Blessedness and Woe, Reprise

Blessedness and Woe, Reprise

Blessed are you…; and woe to you…

If there is an overriding lesson in the Beatitudes, found in Matthew 5, and in the Blessings and Woes, found in Luke 6, it is that life is full of blessings. And life is full of woes, at least from an emotional point of view. Our emotions and our experiences of pleasure and pain cycle back and forth between desirable and undesirable like the swinging of a pendulum. It is their nature to oscillate, and to the extent we overly identify with them at either extreme, our experience of life oscillates, too.

There is a delicate balance between allowing ourselves to grow attached to the people and objects in our lives and remaining emotionally detached from them. If we allow ourselves to become vulnerable in ways that cause us to depend on others for our happiness, we can experience unfathomably pleasant emotions. Because we know our emotions oscillate, however, we also know we will experience unfathomably unpleasant emotions, too. If we refuse to become attached and vulnerable to the people and objects in our lives we may protect ourselves emotionally, but we risk becoming so emotionally detached from reality that we become little more than breathing zombies.

What does it mean to be overly attached to someone or something? I think it means wanting to hold something just as it is for as long as it is pleasurable to us. And that is impossible because everything and everyone on earth is constantly changing, and if they are not changing they are dead. When we have a great evening with someone we love, our natural tendency is to want the emotional high of that evening to last into the future. But it cannot – we must go to work or mow the grass or take our children to ball practice or any of the ten-thousand mundane but important tasks that make up our daily lives. When we get back to our romantic evening, things will have irreversibly evolved – sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse when compared with our memory of the original evening.

The key to enjoying life’s countless blessings without becoming overly attached to them is both living into and fully enjoying each moment for exactly what it is without expecting it to remain so. We kill what we do not allow to evolve. And this is exactly what the Beatitudes and the Blessings and Woes tell us. When we are meek or poor in spirit or pure in heart we are not trying to force people or circumstances into something they are not. Rather, we are accepting them for what they are in the moment. It is like eating an excellent meal. We can enjoy it in the moment we eat it without expecting it to last forever or to be exactly the same 6 hours from now when we are hungry again.

Each experience, when entered into fully and with conscious, intentional awareness, is an inseparable part of every other experience leading up to it and everything following it, so it has no boundaries in time. Our entire lives, including the “time” before we were born and after we die, is a single experience. Of course, our experience of time is unique to our days on earth so to talk about past or future times is only relevant to our earthly lives. We may want to either hold onto certain experiences or erase them quickly because of the emotions they trigger, but that is neither possible nor desirable since all experiences are interconnected. We enter the kingdom of heaven, we see God, we become children of God by being present to the totality of our experiences without regard to the momentary feelings triggered by them. They are each an inseparable part of a larger whole that is what Jesus called the kingdom of God.

And not only are our lives an unbroken continuum of past, present, and future, but we are part of an unbroken continuum of life with all other living beings. This is why Jesus told us to turn the other cheek and to love both our neighbors and enemies – to hate or to respond to another in anger is to attempt to harm a part of the life that we exist within. In other words, wishing harm on another is ultimately self-destructive. Blessed are we when we love and care for others because, in truth, we are at the same time acting in our own best interest. Who would’ve guessed that?

Notice: I am entering the chaotic but liminal space of moving from my home of 34 years to a new home. I will begin my new series Life Notes, titled The Perplexities of Consciousness next, but I may fill some of the coming weeks with previous Life Notes when I do not have the bandwidth to write something new. I anticipate being back on a regular weekly schedule with the new series by mid-September.

This is the 24^th in a series titled Blessedness and Woe.Life Notes are my explorations into mysteries that interest me. They are invitations for readers to explore more deeply into life’s mysteries. Engage with me or explore contemplative spiritual direction at ghildenbrand@outlook.com.