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Q & A
Q&A: Turn Christ’s blessings into daily action Bill Fentum, Oct 2, 2009
The Rev. Anne Howard
The Beatitudes Society, founded in 2005, helps seminary students devote themselves to social justice. Students from 20 schools across the country receive scholarships and serve as interns with Bread for the World, Sojourners and the Children’s Defense Fund.
The society’s executive director, the Rev. Anne Sutherland Howard, profiles nine of those students in Claiming the Beatitudes, published by The Alban Institute. Each of them draws strength from one of the nine declarations in the Sermon on the Mount.
Ms. Howard, an Episcopal priest in Santa Barbara, Calif., spoke recently with staff writer Bill Fentum.
Jeremy Scott at Methodist School of Theology in Ohio says the eighth beatitude, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for justice’s sake,” compels him to advocate against modern-day slavery. Why can’t more of us abandon our comfort zones for social justice work, the way he does? It’s all about fear. Fear binds us to our habits, but what Jesus asked of us is the most radical kind of love. What he asked 2,000 years ago and now is the courage to love in ways that may change us. Change is terrifying, for all of us. We like things just the way they are. Many people would rather complain about the state of the world than try to change it. We don’t know what reform may look like, so it’s easier to be unhappy with what we have. As human beings, we create a homeostasis to maintain stability, and we don’t want to be jarred out of that.
Another student in the book worries that he isn’t “radical enough to be persecuted.” Don’t most of us share that doubt? Of course, and I love the way he puts it. We do what we think we can manage in our churches, like collecting soup cans for food pantries. I don’t mean to condemn that; it’s work that must be done because people are hungry. But the beatitudes ask us to wonder, “Why is that person hungry? How can they make a living wage so they can buy soup on their own? How did that person get pushed to the margins?” That’s what social justice is, it calls us to have the courage to make change in the world, because it isn’t enough to simply do charity. Jesus asks us to push through, to be champions of those in need.
In the chapter on the fifth beatitude—“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy”—you note that even Jesus almost failed to be merciful in Matthew 15, when the Canaanite woman asked him to heal her daughter. Is this the trickiest of all the beatitudes? That’s a good question. All of the beatitudes are a little bit puzzling. Jesus used wisdom sayings and parables in ways that invite us to ask more questions about the way we live. And sure, the fifth beatitude is tricky. April Blaine, the student in that chapter, says it was easy for her to be merciful, to show compassion for others, until she had to forgive a senior colleague who had treated her unfairly. He had not been merciful to her. But to live out the beatitude, she had to give mercy to him. That’s difficult.
We expect natural fairness in life, based on rational notions of justice: If you extend mercy, you receive mercy; if you work 10 hours, you get paid for 10 hours. But God’s sense of equality and justice could be very different, so that a person who might seem unworthy to us, is completely worthy in God’s eyes. I don’t think we know how God judges.
Purity of heart, Jesus says in the sixth beatitude, will lead us to see God. That journey isn’t easy, you warn. No. It’s about being willing to go where it’s hard to go, to look where it’s hard to look, because that’s where we see God. That’s what Mary Emily, a student at Yale Divinity School, discovered when she took care of Blake, a little boy with severe Down syndrome. It’s much easier to spend a day with a child who can always interact with you than a child who isn’t—on the face of it—so rewarding. But she saw a goodness in Blake’s simple desire to engage the world and that led her to a view of God. It wasn’t something she could anticipate, and it had nothing to do with using her own skills as a worker in the God’s kingdom.
It’s like the process of finding Easter in a “Good Friday world,” that another student talks about in the book. We find resurrection and redemption in places of suffering. Be open to the faces you would prefer not to look into: the leper’s face, the outcast’s face. That’s where God is.
You say it took decades for you to understand that peacemaking isn’t only about ending war. Can you explain? I worked for an interfaith nuclear disarmament group in my 20s, when the Cold War was heating up with a massive weapons buildup here and in Russia. I wanted to be a peacemaker, and to me that meant we were going to end the arms race and create a brand-new world, all in time for Christmas! But I have since learned, and I’m still learning, that the way to peace is often much slower than we want. Peacemaking isn’t just about stopping a weapons system or a war. It is about creating a world of justice and a situation where peace can exist. We can’t put up walls to prevent weapons from being fired, but we can figure out ways for people to live in Shalom. We can work for the well-being of people, and that means giving them clean water and adequate resources or starting schools for young girls in Pakistan. That’s how we make peace; we build schools.
So living out the seventh beatitude—“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God”—isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. Sometimes we’re called to protest against war, or it can mean working for sustainable agriculture, like a Mennonite student that I tell about in the book. He’s making peace with creation, finding ways for us to live within our limits on this fragile planet. You finish your morning prayers by praying the beatitudes. Why? It’s just a way to keep them in my mind. The time I spend in prayer is my favorite time each morning, and I always have a cup of coffee in my hand; so my addiction is right in there, too! I pray the Psalms, chanting them out loud to center myself. I pray for the things for which I’m thankful, and I pray about the challenges ahead in the day. I use an Anglican rosary to feel each bead as I pray for everyone in my family and the people I know who have needs. I have beads not only for people, but also the big issues—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, health care—and that helps me to not worry about those things quite so much because I figure it really isn’t in my hands. Prayer is a great reminder that we’re not in charge, that someone indeed hears our prayers.
One of the students in the book prays to keep alive the relationship between his activism and contemplation. Is that true for you as well? Yes, and that’s actually the subject of my next book if I get time to write it. It’s been three years since I left my parish to lead the Beatitudes Society, and the job has left me more convinced than ever of the great need for contemplative prayer in our lives. It sustains the work we do and it helps us to build faithful relationships and compassionate communities. I thought about that a lot this summer, watching the news and seeing so many angry people at the town hall meetings on health care. I certainly understand some of the reasons for that tension, because people are indeed frightened by losses of jobs, homes, retirement income and health care. But I see people react with anger that is really quite chilling, and it worries me that the level of violence in our country can be so quickly inflamed. What we need, I think, is for people of faith to be mindful of practices like prayer and meditation that move us more deeply into compassion.
In the last chapter you remind us that being different from the world is not the same as claiming the beatitudes. No, it’s not enough to simply remove ourselves from all places of trial and temptation. We’re called to go into the places that are dark, the places that aren’t pure. We’re called to get our hands dirty and to try to be people of light. William Blake said, “And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love.” I can’t hoard a sense of private well-being and hide away in a corner, knowing that I’ve been saved by my personal Savior Jesus. God seeks the salvation of the whole world, and we are to be in the world, doing that work.
The Rev. Anne Howard
In the chapter on the fifth beatitude—“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy”—you note that even Jesus almost failed to be merciful in Matthew 15, when the Canaanite woman asked him to heal her daughter. Is this the trickiest of all the beatitudes? 
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