Rooted in the Christian contemplative traditions, the Daily Meditations offer reflections from Richard Rohr, CAC faculty and guest teachers to help you deepen your spiritual practice and embody compassion in the world.
The Beatitudes: Week Two
Saturday 18 July 2026 Week Twenty-Eight Summary The Beatitudes: Week Two
Sunday
The Beatitudes are paradoxical “commandments.” They don’t tell Christians what to do; they tell them what they will be like if they are living in the kingdom: They will be poor in spirit, pure in heart, merciful and gentle peacemakers; they will thirst for what is right and be persecuted because of it, and they will mourn.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
By “the merciful” Jesus means those who have an attitude of such compassion toward all [people] that they want to share gladly all that they have with one another and with the world.
—Clarence Jordan
Tuesday
Jesus knows that no human being has a perfectly clean (pure) heart. But in his wisdom, he’s asking, “Are you willing to show up? Are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to clean up your mess?” To answer yes to these questions is to commit to the path.
—Carl McColman
Wednesday
Peacemakers don’t avoid conflict; in fact, sometimes peacemaking creates it. We see this with Jesus.
—Rich Villodas
Thursday
To live joyfully in the midst of misunderstanding and persecution points beyond our smaller “kingdoms” to the larger kingdom of God.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
Maybe Jesus was simply blessing the ones around him that day who didn’t otherwise receive blessing, who had come to believe that, for them, blessings would never be in the cards. Doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do?
—Nadia Bolz-Weber
Week Twenty-Eight Practice
Practicing the Beatitudes
Peace activist and Orthodox Christian Jim Forest (1941–2022) urges Christians to take seriously Jesus’s exhortation to stay close to those who suffer:
In many bookshops this book [on the Beatitudes] will be placed in the section labeled “spirituality,” a good word that means living in the Holy Spirit. These days, though, it often suggests that by adopting the right method of prayer or meditation you will be lifted above the world, its distracting problems and hopeless suffering and enter into the bliss of God (or Buddha or a Hindu deity). Christian spirituality has nothing to do with losing contact with those who suffer.
A Christian is obliged to see and respond to the real world with all its fear, pain, and bloodstains, to be a rescuer, to protect the defenseless, to participate in the here and now in God’s righteousness. [1]
Forest offers reflection questions about how we are practicing the Beatitudes:
In the Orthodox church, reflection on the beatitudes is often recommended as a way of preparing for confession and communion. Such reflection provides a framework for an examination of conscience about steps not yet taken in our effort to follow Christ:
Do I embrace poverty of spirit—or flee from it at the speed of light?
For whom have I been in mourning?
How meek am I in my response to the gospels?
In what ways am I hungry for righteousness?
How merciful am I regarding those who in some way have done me harm?
How pure is my heart and what keeps it so impure?
In what ways am I trying to purify my heart?
What are the divisions that intersect my life and in what ways am I responding to these divisions as a peacemaker?
What enemies do I love? For which enemies am I praying?
Whose threatened life am I trying to safeguard?
Do I accept persecution as a blessing—or do I avoid anything that might get me into trouble? [2]
[1] Jim Forest, The Ladder of the Beatitudes (Orbis Books, 1999), 69.
[2] Forest, Ladder, 142.
Friday 17 July 2026 It’s Not a Matter of Working Harder
The Lutheran priest and author Nadia Bolz-Weber questions how we might follow the Beatitudes:
It can be easy to view the Beatitudes … as Jesus’s command for us to try real hard to be meeker, poorer, and mourn-ier in order that we might be blessed in the eyes of God…. But what if the Beatitudes aren’t about a list of conditions we should try to meet to be blessed? What if they are not virtues we should aspire to?… Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’s lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside … who that world—like ours—didn’t seem to have much time for: people in pain, people who work for peace instead of profit, people who exercise mercy instead of vengeance.
Maybe Jesus was simply blessing the ones around him that day who didn’t otherwise receive blessing, who had come to believe that, for them, blessings would never be in the cards…. Doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do?
Bolz-Weber offers her own version of beatitudes for people who may not feel blessed today:
Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction.
Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones, for whom tears could fill an ocean.
Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like.
Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried.
Blessed are they who don’t have the luxury of taking things for granted anymore.
Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else.
Blessed are the motherless, the alone, the ones from whom so much has been taken….
Blessed are those who no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. The laundry guys at the hospital. The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers.
Blessed are the losers and the babies and the parts of ourselves that are so small, the parts of ourselves that don’t want to make eye contact with a world that loves only the winners.
Blessed are the forgotten.
Blessed are the closeted.
Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the underrepresented….
