Beatitude in transit

Stephan Mathieu - Schwarzschild Radius

We can’t abandon our pursuits of happiness any more than we can want to not have been born. Nonetheless, most people don’t expect us to be happy because they don’t see that ultimate reality is God’s own happiness. Our beatitude is in transit. To assert that even the most miserable have good reasons to be happy despite the unhappy appearances of their lives is simply to rephrase the truism that appearances often fool us.

This calls for a demonstration. It has to be seen to be believed. Poetry is autobiography made pretty in order to transmit, in our time-bound language of signs and appearances, something of the essential beauty in its author; poetry is also theology, and for the same reason. The nearer to God, the better our poetry.

The same is true of prayer. Asking why Christians pray if our Father has preordained from eternity what will come is more accurately and more usefully framed as a question of causality than of purpose. When the Spirit impels us to ask something of our Father in the name of his Son, Jesus, only God can fully know why if final purposes are meant by the question. The causal question, however, is known by biblical theology and by the experience of the prayerful Christian who draws always nearer to God’s purposes in Spirit-led prayer.