Blue Eyed Ennis: Those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness

Those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness

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The only thing left to do sometimes is to pray that what justice can’t repair, love will. — Paula Huston.

Nice "down to earth "reflections here from Contemplative Dialogue

on what that mighty word righteousness means.

Righteousness - It's a word I hardly ever use in ordinary conversation except when I rebuke myself or others,
(nearly always politicians) for being self-righteous-

The peacock standing proud is the image here !

Thinking of the type of righteousness that might be relevant:

How many of us would even consider going on Hunger Strike for a cause we believed passionately in ?

Then there is the righteousness of living in a way that does no harm!!

those who hunger for righteousness Pictures, Images and Photos

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The kind of righteousness in the beatitudes is nothing to do with wanting to experience some kind of short lived and unsustainable spiritual high.

It may be a thirst and hunger to transform our language of desire from the want of a consumer, trapped in the seductions of the marketplace to one that embraces the sacred life giving space of the Kingdom of God.

It is marked by poverty of spirit, grief over personal failings, outrage over personal and global social injustices, abuse of human rights global environmental degardation and a meekness that we have to admit we cannot always be brave enough or capable enough to fight and that often if we do we will fail.

Physical and spiritual appetites are normal to healthy human beings.

Yet neither the body nor the soul is self-sustaining.

Both must be fed regularly.

Just as physical hunger is a sign of physical health, so the insatiable spiritual longing and hunger for God's word to prevail is a sign of spiritual health.

The dry periods, when we no longer feel spiritual but resolve to continue to try and live the Christian life may paradoxically be the moments of greatest spiritual strength.

Dissatisfaction has an important place in our soul and this beatitude reminds us to cultivate it.

Ultimately it is dissatisfaction that helps us set our sights on God and heaven. The fact is that we have a dissatisfaction, a thirst that is so deep that this world can’t even come close to quenching it. Our thirst is infinite but the world is finite.

Jesus met a woman from Samaria at a well. She came because she was thirsty. But the Lord taught her, and us, “Everyone who drinks from this well will be thirsty again“ .The well is this world which can never satisfy us for long. How could a finite world quench an infinite longing? Of course we are dissatisfied. A puny little universe can never hope to fill a God-sized hole in our hearts.

Jesus goes on to teach her and us, “But whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst and the water I shall give will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life”

God knows the real us. He sees the mixed impure motives behind some of what we do.

He also sees the longing for righteousness behind it all and in that longing for righteousness He pronounces the longing blessed and promises that it shall be satisfied.

But we need to find sacred space in this increasingly secular world to feel our thirst, to listen to our dissatisfaction and not suppress them.

We need to cultivate them and let them speak: “I hunger, I thirst, I long.” This beatitude tells me the fuller meaning of these basic sensual urges. So what these basic desires are actually saying, “ It’s not really about sex, or popularity, or a new car, computer or some creature comfort. It’s God….

It is a great comfort to know that God meets us at the point of our aspiration, not our achievement. He is more concerned with intention than success. Few of us will be spiritual giants in our lives but we can still stand on the shoulders of those who continue to show us the way.

Someone once suggested that the Beatitudes should be put in the London Underground as a poster. It is a sad fact that we cannot even do this these days because it may "offend" others. But it is comforting to know that no matter how far short we fall from perfect righteousness, God will reward our hunger and thirst.

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled." Maybe not in this world but someday, somewhere !!

Links to more reflections below

Nice one here "The beatitudes in my own words"

Nice article here on the difference betwen self -righteousness and God's righteousness

and another one here that has this great phrase " Beatitudes are not Platitudes ."

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More from Seamus Heaney

“History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime,
The longest-for tidal wave of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge
Believe in miracles....”

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.” ―

“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.”

and five more......

On his inspiration: 'The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis”

On which animal he'd prefer to be: "I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks."

On fame: "The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. The prizes can’t help you at all.”

On becoming a poet: "My quest for precision and definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of a landscape and a language that I was born with. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading."

On authority "At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

Easter Hope All Year Round

Celestial spirit that doth roll
The heart's sepulchral stone away,
Be this our resurrection day,
The singing Easter of the soul -
O gentle Master of the Wise,
Teach us to say: "I will arise." ~
Richard Le Gallienne

"The great gift of Easter is hope - Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake."
-- Basil C. Hume

Celtic Christianity may offer us a lifeline in the form of an approach to faith which is rooted in the imagination...[Celts] excelled at expressing their faith in symbols, metaphors and images, both visual and poetic.
They had the ability to invest the ordinary and commonplace with sacramental significance, to find glimpses of God’s glory throughout creation and to paint pictures in words, signs and music that acted as icons opening windows on heaven and pathways to eternity
Ian Bradley The Celtic Way

Favourite Quotes from Pope Francis

“Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.

This offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’ … However the risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever.”

-- Pope Francis

Carlo Caretto's Love Letter to His Church

How much I much criticise you my church and yet how much I love you !

You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe you more than I owe anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.

You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in the world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful.

Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your arms!

No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you.
Then too – where should I go? To build another church?

But I cannot build another church without the same defects, for they are my own defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ’s church. No, I am old enough. I know better!"

Did the Woman Say ?

Great Quotes

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

Mary Oliver

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person."

~Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms, 1989

“And

"
"You can get all A's and still flunk life."

"Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive."

Walker Percy

"The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”

A tough life needs a tough language-and that's what poetry is. That's what literature offers- a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”

- C.S. Lewis

The independent hearts of Celtic descendents everywhere still yearn for the solitary place, still rejoice in the goodness of creation, still see the Lord beside them as they walk, still see Him in the face of friend and stranger. The gospel light with its eastern fire still gleams. The truth still lingers in the heart.
Pat Robson – The Celtic Heart

People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help?

They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world."

-- James Hillman

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government only when it deserves it.
--Mark Twain

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice: - we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-- George Orwell

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience or convictions.
--Dag Hammarskjöld

If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

For what are we, without hope in our hearts, that someday we'll drink from God's blessed waters?"
-Bruce Springsteen

"Sometimes grace works like waterwings when you feel you are sinking."
-Anne Lamott

"A prayer may be a wordless inner longing, a sudden outpouring of love, a yearning within the soul to be for a moment united within the infinite and the good, a humbleness that needs no abasement or speech to express it, a cry in the darkness for help when all seems lost, a song, a poem, a kind deed, a reaching for beauty, or the strong, quiet inner reaffirmation of faith. A prayer in fact can be anything that is created by God that turns to God."

Paul Gallico

"God does not die when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjold

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

― Paul Hawken

The greatest religious challenge of our age is to hold together social action and spiritual disciplines. This is not just a theological necessity, dictated by the need to integrate all of life around the reality of the living God. It is a matter of sheer survival. The evils we confront are so massive, so inhuman, so impervious to appeals and dead to compassion, that those who struggle against them face the real possibility of being overwhelmed by them.”

~ Theologian Walter Wink

One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours?
I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

~ Khalil Gibran

Blue Eyed Ennis

Those who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness

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