I imagine Jesus standing there blessing us all because I believe that is our Lord’s nature. Because, after all, it was Jesus who had all the powers of the universe at his disposal but did not consider his equality with God something to be exploited. Instead, he came to us in the most vulnerable of ways, as a powerless, flesh-and-blood newborn. As if to say, “You may hate your bodies, but I am blessing all human flesh. You may admire strength and might, but I am blessing all human weakness. You may seek power, but I am blessing all human vulnerability.”… [Jesus] was God’s Beatitude—God’s blessing to the weak in a world that admires only the strong.
Nadia Bolz Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (Convergent Books, 2015), 184, 185–186, 188.
Thursday 16 July 2026 Rejoice in Persecution?
Blessed are those who are persecuted in the cause of justice, the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you.… Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.
—Matthew 5:10–12
Father Richard considers how this beatitude challenges Jesus’s listeners to prepare for the consequences of following him:
Up until now Jesus has been talking generally, saying “Blessed are the poor, meek, merciful,” and so on. But following this beatitude he says, “Blessed are you when people revile and persecute you.” He’s likely talking about what’s going on right in front of him. He continues teaching what could really be called the ninth beatitude, although it more likely is an explanation of the eighth. Persecution has begun to happen to the believing community, and he’s encouraging them to “rejoice and be glad.” Persecution for the cause of justice is inevitable. Instead of seeking to blame someone for their well-earned scars, he is telling them two clear things: You can be happy—and you can be happy now! The self that Jesus proclaims is so grounded that it can consider persecution an asset.
Jesus appears to be saying that the disciples’ response is a prophetic action itself. To live joyfully in the midst of misunderstanding and persecution points beyond our smaller “kingdoms” to the larger kingdom of God. Jesus promises us that when we live joyfully under persecution, the world won’t understand. In fact, it will hate us. Many before me have said that a clear sign that something is the true gospel is if it engenders criticism and a spreading of falsehoods, what we used to call “calumny.” Goodness can never be attacked directly; the messengers or the motivation must be discredited.
Luke’s Gospel presents the same message in the opposite form: “Alas for you when the world speaks well of you! This was the way their ancestors treated the false prophets” (Luke 6:26 emphases added). Too much praise or widespread acceptance is probably an indication that something is not the full gospel. In either case, Jesus clearly knew that his teaching would turn conventional values on their head.
Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is not about maintaining the status quo. “Bad” people didn’t kill Jesus; conventional wisdom crucified him. Jesus taught an alternative way of being instead of the maintenance of the social order. When we can weep, when we can identify with the humble ones, when we can make peace, when we can be persecuted and still be joyful—then we are doing it right. The Beatitudes are describing what holiness looks like in the kingdom of God.
Story From Our Community
When I think about how many changes my life has gone through, I am amazed at the resilience of the human body and spirit. I am amazed at the way we are tied together by fate and fortune. We are one.
—Tom B.
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 150–151, 152.
Wednesday 15 July 2026 Peacemaking Is Not Keeping the Peace
Blessed are the peacemakers: they shall be recognized as children of God.—Matthew 5:9
This beatitude places Jesus in a lineage of peacemakers who reject the false promises of violence. Father Richard writes:
This beatitude in Matthew’s Gospel is the only time the word peacemakers is used in the whole Bible. Peacemakers literally are the “ones who reconcile quarrels.” We can clearly see Jesus is not on the side of the violent but on the side of the nonviolent. Jesus is saying there must be a connection, a clear consistency, a constant unity between means and ends. There is no way to peace other than peacemaking itself.
To this day, many think we can achieve peace through violence. We’ve all witnessed actions coming from the logic “We’ll stop killing by killing.” It’s a common way to think, even though it’s in opposition to all great religious teachings. Our desire for immediate control leads us to disconnect the clear unity between means and ends. The peace we are “keeping” is a false peace. Jeremiah the prophet would say about our “peacekeeping” wars what he said to Israel’s leaders:
“Peace! Peace!” they say, whereas there is no peace.
They should be ashamed of their loathsome deeds.
Not they! They feel no shame, they do not even know how to blush.
—Jeremiah 8:11–12
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus defines peace in a different way, what we call Pax Christi, the peace of Christ. The Pax Romana creates a false peace by sacrificing others; the Pax Christi waits and works for true peace by sacrificing the false self of power, prestige, and possessions. [1]
The pastor Rich Villodas makes a distinction between peacemaking and peacekeeping:
Peacemakers are those who work for right relationships at the expense of their comfort. We don’t usually choose this route, nor do we understand what it really means. Jesus does not say, “Blessed are the peacekeepers.” [But] what’s the difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking?…
Peacekeeping tries not to rock the boat, avoids conflicts, and is superficial. It ensures that no one gets upset. That’s not real peace. When, out of fear, we avoid conflict and appease people, we are false peacemakers….
