Any meaningful review of what my life has been through 2007 should balance negatives and positives. But if I gave an accurate review I would probably have to indulge in a bit of spin, to make this past year sound better than in fact it turned out to be. "Count your blessings" is one of those Promise Box type of exhortations that is devotionally valid but not always emotionally feasible. Of course a positive spin on how we tell our story doesn't need to mean that the good stuff is invented or misleadingly told; just that emphasis is laid, attention is paid, capital is made, out of those experiences and circumstances that, in memory and mind, evoke positive feelings. So I count my blessings, name them one by one.....it's just that there is another list of ambiguities that's just as long, and often not as obviously beatitudinal. And my journey with God has involved both experiences I thank God for, and other happenings and experiences I wish hadn't happened.
But the hard stuff also has its value. Life enriching experiences aren't always counted as blessings at the time. Often those that enrich most initially seem emotionally expensive, relationally demanding, requiring that we grow in new directions, perhaps taking us through valleys of deep darkness where the presence of God might be felt more as absence than nearness. Which means even our hardest experiences can be beatitudinal. That's twice I've intentionally, and with theological awareness used this clumsily precise word - 'beatitudinal'.
When Jesus spoke of those who were Blessed, he wasn't referring to those who could 'count their blessings' in a process of positive spin. He was talking about the meek and materially disadvantaged, the mourner coming to terms with loss and sorrow, the unjustly treated who hungers for the right to be done and seen to be done, the peacemaker who exists in relation to conflict, the merciful who confronts wrong with forgiveness, the persecuted whose sense of being threatened is subsumed beneath a sense of being held. A beatitudinal life is one in which, whatever happens, we need fear not, for it is our Father's good pleasure to give the Kingdom.
So as a statement of honesty, for many reasons that don't need to be told here, this has been on balance, a hard year. That isn't a negative statement meant to evoke sympathy, it's as factual and physical, and as significant as if I said the road from here to where I was born passes through some of Scotland's bleakest moorland - it's part of the journey from here to there. But it has been a beatitudinal year,in the kinds of ways Jesus declared blessed. Joy and sorrow, peace and anxiety, trust and doubt, companionship and loneliness, healing and hurt, gain and loss, fun and frustration, achievement and failure - and between these poles of human experience, enfolding us within purposes beyond our knowing, the purifying love and merciful constancy of the Triune God.
I suppose what I feel more than anything else on this first day of 2008, is that, year on year, I confess with more attempted humility but also more trusting hopefulness, that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, are the fundamental blessings that make my life beatitudinal no matter what. And counting them is easy - they come to Three in One!
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