Blessings and curses

Our heart is the throne of God and our happiness, our fulfilment in life, depends on who sits on that throne. Happiness is something we all long for. But we all, some time or other, experience disillusionment with those very things we think might make us look blessed or lucky.

There are people who have a thousand and one reasons in life to be happy and are not; and there are others who have a thousand and one reasons to despair, and are not desperate. Because at the end of the day, life's meaning does not depend on what you have. At times we are really possessed by our possessions. And that is enslavement.

This is the meaning of what Luke, in his version of the Beatitudes, is saying in today's Gospel. It is also what we read, in other words, from Jeremiah in the first reading where the prophet speaks of two categories of people: those who put their trust in man, and those who put their trust in the Lord. Blessings and curses in life are many a time the consequences of the choices we make. It's not always like that. But then that's why life remains a mystery.

The Gospel today traces for us a roadmap. God knows our future. Consulting the map, we can have an overview of where we are heading. But if we ignore the roadmap and proceed according to what can merely be our restricted standpoint, then our viewpoint will be restricted also. The outcome will be: we may be having our consolation now; we may be having our fill now; we may be laughing now; the world around us may be speaking highly of us now. But it's all focussed on the 'now'. And as Paul warns us today in the second reading: "If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of all people".

In our understanding of the world and society, we have fixed in our minds the great divides, between classes of people, and between different strata of society. But for God the great divide is not fixed, it is not between North and South, or between the rich and the poor. It is a divide that is very fluid, it depends on choices people make, on viewpoints people have on life. There was a time when what made life meaningful was belief in afterlife, believing that life never ends. Today we want to find meaning in the here and now of life. Happiness is something to be fully achieved here.

But everything we experience here is provisional. The securities we create for ourselves result ultimately as merely lifeboats that help us escape from our sinking Titanics. And a lifeboat can never be firm ground or sufficiently safe. Yet, we all some time or other fall captive to collective lies.

Christ in today's Gospel is not exalting poverty and demonising richness just for the sake of doing it. Today's readings in no way are conveying the message that for the simple fact that you are rich you are doomed, or that for the simple fact that you are poor you are blessed. As St Irenaeus says, God's glory is that man lives. The whole issue is about what makes us live fully.

Christ became man to show us how not to remain captive to whatever is provisional. His resurrection is not just a promise, a pie in the sky. We can experience his victory in our daily dying and in whatever instils fear in us. Insecurity today invades our seemingly secure life-styles. The greater this feeling of insecurity, the greater significance assume the wise words of Augustine that "our heart was created for You, O Lord, and will be restless until it rests in You".