Here’s the thing with peacekeeping: sooner or later, it brings chaos—not peace—into your life. Peacemaking is quite different. Peacemakers don’t avoid conflict; in fact, sometimes peacemaking creates it. We see this with Jesus. As the epitome of love, he wasn’t always nice—at least not in the way modern people visualize niceness….
He burst into the temple and flipped over tables because poor, vulnerable people were being taken advantage of (see Matthew 21:12). When he saw the Pharisees putting yokes of religious condemnation on people, he confronted the religious leaders with harsh words. As Jesus’s life reveals, peacemaking is often met with resistance. [2]
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 148–149.
[2] Rich Villodas, The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls (Waterbrook, 2024), 28–30.
Tuesday 14 July 2026 What Is Purity of Heart?
Blessed are the pure in heart: they shall see God.
—Matthew 5:8
Richard Rohr explores Jesus’s metaphor, connecting the eyes and the heart:
In this beatitude, Jesus is saying, “When the heart is right, seeing will be right.” He ties together heart and sight. We might have heard the saying, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”—so is God. All we need to do is keep the lens clean and the heart pure. If our heart is cold, our vision is distorted. If we hold coldness and unforgiveness, the desire to do violence with words or actions, or avert our loving gaze so that another will feel our rejection, we will not be able to see clearly. Our heart is not pure. Jesus calls us to purity of heart with the promise that correct seeing will follow. [1]
The author and spiritual director Carl McColman reflects on what Jesus might have meant by “purity of heart,” calling it “the beatitude that points toward the goal of every restless heart—to see God”:
Over the centuries, purity has been used for religious and political control. It can be a dangerous concept—used to justify genocide like the Shoah (Holocaust) as well as a code word for controlling people’s sexual behavior. But the word Jesus uses—the Greek word katharoi— carries a different meaning. Katharoi is a root of the word catharsis. Catharsis, in the annals of Western mysticism, is the necessary first step on the journey toward union with God. Here pure not only suggests a freedom from contaminating elements; it also could simply be rendered as clean. We might rephrase the beatitude as “Blessed is a free and cleansed heart, for it shall see God.”
“Seeing God” doesn’t happen automatically. The God of love is gentle and not willing to force the divine presence on those who just don’t want it. Most of us are a paradox: we want it, and we don’t want it. We have mixed hearts, hearts that know the only true rest is in God but nevertheless remain invested in all sorts of other pleasures—some perfectly benign and others not so good. With this reality in mind, it’s important to read Jesus’s beatitude as a challenge as well as an invitation—not as an accusation or a shaming.
Jesus knows that no human being has a perfectly clean (pure) heart. But in his wisdom, he’s asking, “Are you willing to show up? Are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to clean up your mess?” To answer yes to these questions is to commit to the path…. There’s the cleansing right there. Are we willing to begin to let go of gratuitous cynicism, nursed resentments, dispiriting bitterness, and the kind of negativity that leaches away our energy and gives us nothing in return? Letting go of those kinds of afflictive thoughts launches us on the journey of catharsis, of inner cleansing, that prepares us to receive the presence of the One who is already there. [2]
Story From Our Community
Thank you Brian McLaren for reminding us that God’s blessings are open to all. We are in this salvation train together. We are many parts, but we are all one body of hope, love, faith, and salvation. We are all God’s favorites because God could not possibly be a God of only a few favorites. Blessed be God!
—David S.
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 147–148.
[2] Carl McColman, Eternal Heart: The Mystical Path to a Joyful Life (Broadleaf Books, 2021), 27–29.
Monday 13 July 2026 Mercy Endures Forever
Blessed are the merciful: They shall have mercy shown them.
—Matthew 5:7
Father Richard teaches that mercy is the essence of who God is:
Mercy is like the mystery of forgiveness. By definition, mercy and forgiveness are unearned, undeserved, and not owed. If it isn’t all those three, it won’t be experienced as mercy. If we think mercy is mandatory, or that it must be earned, we lose the mystery of both mercy and forgiveness. I believe with all my heart that mercy and forgiveness are the whole gospel.
The experience of forgiveness or mercy is the experience of a magnanimous God who loves out of total gratuitousness. There’s no tit for tat with God, no buying or selling in the temple. We cannot buy or sell God’s love by worthiness or achievement. Salvation is God’s lovingkindness, a lovingkindness that is “forever.” Read Psalm 136 for an ecstatic description.
