Copyright © 2008 Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University
The Beatitudes in the Desert B y
J o n a t h a n
W i l s o n - H a r t g r o v e
In our fast-paced world of wars and anti-war activism, seeking wisdom from the ancient Christian solitaries may seem counterintuitive (or just flat wrong). Yet how they received Jesus’ blessing in the Sermon on the Mount reveals how we can live faithfully in a broken world.
B
ryan Hollon has written in these pages about new monastic communities that “aim not only to serve the urban poor, but also to reinvigorate traditional church institutions and become salt and light to a civilization in moral and spiritual disarray.”1 I write from one such community—the Rutba House in Durham, North Carolina. I am a new monastic who longs to know what Jesus’ Beatitudes mean in the desert that is urban America. As I pause to write between knocks at the door and telephone calls, I have to confess that “serving the urban poor” and “reinvigorating the traditional church” sound like pretty lofty ideals. Don’t get me wrong: I think they are good ideals. I pray that we somehow get around to those important tasks in the midst of everything else that comes up around here. But if we do, it is not because we have developed a master plan for successfully countering the “moral and spiritual disarray” of the world around us. We are neither smart enough nor pious enough to pull that off. What we do here is wake up every morning and thank God for blessing us with a way of life that does not lead to destruction. The best summary I know of that way of life is the Sermon on the Mount. New monasticism’s connection to the Sermon goes back at least as far as the 1930s. “The restoration of the church,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “will surely come from a new kind of monasticism, which will have nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising adherence to the Sermon on the Mount in imitation of Christ. I believe the time has come to rally people together for this.”2 As best as I can figure, the oldest of new monastic