Blessed are the Poor

When under a tyranny there is a constant unarticulated threat that hovers about the locus of power. It threatens those under it a certain death or alienation. It plays off the deeply felt ontological reality of social beings having been severed from their original creative source. The Myth of the Creation of humans is that an Infinite person casted his image. The human in this interpretation is nothing in his or her self except in relation. Being and substance are not independent of relationship. “Human nature” is a commitment to stand alone from any source, in contradiction of the social nature of the self. This might be called idolatry, for idolatry is the treating as real the image of the real.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.

To be in solitude is to be in a state of poverty, for to be in solitude is to confront human nature and admit the social need. To be poor is to not have any thing to cover the naked state of our being. Poverty is not the absence of money, but the absence of fear because in poverty the worst has been admitted. And often the deepest fear in a heart is the fear that we do not meet our greatest fantasy: that We are therefore we are. To give worship is to admit “You are therefore I am” Tyranny is anything that keeps us from this statement. It controls us with shame of our nakedness (though that is how we were originally created) and fear of that revelation.

The fear of God is different than the fear of a tyrant. Our need drives us to fear one or the other, but the consequence of that fear is very different. In one we are clothed and in the other we are raped. Yet It is the fear of a tyrant that can become comfortable and familiar. A tyrant can take many forms. It can be a mother, or money, or fashion, or boyfriend, or ideas or anything that is used to prevent the sense of urgent dread. In turn for its powerful anesthetic it demands your life, for it blocks the dark entrance to the deep waters of your washing. Tyrants are the riches that keep you from giving worth to that which is beyond you that you are vulnerable to and have no power over and whose being is love.

Thus the poor are blessed because they stare into the door to the inperceivable depths of the kingdom of heaven. They have nothing to keep them from starring their greatest longing in the face and watching it come true. Those under tyranny can not bear longing because they know they keep themselves from being clothed in the actualizing of that longing.