More than a description of something God does now and then, mercy is who God is. According to Jesus, “Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13; 12:7). The word mercy is hesed in Hebrew: “the steadfast, enduring love which is unbreakable.” Sometimes the word is translated as “lovingkindness” or “covenant love.” God has made a covenant with creation and will never break the divine side of the covenant. It’s only broken from our side. God’s love is steadfast. It is written in the divine image within us. We are the ones who instead clutch at our sins and punish ourselves instead of surrendering to the divine mercy. The refusal to be forgiven is a form of pride. It is saying, “I’m better than mercy. I’m only going to accept it when I’m worthy and can preserve my so-called self-esteem.” Only the humble person can live in and after mercy. [1]
Clarence Jordan (1912–1969), an activist for racial and economic justice, considers the economic outcome of being immersed in God’s mercy:
The word translated “mercy” … isn’t a cold, condescending kind of mercy such as one in power might extend to his victim in return for gratitude or service. It is warm, compassionate, tender, and never seeks to barter. It is almost exactly the same word that Jesus uses later on in the Sermon in referring to “almsgiving.”… Jesus rescued that world from the mere act of proudly pitching a coin to a beggar and made it into a whole attitude of life.
By “the merciful” he means those who have an attitude of such compassion toward all [people] that they want to share gladly all that they have with one another and with the world…. To them, [people] are no longer beggars to whom one gives a part, but brothers [and sisters] with whom one shares all. This concept of charity, or mercy, led some of the early Christians to a state of voluntary poverty in which “All the believers were together and held all things in common” (Acts 2:44). [2]
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 144–146.
[2] Clarence Jordan, Sermon on the Mount, rev. ed. (Judson Press, 1993), 30–31.
Sunday 12 July 2026 A Joining of Law and Love
Father Richard Rohr considers how the Beatitudes build on the wisdom of the Ten Commandments:
The Beatitudes are paradoxical “commandments.” They don’t tell Christians what to do; they tell them what they will be like if they are living in the kingdom: They will be poor in spirit, pure in heart, merciful and gentle peacemakers; they will thirst for what is right and be persecuted because of it, and they will mourn. Not a very happy prospect! And yet the Beatitudes call discipleship a happy life. Why? Because when we live in right relationship with God and one another, we are comforted, our hunger is satisfied, we are shown mercy, and we see God; and so, we are called God’s children, and we live under God’s reign!
The Beatitudes are as concerned about a new way of relating as the Ten Commandments were in the ancient days of Israel. The commandments spoke of showing honor to God and to one’s parents, of not killing, lying, stealing, cheating, or being jealous. The Beatitudes take nothing away from this revelation, but they do add something new. Instead of asking us to obey rules, they invite us to a lifestyle based on vulnerability, self-emptying, and cooperation.
Yet if we ask most Christians what it means to be moral, they think of the Ten Commandments, not the Beatitudes! They think in terms of legalistic morality. But to follow Jesus is to follow him out of the legality of systems and into living in a much larger truth. It’s to move to a more mature level of faith, where we discover God much more as lifegiver than lawgiver. [1]
The law makes us aware of problems. It gives a certain basic order to society and a framework within which people can live their lives. But what if people just obey the law and nothing more? Is there any law that requires you to make friends? Is there any law that compels you to fall in love? Is there any law that says you have to have agency, accomplish something, or be happy? Is there any law that states people have to care about you when you are suffering? Of course not! Almost everything that makes life enjoyable and satisfying comes from people going beyond the legal minimum. It’s going beyond the letter of the law that makes life worth living.
The same is true in our spiritual life. The framework of the commandments provides a basic and needed regularity in our spiritual life. We need such a “container” if we are ever to move beyond commandments and discover blessings. We can’t expect to be blessed with the happiness of living in the reign of God if we never obey God’s laws. Yet even God’s laws are not an end in themselves. Living within them simply frees us to hear the call of the Spirit to the more radical spiritual life of the Beatitudes. [2]
Story From Our Community
Cynthia Bourgeault’s meditation on the laborers in the vineyard reminds me that God is always inviting us into the kingdom of heaven. Some spend their entire life in devotion to God, and some come around near the end of their life. It’s the same reward for all.
—Mark S.
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Great Themes of Scripture: New Testament (Franciscan Media, 1987), 23–24.
[2] Rohr, Great Themes, 135–136.
The Beatitudes: Week One
Saturday 11 July 2026 Week Twenty-Seven Summary The Beatitudes: Week One
Sunday
As we consider Jesus’s message today, we join those people on that hillside, grappling with the question of who we are now and who we want to become in the future.
—Brian McLaren
Monday
Poor in spirit means to live without a need for our own righteousness. It’s inner emptiness without a need to bolster our own reputation.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Weeping over our sin and the sin of the world is an entirely different mode than self-hatred or hatred of others. The weeping mode, if I can call it that, allows us to bear the pain of the world without looking for perpetrators or victims.
—Richard Rohr
Wednesday
This feels like the secret Jesus is letting his listeners in on: the power we’re born into and the power we gain throughout our lives is a mirage. In the really real, power can only be shared.
