Pop 89: Beatitude List

By Madonna Hamel

I was awakened again this morning at 3:30 am. And, again, the words sprang to my lips: "Blessed are the birdies." An echo of the words attributed to Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, when he introduces us to the Beatitudes. Blessed are the meek, the broken-hearted, the pure of heart, the hungerers after justice, he says. When I think on these words I am reminded that we are all holy, all graced with gifts, talents and our own abilities, obligations and propensities to bless others in return.

Truth be told, I cannot recall that, as a young Catholic attending St. Mary's elementary school with the Sisters of Mercy, we were ever given a thorough introduction to the meaning of the Beatitudes. But I know we were encouraged and admonished to be constantly grateful. Grateful to God, to our parents and yes, to the nuns themselves. I can't say I had any felt sense of "God," and even less an intimate sense of relationship with Jesus. I was, and am, grateful and thankful for a life that has kept me fed, clothed, sheltered, curious and filled with wonder.

And though I do not actively keep what people like my sister and my Al-Anon fellows call a gratitude list, I do hear myself saying thank-you out loud on a regular basis, to everything from the birdies outside my window to my sisters and friends who have managed to make certain I take my brain cancer meds, make me meals and, best of all, make me laugh. And when I hear myself say, "Bless you!" to them all, I am highly aware that I am being blessed. So, I suppose I could say I am keeping a Beatitude List.

In 12-step recovery a sponsor will often suggest that a sponsee keep a daily gratitude list. The idea is to develop a lifelong "attitude of gratitude."

If you joined the Al-Anon program, as I did, to face your dependency on fixing, enlightening, sobering up an alcoholic, you are often encouraged to put that alcoholic at the top of your gratitude list. Why one would be thankful for a drunk in your life who manages to hide their own dependencies, spend your money, break your heart, seemed insane to me. But the point of putting the source of your misery at the top of the list is also an urge to shift your focus, to recognize all the ways you actually found unexpected joy and treasures hidden in your capacity to make it through the day, replete with hurts, fears, resentments and confusions.

There's a good reason to keep a Beatitude List. It reminds us that we are all holy, all embodiments of the sacred, all more than evidence of achievement. More than tools to be used to keep the large machinery of the secular world functioning.

I recall Patti Smith's 1996 album "Gone Again," wherein the spoken-word track "Spell" itemizes all the elements of life, sacred and profane, as holy. While the piece is meant to be an adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's 1956 Beat Generation poem "Howl," it strikes me as her own Beatitude List. "Every man's an angel," she chants. "The bum's as holy as the seraphim! Holy the unknown buggered. And suffering beggars. Holy the hideous human." Holy, holy, holy. Everything is holy, she says. Everyone is holy. Which brings to mind something Wendell Berry wrote in his essay "The Gift of Good Land": "There are no un-sacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places." By seeing the sacred in everything, he reminds us that all land is Holy Land.

I admitted to my friend, author and pilgrimage professor Matthew Anderson, that I can't seem to muster any kind of genuine feeling of devotion toward the divine. That I don't even know what it means to worship and adore. But maybe, thanks in great part to the morning birdies, and to the new quilt I received from a group of women who embroidered the word "glorious" into its very fabric, I can hear myself say: "Glory be to..." As a Catholic I was told to worship, but I didn't know what that looked like, and I didn't want to do anything wrong or false by just repeating the words given to me. Matthew's reply was: "It seems to me that when a person feels awe, that's glorifying God." By extension, every time I get a thrill at the sound of a meadowlark, or I hear the frogs strike up a chorus, or a pronghorn antelope races alongside the car I'm in, I am being present to the sacred. And that does not require my thraldom, the way a celebrity or trillionaire expects.

"For anybody conscious of the history of the collision between the living world and the purposes of mechanistic humans, and of the marks and scars almost everywhere of that collision, heartbreak comes easy and rest comes hard," writes Berry. "That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of woods, grow quiet and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace."

Call it grace, wonder, blessing, good fortune, luck. Every time I hear a meadowlark or a nighthawk ready to take his daring plunge, or a snipe mid-winnow, I feel the "glory be" rise up in me. I am eternally thankful that there is a reserve of worship and adoration in me, and that I can feel both blessed and able to, in some way, bless.