Reflection

People ask why I’m so obsessed with the Sermon on the Mount. I answer, “Everyone is obsessed with something. Why not let it be something beautiful and timeless?

Timeless it is, and beautiful. It would be hard to find something so profoundly and exquisitely expressed as The Beatitudes. Let is talk today about the timeless nature of those wondrous thoughts, and others from that famous sermon.

General Omar Bradley expressed it this way after being exposed to the horrors of World War Two: “We have too many men of science; too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the message of the Sermon on the Mount. Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

We would move to question his seemingly unfair comparison to “men of God,” and “men of science,” unless we considered the general’s temporal setting. He was speaking in an age in which true people of God sought love and grace, while people of science created the atomic bomb. What would he have thought of the so-called “religious leaders” of today who stand on piles of cash conned from gullible victims or well-funded political platforms and preach an anti-education message designed to inflame and separate the masses and make us discriminate against our LGBT brothers and sisters? Perhaps he would have cautioned, as did the Galilean, “For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:20 (KJV)

One of the main themes of the sermon is, to me, the need for reflection, in this case the need to reflect on how to achieve righteousness. The timeless nature of the sermon, again in my opinion, is that we so badly need to stop and reflect on the gains in science. This would include the need to reflect on how science and technology could lead us to a more benign treatment of those around us, others in the world, and our planet. We seem in a headlong rush to utilize the miracles of science to demean and divide ourselves from one another. Surely, we could conceive better use of the Internet if we took time to contemplate, truly contemplate, the miracles it offers.

John Steinbeck had a similar thought in one of his reflective observations in his marvelous work Travels With Charlie, published in 1962 and documenting a 1960 road trip around the United States. He noted, "The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world."

George Orwell had his protagonist in 1984, Winston Smith, feel the pure joy of reflection, prohibited in his time,  in this manner:

“Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity.”

Seems a worthwhile endeavor to me, to satisfy our need for reflection. Didn’t the Galilean himself say, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:  For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. 7:7-8 (KJV)

Maybe it would make him happy if, just for today, if Americans ask more and speak less.

Artwork by my friend Lisa Casey