—Micha Boyett
Thursday
While it may take a long time, our nonviolent persistence and truth-telling will eventually win out and bear the good fruit of justice. Truth is on our side; God is on the side of justice.
—John Dear
Friday
The Beatitudes remind us that blessing and justice are inextricably linked. If it’s blessing we want, then it’s justice we must pursue.
—Debie Thomas
Week Twenty-Seven Practice
Where Do You Seek Happiness?
Franciscan sister Patricia Jordan invites us to contemplate the Beatitudes as a way to transform our hearts:
A good starting place for the journey of discovery into your heart is the Beatitudes. One interpretation of Beatitude is happiness. Where do you seek happiness? In this answer lies a clue to the choices and challenges you may be required to face as you journey towards healing and wholeness. The Beatitudes do not deny our human instincts, emotions, thinking and willing, but they do invite us to reorder or restructure them according to their God-given capacities. In biblical language this is the painful journey of metanoia, or conversion. The human journey of the heart is the movement from selfish love to selfless and unconditional love, but the initiative comes from God. God is always the first to reach out and approach the human person and [God] is the last to go away….
The journey of our hearts through the different types of desert experiences in our lives restores the image and likeness [of God] provided we engage in what is involved. Are you ready to face the unmasking and dismantling of false notions of love and life that may be lurking in your heart? If you are, then take time to meditate on the Beatitudes….
The beauty portrayed in the Beatitudes is a yardstick for you to measure the areas of brokenness that are still operative within your heart. Perhaps you may wish to reflect on each one separately in order to see how the Beatitudes address your false symbols of security, power and self-esteem that the false self struggles to satisfy.
Our starting point is the heart. Blessed are the pure in heart: they shall see God. What an astonishing promise! The purity Jesus speaks of in this Beatitude presupposes a heart where affections, intellect and will are integrated in a love that is a participation in the life of God himself.
Patricia Jordan, An Affair of the Heart: A Biblical and Franciscan Journey (Gracewing, 2008), 52–53.
Friday 10 July 2026 What the Beatitudes Are Not
Reflecting on the many ways the Beatitudes have been understood, author Debie Thomas clarifies what she believes the Beatitudes are not:
People who know little else about Jesus know the Beatitudes. Some folks read them as lines of poetry. Some consider them a rule of life. Others find them naïve and impractical. Having grown up in the church, I’m familiar with the ways the Beatitudes are often misread and misused. I want to start there, by naming what they are not:
The Beatitudes are not sentiments. It’s easy in our consumerist culture to allow a word like “blessing” to become greeting card fodder, bland and meaningless. (“I’m so #Blessed.”) But the Beatitudes are not meant to settle and soothe us; they’re meant to startle us awake. Yes, they are pastoral, and yes, they give us hope. But Christian hope is not a sedative. Christian hope gets us up and out the door.
The Beatitudes are not to-do items. They are not suggestions, instructions, commandments, or quid pro quos. There is nothing transactional about them, nothing that smacks of a “should,” a “must,” or an “ought.” It is emphatically not the case that if I try very hard to be poorer, sadder, meeker, hungrier, thirstier, purer, more peaceable, and more persecuted than I am right now, God will like, love, reward, and appreciate me more than God already does.
The Beatitudes are not shame tactics. The point is not to read Jesus’s litany of blessings for the poor and the disenfranchised and walk away feeling like an overprivileged wretch. The takeaway Jesus intends for his listeners is neither shame nor self-condemnation. The last thing Jesus’s Beatitudes should do is defeat us.
The Beatitudes are not permission slips for passivity. To use Jesus’s teachings about sorrow, meekness, poverty, and persecution to keep oppressed people oppressed is to distort his words and intentions. There is nothing in the Beatitudes that excuses injustice, nothing that relativizes abuse, nothing that frees us to tell suffering people that their suffering is God-ordained and redemptive.
Through Jesus’s example, we learn that the Beatitudes are a vocation for our lives. Thomas points out:
Jesus acts. He doesn’t simply speak blessing; he lives it. Through his words, his hands, his feet, his life, he brings about the very blessings he promises. Insisting that pain in and of itself is neither holy nor redemptive in the Christian story, Jesus works to bring healing, abundance, liberation, and joy to everyone who crosses his path.
This is the vocation we are called to. The work of sharing the blessings we enjoy is not the work of a distant someday. It is the work we’re called to now. The Beatitudes remind us that blessing and justice are inextricably linked. If it’s blessing we want, then it’s justice we must pursue.
Debie Thomas, Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories: Reflections on the Life of Christ (Cascade Books, 2022), 120–121, 123–124.
Thursday 9 July 2026 Thirsting for Justice
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice: They shall have their fill.
