Postmortem 24

Dichosos los de corazón limpio, porque ellos verán a Dios.

or

in English

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

It's again that divine order of Beatitudes:  Poverty of spirit, then weeping, then a hunger and thirst for justice, followed by humility and then compassion.  Well, yes, those qualities and experiences in that kind of order, create the clean heart, the pure heart, and then we see God.  It's a process.

When I arrived in Colombia, I was exhausted from poor sleep on an overnight flight to Toronto, followed by nine sleepless hours in the Toronto Pearson Airport while waiting for my connecting flight to Bogotá.  I was able to sleep more on the plane.  But when I arrived and Alonso took me back to his apartment, I was feeling pretty tired and vulnerable.  As a guest in a foreign country in the home of a new friend, I was experiencing real poverty of spirit.  And that was how it began.

Arriving in Bogotá three days later in my friend's car for the first time in four years was a real shocker.  I had not before really appreciated the huge economic disparity and inequality in Colombia.  It isn't that I hadn't seen it before, after two one month visits there in 2015 and 2016.  But somehow, it was so in my face this time.  I must this time have been more ready to see it, to experience it, to live the pain of the huge social injustice that is Bogotá.  Feeling thoroughly dependent on someone else for my well-being made me ready to be impacted by the pain of the two fathers begging between cars stopping for a red light with their very young children in their arms.  And this continued for me throughout my three weeks spent in Colombia.

The mourning followed very quickly, this very shared and very communal experience of our own very human wretchedness, along with a hunger and thirst for justice for the poor and marginalized, then a sense of humility because I could only appreciate my smallness and my own lack of ability to do one single thing in order to help, short of giving what little money I could spare and a smile..  And compassion.  Always compassion.  When we know that we are in this together, we are feeling this together, that we are this together, then we no longer walk alone. We never have walked alone. And that is the birthplace of compassion.

So, how does this make me clean, or pure of heart?  If I am pure of heart, I can only imagine that it comes from the trauma of God first tearing my heart open.  of God giving me a new heart, a beating heart of flesh that is ready to be wounded for the very love of our poor, miserable and wounded humanity. And it is through this very wounded, beating and very  human heart that we come into direct contact with the living God, it is with this heart vulnerable with love that we come to see God. hanging nailed to a cross, the blood flowing from his wounds as he exhales his very last breath, a breath of love for all of us. That is purity of heart.  And that becomes our vision of God.