beyond just getting momentary reprieves from our ego’s never-ending desire for “stuff” and comfort. At its worse, when the effort is pushed too far to artificially free ourselves from those negative feelings of craving more and more, which often comes with a side of envy and grudges, then it can even incite some people to commit crimes of passion for what they think will be their “liberation”. Notice, for example, how Hollywood glorifies vengeance in movies, even the criminal kind, following scenes that conjure up anger in the viewing audience against some really bad guy or gal in the film? Movie makers know how “liberating” scenes of revenge will feel for viewers suffering from a bruised pride, a battered self-esteem, jealousy, or from having been mistreated. But then, aren’t all crimes ultimately just misguided, desperate attempts at some form of so-called “liberation”, that fake imposter of happiness? The only true liberation would come from being freed from ourselves, the way of the Beatitudes.

Many people, without going to the extreme of committing crimes of course, think they’d be happy if only they could at least defeat their daily problems. So, their happiness hinges on eliminating, or at least reducing any negativity in their lives the way you’d scratch an annoying itch. But, by analogy, when was the last time you felt any lasting joy just by not having something annoying, like a pain in your left foot for example? Sure, if you had felt pain in it before, you’d rejoice at being cured, but the rejoicing would be short-lived because you’d soon discover, as we all do, reasons to be dissatisfied or annoyed about something else. Of course, medical factors, including psychiatric ones, can also account for certain moods, but the point is that true and lasting contentment is elusive outside of God’s way as expressed in the Beatitudes.

When applied to the Christian religion, just avoiding negativity that way would be very unfortunate. It would amount to some people viewing the teachings of the Church only as a way to avoid hell or purgatory, or as a code of conduct to be conformed with, like a duty, a tax to be paid, or even as an obstacle to their “free will”, instead of the school of positive thinking that it really is.

Still others seek happiness always from afar. “Utopia City” is always just around the corner in “Tomorrowland”. Preschoolers dream of school, students of graduation, workers of retirement, while retirees long for their younger, healthier days. They’re all “dying to live”.

We are all born pregnant with true, genuine happiness. Abortion is nothing new.

In The Wax Museum

In all these on-going attempts to pacify our ego’s demands for artificial happiness, we can easily become our own prisoners, as I’ve mentioned. I think this may be the notion that prompted a popular Swiss author, the late Maurice Zundel, to compare much of humanity to a wax museum.[2] Although he did not elaborate very much on that analogy, it’s easy to picture what he meant: in a museum, forms can be seen, but there is no one, no life, in the display. Gestures, occupations, and roles are represented by the figures, but there is no one in them. Behind the conversations portrayed by the wax figures may be hidden scheming self-interests, bruised self-esteems, perhaps jealousy and ambitions, all serving one instinct or another, but there is no one there. There’s no life, at least no real life, only the biological impulses that the wax figures display but never consciously chose, like an automated part of the universe doing things reactively without knowing why. The lifeless figures are no more alive than the wax, and neither are we if and when we limit ourselves to obeying only natural instincts, primitive impulses. When that’s the case, we can become as if trapped in a kind of “wax figure”.

I believe the problem Jesus wanted to help us fix by his Sermon on the Mount that day is us. The problem is our refusal to become what we were designed to be if we get trapped in that wax figure.

[1] Source: The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics: Antidepressant Use Among Adults: United States, 2015-2018, in: “Products - Data Briefs - Number 377 - September 2020 (cdc.gov)”

[2] His term, “wax museum”, was quoted in Marc Donzé : L’humble présence. Inédits de Maurice Zundel, tome I. (Geneva, 1986), p. 19.