—Matthew 5:6
Father Richard connects righteousness with justice:
This beatitude is both spiritual and social. Most Bibles to this day soften this beatitude: “hunger and thirst for what is right” or “for righteousness” are the more common and, I would argue, faulty translations. But the word in Greek clearly means “justice.” Notice that the concept of justice is used halfway through the Beatitudes and again at the very end. It’s a couplet reiterating the point: To live a just life in this world is to have identified with the longings and hungers of the poor, the meek, and those who weep. This identification and solidarity are already a profound form of social justice. [1]
The peace activist John Dear, who has spent his life working for nonviolence, writes about this beatitude:
Righteousness is not just the private practice of doing good; it sums up the global responsibility of the human community to make sure every human being has what they need, that everyone pursues a fair sense of justice for every other human being, and that everyone lives in right relationship with one another, creation, and God….
Jesus instructs us to be passionate for social, economic, and racial justice. That’s the real meaning of the Hebrew word for justice and the Jewish insistence on it. Resist systemic, structured, institutionalized injustice with every bone in your body, with all your might, with your very soul, he teaches. Seek justice as if it were your food and drink, your bread and water, as if it were a matter of life and death, which it is…. Within our relationship to the God of justice and peace, those who give their lives to that struggle, Jesus promises, will be satisfied….
How do we hunger and thirst for justice? By making global justice a priority in our lives. This beatitude requires us to join a grassroots movement that fights one or two issues of injustice and to get deeply involved in the struggle. Since all issues of injustice are connected, fighting one injustice puts us squarely in the struggle against every injustice. As Martin Luther King Jr. said over and over again, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Befriend the victims of systemic injustice, side with them, listen to their stories, let their pain break your heart, join the movements to end injustice, tithe your money to the cause, and commit yourself to the struggle….
While [it] may take a long time, our nonviolent persistence and truth-telling will eventually win out and bear the good fruit of justice. Truth is on our side; God is on the side of justice. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Martin Luther King Jr. said famously, “but it bends toward justice.” [2
Story From Our Community
The stories from the community always uplift my spirit. Today, I became tearful while reading Lazarus’s story. It touched me deeply, and I felt connected even through the ethernet. I am grateful and thankful for all the stories my brothers and sisters across the world send to Center for Action and Contemplation. They help me feel part of the bigger story!
— Shona C.
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 142–143.
[2] John Dear, The Beatitudes of Peace: Meditations on the Beatitudes, Peacemaking and the Spiritual Life (Twenty-Third Publications, 2016), 61–62, 66, 69.
Wednesday 8 July 2026 Land for the Humble
Blessed are the gentle: They shall have the Earth as their inheritance.
—Matthew 5:5
Father Richard explains why the third beatitude would have been simultaneously shocking and comforting to Jesus’s listeners:
The third beatitude is almost taken verbatim from Psalm 37:11: “The humble shall have the land for their own.” Some translate “gentle” as “the nonviolent,” but perhaps the most familiar translation is “the meek.” There’s an irony here. If there was one hated group in the Palestine of Jesus’s day, it was landlords—those who possessed the land. Nobody possessed land except by violence and oppression, by holding onto it and making all the powerless peasants pay a portion of their harvest. The landlords certainly weren’t meek or gentle, so Jesus is turning that around and saying, “No, it’s you, humble ones, who are finally going to possess the land.” [1]
Author Micha Boyett considers how Jesus’s listeners would have understood the paradox of the meek “inheriting the land”:
[Jesus] says that those who have no power and those who choose to give up their power are the ones who inherit the earth, which could also be translated as “the land.” The people sitting before him … are certainly not landowners. They are most likely what we could consider today to be sharecroppers, working the land for a wealthy owner, who didn’t need to get his hands dirty….
“Makarioi [Greek for “happy”] are the powerless ones,” Jesus says. “They shall have the earth as an inheritance.” They will recognize that the earth has always been theirs. He is getting at something essential to the spiritual life: our ownership is temporal. According to the psalmist, human beings are like the leaves of grass, here for a moment and then, poof, gone. We’re all stewards here, and the land remains long after we’ve become the dust we came from. Only the divine one possesses it. In God’s dream for the world, possession is an illusion. When we humble ourselves, when we release our hands from all that we have tried to control and cling to, we discover that those who possess the land are the ones living under the illusion. But the ones who release their power and the ones who never had power to begin with inherit the really real….
This feels like the secret Jesus is letting his listeners in on: the power we’re born into and the power we gain throughout our lives is a mirage. In the really real, power can only be shared…. Meekness—the upside-down possibility that when we let go of the power we hoard, power grows wide enough to share. When the few in power release their hold on the land, everyone has space to spread out and flourish. Meekness is the way toward an earth where we live in peace, where resources are shared, where everyone has enough. [2]
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 141.
