Choices for Life - The Beatitudes for Daily Living, Kevin Treston 2024

The thing about the Beatitudes is that they are so profoundly counter-cultural. Kevin Treston's selection of the Beatitudes as providing a gateway to exploring the spiritual life has particular relevance in a society obsessed with material matters. Moreover, in a postmodern world in which the boundaries of all things are smudged and deliberately challenged, selecting The Beatitudes as a text for challenging our lifestyles and behaviour has radical relevance, offering, in his own words, an ecumenical charter for moral communal living grounded in the oneness of all creation.

What is meant by this? Prior to Vatican II, most people's ideas of spirituality were monastic, belonging to the Trappists, Enclosed Carmelites or some other mendicant orders. From the Sixties onwards, youth disgruntled with the Vietnam war and searching for new meaning in life, embraced Eastern practices, dropped out of society, travelled to India and sought various means of turning their/our backs on society and its conventional religious and other practices.

The Beatitudes pursue a different spiritual path, equally at odds with conventional mores of society, especially Western culture with its accent on individualism. Treston shows this by exploring them as a new way of critiquing and challenging conventional wisdom, which, when one comes to think of it, teaches the Gospel of 'Blessed are the Rich', 'Do Harm to Those that Harm You' (the promotion of retaliation and revenge), etc., and which encapsulate everything in our culture that is designed to appeal to the need for instant gratification and escape from commitment.

Imagine a society or culture in which we placed as our priority epithets such as 'Feed the hungry', 'Care for the downtrodden' and 'Do good to those that harm you'? What would happen in The Ukraine and, come to think of it, the two sides locked into a battle to the death in the Middle East. I commend to you Kevin's selection of the Beatitudes, reproduced in another scriptural text as the Sermon on the Mount, as a new way of living our spirituality, first and foremost without escaping from the world, as the Hippies did seeking escape in drugs and, equally importantly, in offering an alternative vision of the world as we know it as a place in which we can restore the integrity of all Creation through acting for peace and justice.