Overview:

The Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, Priest

A Reflection for the Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, Priest

Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!
Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.
For their ancestors treated the prophets
in the same way. (Lk 6:23)

Find today’s readings here.

In my experience, when you first move to New York, you’re jarred by the endemic poverty. Every commute to work, every grocery run—every step you take outside your apartment, actually—becomes a shelling of moral intrusions. People hungry, people begging and to a horrifying extent, people openly weeping.

You give out the cash you have, but that goes fast, so you try to make yourself impenetrable to it all, in a way seemingly intrinsic to your eight million neighbors. But your grief accumulates still, along with a vague sense of dread you’d rather leave unplumbed.

Still, you’ve hardly been Dorothy Day–ing it out there. You decide not to claim, on an investment of nothing, the grief of the world as your own. You look into volunteer work and start committing yourself to mornings of “packaging” and afternoons of “delivering.” And that feels like a solid start, but you’re dissatisfied to find that it doesn’t feel like an end. You find yourself inverted, again, looking for an answer. At the same time, ordinary parts of your day start to feel unnecessary: your iced coffee on the to-go shelf at Pret, cashmere on the mannequins at Nordstrom, a stranger’s sandalwood perfume in the revolving door at work.

And that first, inchoate feeling is now full and articulate: Things really are catastrophic, and you cannot fix it.

“Blessed are you who are poor….
Blessed are you who are now hungry….
Blessed are you who are now weeping….
Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.”

The beatitudes remind us that this world is an incomplete one. Not broken or irredeemable—incomplete. That we can never fix this world is a burden, but it’s not one we bear in vain. Because in the Beatitudes we get a glimpse of the final act—when all that seems irrecoverably wrong becomes right. Just the thought of it arrests my every capacity.

And what a gift that is, desperate as it may sound, small as it may seem: to have just the thought of it. Your whole ability to evert yourself, to help anyone, do anything, hinged on that promise. On a resolve beyond reality. On hope.

Will Martino is a Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., fellow at America Media.