[2] Micha Boyett, Blessed Are the Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole (Brazos Press, 2024), 74, 75, 76.
Tuesday 7 July 2026 Blessed Are Those Who Mourn
Blessed are those who mourn: They shall be comforted.
—Matthew 5:4
Father Richard reflects on the sacred nature of our ability to grieve—our own pain and that of the world:
In this beatitude, Jesus is describing the state of those who weep, those who have something to mourn about. They feel the pain of the world. Jesus is saying that those who can grieve, those who can cry, are those who will understand by coming closer to the heart of God.
Jesus praises the weeping class, those who can enter into solidarity with the pain of the world and not try to extract themselves from it. Weeping over our sin and the sin of the world is an entirely different mode than self-hatred or hatred of others. The weeping mode, if I can call it that, allows us to bear the pain of the world without looking for perpetrators or victims. Instead, we recognize the tragic reality in which both sides are trapped. Tears from God are always for everybody, for our universal exile from home. [1]
New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine describes how Jesus’s listeners would have heard echoes of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah’s message of consolation:
The beatitude has a particular resonance for Jesus’s followers that also draws from the Jewish tradition…. The passage Jesus partially cites as part of his address to the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4, reads,
The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me …; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners … ; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion—to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit…. [Isaiah 61:1–3]
[Isaiah] comforts the mourners in Zion by telling them that theirs is not the last generation, that what they may not see to fruition, their children and their children’s children will. To mourn in Israel means that we are not alone; we have not only our friends and relatives but also the previous generations and the generations to come. And we take comfort in that. [2]
Father Richard recognizes mourning as a quality that connects the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes:
Mourning might be thought of as the prophetic “way of tears,” a letting down of our defenses, in stark contrast to our more common ways of heroic willpower, commandment, obedience, force, anger, and legitimated violence. It takes an initial tender vulnerability (“wounding”) to defeat our ego and to open us to full consciousness—which must include the scary unconscious! It is a movement, frankly, from the Ten Commandments to the eight Beatitudes. A movement that the prophets illustrated for us twenty-five hundred years ago, and that we need—out of desire and desperation—to recover today. [3]
Story From Our Community
One of the most powerful aspects of Jesus’s life was his willingness to fully experience and express human emotion, including grief. Jesus embodied what it means to mourn, not as a sign of weakness, but as an act of love, justice, and divine sorrow for a wounded world…. Jesus allowed himself to fully feel and express grief, loss, and sorrow with Martha and Mary. Jesus’s tears reveal that the Divine One does not rush past mourning but enters into humanity’s pain. This profound moment shows that Jesus did not dismiss suffering with divine detachment. No, he stood in it, felt it, and wept with those who wept.
—Malika C.
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 140–141.
[2] Amy-Jill Levine, Sermon on the Mount: A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven (Abingdon Press, 2020), 13–14.
[3] Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (Convergent Books, 2025), xxviii.
Monday 6 July 2026 How Do We Become Poor in Spirit?
How blessed are the poor in spirit: the kingdom of God is theirs.
—Matthew 5:3
Father Richard Rohr explores the first beatitude as a call to interior freedom, a key to participating in the kingdom of God:
What an opening line! It’s crucial, a key to everything Jesus is teaching, or it wouldn’t be the opener. It’s hard to imagine that a saying so radical should become so familiar, so normalized. Matthew may have chosen to soften it from the original phrase that we see in Luke and the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Luke’s Gospel is for the poor, so he leaves the hard words of Jesus as many scholars believe they were originally spoken: “Blessed are you who are poor” (Luke 6:20).
Matthew, however, was addressing a more stable, even middle-class Jewish community, so he says, “Happy are the poor in spirit.” The truth is still there—poor in spirit means to live without a need for our own righteousness. It’s inner emptiness without a need to bolster our own reputation. For middle class folks, if we’re poor in spirit, we may eventually become poor in fact. In other words, we won’t waste the rest of our lives trying to get rich, because we’ll know better.
Christian Scripture scholars point out that the Greek word usually used for the peasant class is tapeinoi, but that is not the word Matthew and Luke use here. They use the word ptochoi, which literally means “the very empty ones, those who are crouching.” They are the beggars, the nobodies of this world who have nothing left. Jesus is saying, “Happy are you, you’re the freest of them all.”
The higher up we are in the system, the more trapped we are. The more we are outside the system, the freer we are. When we are high up in anything, we are expected to represent it, hold it together, and affirm it. The price of the truth can be very great, so we say what is needed to survive and to be liked inside the group, and to hold the group in unity.
