Blessed Are the Pure in Heart

The Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Today’s Readings: [Click here]

There’s a monastery in South Dakota where the monks follow the ancient Rule of St. Benedict and live a simple life of prayer and labor. Some years ago, the abbot there had a cat that roamed around the chapel during prayer, so he tied the cat to a peg to prevent the monks from being distracted. When the abbot died, the practice just continued. When the cat died, a new abbot got a new cat and tied it up the same way. Eventually, no one could quite remember why the cat was being tied up. Even though the practice had lost its original purpose and meaning, the good monks kept the old tradition alive.

Rituals are a deeply entrenched part of both human and faith life. You may have heard the apocryphal story about the woman who was teaching her daughter how to cook a roast beef. She explained how you season the meat, chop off one end, put the roast in the pan and then cook it in the oven. The daughter asked her mother why she cut the end off. The mother answered, “Well, that’s how Grandma taught me and that’s how we’ve always done it.” So the daughter figured she’d ask her grandmother about it. “Oh that,” her grandmother said. “In those days, my pan was too small to hold a big roast, so I always had to cut the end off so the meat would fit.”

If you were to examine your own habits and traditions, you might very well find that you do things in everyday life and even in your faith life that you’re not completely sure of the reason for.

All religions use symbols and signs to express externally some of our internal beliefs, feelings and deep mysteries about God and human existence. In our church, that’s what the sacraments are all about—as well as our prayers, blessings, devotions, vestments, statues and artwork, sacramental objects, and even our liturgical music.

However, there’s a danger that arises when the symbols and signs lose their original purposes and become ends in themselves. There is nothing inherently wrong with practices such as ritual meals like the Eucharist… or purifications like baptism… or acts of intimacy like embracing or kissing or sex. But the danger comes when these practices don’t authentically express what they are meant to convey.

Take purification, for example. In the Catholic Church we have various rituals and practices that are meant to purify. We baptize to purify the person from their sins, original and actual. We bless ourselves with holy water to remind us of this. The priest at mass washes his hands before the Eucharistic prayer to cleanse himself of his sins so he can reverently turn the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood. There are other purifications, as well. But think: it is so much easier to wash your hands ritually than to do what’s really behind the ritual—to clean your heart of impure thoughts such as envy, jealousy, bitterness or revenge.

In the same way, it’s much easier to share in a ritual meal like Holy Communion than to really commune with the unlovable, the ungrateful or the enemy.

Jesus was the most authentic person who ever lived. In other words, for him, the outside and the inside were one and the same. He performed the prescribed rituals and prayed the required prayers, but in a way that illuminated their true meaning. And when they were empty and meaningless, he didn’t hesitate to transform them, replace them or simply discard them. Go through some of the ancient Jewish laws found in the Book of Leviticus or Deuteronomy and you’ll find many examples.

Our very beautiful gospel today features the Sermon on the Mount. Among the beatitudes, Jesus teaches: Happy are the pure of heart for they will see God. We need wisdom to be pure in heart. If my heart is pure, then everything about me will be pure: my mind will think pure things, my lips will speak pure words, my actions and intentions will also be pure. And the reverence I pay to God and others in words and signs will be the most authentic kind of worship I can give to God. How different this is from just going through the motions of prayer and devotion while your heart and mind are someplace else. Of course, this is totally apparent to God who knows and sees all things.

A friend of mine was a chaplain in the United States Navy. He told me about a sailor he knew by the name of Keith. He was a gentle and hard-working man with a dream. He wanted to become a nurse and help people. Keith frequently went out of his way to befriend sailors who were new and lonely, often away from their homes for the first time. He was a spiritually sensitive person who was only in his twenties when the unthinkable happened. And it happened so unexpectedly. Being the chaplain, my friend was the first to know when he got a phone call.

A simple routine visit to the dentist revealed that this young man had some unusual swelling in his neck. The dentist insisted on an X-ray, and various tests turned up a massive tumor surrounding his heart. They began emergency surgery. Keith’s mother flew in to be with her son. Tragically, the sailor died that day.

My friend preached Keith’s funeral homily around this very verse: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. From the dozens of Keith’s friends weeping openly, it was clear that they recognized that Keith’s life reflected that the heart is the center of our being, and a pure one is something that honors God and neighbor.

In the press of everyday life, it’s easy to just go through the motions and forget what’s behind the traditions and rituals we repeat. It’s easy to forget that our lives reflect God’s presence in our hearts. May our prayer today be that the Lord will purify our hearts so we may see him more clearly. May our prayer be that God will give us his pure and authentic heart.