The meek inherit the earth

Sunday, March 17, 2024

I like the poetry of The Beatitudes, a list Jesus made in his The Sermon on the Mount. It begins:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth…

I always get stuck on that third one: “Blessed are the meek…”

Meek? What does that mean?

“‘Meek’ is not a word that is easy to salvage,” writes Rowan Williams in his latest book, Passions of the Soul. “Even ‘humble,’ which is sometimes used as an alternative in translations, is not a great deal better.”

When Jesus calls himself “meek” or “humble” (praus in Greek), he is speaking, significantly, in the context of inviting people to lay their burdens on him: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens … for I am gentle and humble in heart.” And this surely suggests that the “meekness” about which he talks must be connected with a willingness to be open to the neighbour, not to push away the other, a willingness to share the vulnerability of the neighbour.

Meekness, then, might be reimagined as something to do with an attitude to others that is not self-abasing but simply alert to the reality of others, as Jesus declares that he is in those verses from Matthew 11. His humility is a capacity to be a place where others find rest. The humble person is the one who is not anxiously defended, not restless or tense over their status and safety, the person who is not anxious to hold, to keep control, but who simply occupies the place they occupy. And if that is what we are talking about here, a quality of stillness and alertness, it is possible to see how – as in some of the narrative about Jesus – anger can arise as a simple moment of passionate protest against pain, evil or deceit.

Meekness as a habit of calm attentiveness, stillness, freedom from the fretting worry of keeping control, a stillness that allows others to feel welcome around you, can appear as something very different from the shrinking back that the word so easily suggests. If anger is very much to do with the “pushing out and pushing away” element in our psyche, “meekness” in the sense of a welcoming stillness is the opposite of this. It is the dropping away of the pushing, chest-beating style of response. And the blessedness of the meek, the blessedness of those who live in welcoming stillness, is the condition of those who will “inherit the earth” simply because their spirit is one of receptivity: they are able to welcome truth, to welcome the neighbour; they welcome the world they live in, not needing always to be pushing outwards, battling, throwing up the defences. The earth is theirs because they are not obsessed about what is and isn’t theirs.

Emphasis mine.

I love this rethinking of the word “meek” as a state of being still and holding your place, but also being open and receptive to the world. The meek inherit the earth because they’re open and alive to it.

In an interview with The Idler, Williams calls “poor in spirit” an “unhelpful translation,” and suggests that it “means those who are not dependent on their own achievement for grace.”

In the Beatitudes, what you’ve got is not a recommendation for behaviour but the question: “In whose company will you see God?” In the company of people who are, in a hopeless translation, “meek” – which means simply the ones who don’t need to go around asserting their ego… The kind of person who is content not to push themselves in conversation, who can sit back and listen. The right sort of detachment. You don’t need to be on top of the situation, you don’t have to work all the time to be in control…

And now I’m thinking about a favorite bit in A Man Without A Country when Kurt Vonnegut observes that no politicians seem to want The Beatitudes or The Sermon on the Mount printed in public buildings. “‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”

(Happy Sunday.)

Be a good date

Thursday, August 17, 2023

I am fond of Kurt Vonnegut’s assertion that good writing is an act of “sociability.” He said he tried to teach his students “how to be a friend to a reader so the reader won’t stop reading” and “how to be a good date on a blind date with a total stranger.” (From The New York Times, 1999.)

Being a good date to the reader requires a kind of humility, I think, and an understanding that nobody really wants to read a book. (Or a newsletter or a blog post, or whatever.)

Perhaps paradoxically, Vonnegut suggested that one way to be a good date to a total stranger is to try to write for one specific person you know: “If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

Mary Karr writes something similar in The Art of Memoir:

You might ask, though, who are you writing for? Lots of people say, ‘I write for myself.’ I am way less cool. I tend to imagine a writer pal I look up to, maybe a former teacher; or my son; or even my dead priest. That helps me think clearly about what order information goes in… if you were telling a therapist or a friend at lunch, you’d know right away what data went where.

Here’s Stephen King in On Writing:

Someone—I can’t remember who, for the life of me—once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of the story, the writer is thinking, “I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?” For me that first reader is my wife, Tabitha.

Vonnegut said that in hindsight he realized that he wrote everything he wrote for his sister, just trying to make her laugh…

(Come to think of it, this is why I suggest in Keep Going that if you’re stuck, you might consider making something for somebody specific in your life.)

Disgust with civilization

Monday, January 18, 2021

“Disgust is a survival trait…”
—Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun.

I think often of this Kurt Vonnegut piece that ran in the first issue of Backwards City Review:

Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him.

It was music.

I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out.

It was disgust with civilization.

What disgusts you is important information. It tells you something is wrong. What to avoid. It gives you a path.

I feel like my readers see me as a fairly positive person, but I doubt they know how much I am driven by my disgust.

The trick is: I take the thing I’m disgusted with, imagine the opposite, and push that out into the world.

Identifying poison, privately, but sharing nourishment, publicly.

After all, aggravation is my muse.

* * *

After posting this, I realized today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I will be celebrating by re-reading “Transformed Nonconformist,” from his collection of sermons, Strength To Love, which contains the oft-quoted line, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” (You can read the interesting background behind the book at Stanford’s King Institute.)

A plausible mission

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Watching this 5-minute cut of never-before-seen footage from Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, I thought of the beginning of Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake:

I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, “The Beatles did.”

Filed under: The Beatles

Experience #TheBeatlesGetBack, a three-part original docuseries from director Peter Jackson streaming November 25 on @DisneyPlus. Watch the new trailer now. pic.twitter.com/nGYBoNmCcw

— The Beatles (@thebeatles) October 13, 2021