“How blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3), the ones who don’t have to play any of these games. Jesus is recommending a social reordering here, quite different from common practice. Notice how he also uses present tense: “The kingdom of God is theirs” (Matthew 5:3). He doesn’t say “will be theirs.” That tells us that the kingdom of God isn’t later. It’s present tense: We are the free ones now, if we remain without anything to protect or anything we need to prove or defend.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 138–140.
Sunday 5 July 2026 A Surprising Teaching
Over the next two weeks, the Daily Meditations will reflect on the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–16), Jesus’s core teachings from the Sermon on the Mount. CAC teacher Brian McLaren sets the scene:
Imagine yourself in Galilee, on a windswept hillside near a little fishing town called Capernaum. Flocks of birds circle and land…. The Sea of Galilee glistens blue below us, reflecting the clear midday sky above.
A small group of disciples circles around a young man who appears to be about thirty. He is sitting, as rabbis in this time and culture normally do. Huge crowds extend beyond the inner circle of disciples, in a sense eavesdropping on what he is teaching them. This is the day they’ve been waiting for. This is the day Jesus is going to pass on to them the heart of his message.
Jesus begins in a fascinating way. He uses the term blessed to address the question of identity, the question of who we want to be. In Jesus’s day, to say, “Blessed are these people” is to say “Pay attention: these are the people you should aspire to be like….” It’s the opposite of saying “Woe to those people” or “Cursed are those people,” which means, “Take note: you definitely don’t want to be like those people….” His words no doubt surprise everyone, because we normally play by these rules of the game:
Do everything you can to be rich and powerful.
Toughen up and harden yourself against all feelings of loss.
Measure your success by how much of the time you are thinking only of yourself and your own happiness.
Be independent and aggressive, hungry and thirsty for higher status in the social pecking order.
Strike back quickly when others strike you, and guard your image so you’ll always be popular.
But Jesus defines success and well-being in a profoundly different way…. He advocates an identity characterized by solidarity, sensitivity, and nonviolence. He celebrates those who long for justice, embody compassion, and manifest integrity and nonduplicity. He creates a new kind of hero: not warriors, corporate executives, or politicians, but brave and determined activists for preemptive peace, willing to suffer with him in the prophetic tradition of justice….
It’s hot in the Galilean sunshine. Still the crowds are hanging on Jesus’s every word. They can tell something profound and life-changing is happening within them and among them. Jesus is not simply trying to restore their religion to some ideal state in the past. Nor is he agitating unrest…. He spurs his hearers into reflection about who they are, who they want to be, what kind of people they will become, what they want to make of their lives.
As we consider Jesus’s message today, we join those people on that hillside, grappling with the question of who we are now and who we want to become in the future…. As we listen to Jesus, each of us knows, deep inside: If I accept this new identity, everything will change for me. Everything will change.
Story From Our Community
When we stop demanding and clinging to “my way or the highway” way of thinking, we begin to sense an inner peace and clarity that radiates from within. We then empower that sense of clarity to radiate into the world as our true calling— just as Fr. Richard has done for so many years. Blessings!
—Dave A.
Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (Jericho Books, 2014), 127–130.
Image Credit and inspiration: Minh Trí, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a raindrop poised on a leaf, the Beatitudes provide a drop-by-drop prescription to counter-culturally create the kin-dom of God.
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How can we Reclaim Jesus from Empire?
(click the picture to access)
Kat Armas on Liturgies for Resisting Empire
Kat Armas explores how liturgy, community, and the liberating message of the Bible can help us heal from systems of violence that hurt ourselves, each other, and the earth.
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Can Ancient Wisdom Help Us Face These Challenging Times Together?
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Diana Butler Bass on A Beautiful Year
Diana Butler Bass explores the meaning of Lent, the origins of the liturgical calendar, and the role of Mary Magdalene as the “Apostle to the Apostles.”
CAC faculty member Brian McLaren shares the theme for the 2026 Daily Meditations.Watch the video.
Story From Our Community
James Finley says, “God sustains us in all things while protecting us from nothing.” I’ve come to believe that it’s only through seeing God in our suffering that we can truly be free from the fear that causes us to choose ways of being that are not loving. Even in our fear, when we choose not to love, God is there. God has not, could not, and will not ever forsake us. God is not safe, but God is good. It’s the same thing to say that reality is not safe, but reality is good.
—Heather C.
[1] Adapted from Brian D. McLaren, 2026 Daily Meditations Theme: Good News for a Fractured World, Center for Action and Contemplation, video, 6:38.
[2] Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2022), 138, 139–140.
Image credit and inspiration: Paul Macallan, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like this bright flower, the gift of contemplation and action brings us hope in the midst of painful reality.
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Christine Valters Paintner on Seeking a Word
Author Christine Valters Paintner shares how the desert mystics have wisdom for us today.
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Click the image for the latest from ‘News from New Mexico’.
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