Loss Prevention

And turning His gaze toward His disciples, He began to say, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.  Luke 6:20  NASB

Poor – Matthew translates Yeshua’s statement differently.  In Matthew’s Greek, the text says ptochoi pneumati.  He needs this added bit of Greek because his reading audience is Jewish and he must distinguish in Greek one of the four different words for “poor” in Hebrew.  But Luke doesn’t have this problem.  He’s writing to a Gentile audience.  His choice of the Greek ptochoi is enough.[1]  For the Gentile audience, ptochoi expressed the destitution of the beggar, something quite familiar to the Gentile world (even today) but summarily feared and avoided if at all possible.  In other words, even to the Gentiles Yeshua claim that the ptochoi are lucky seems completely absurd.

Since the Church converted these sayings into spiritual “attitudes,” we have been taught that they are either steps toward a repentant heart or laudable moral virtues.  But perhaps we are a bit too quick to turn these citizenship descriptions into spiritual mantras. Let’s consider another approach.

Suppose we look at the condition and character of the ptochoi.  What is it like to be a beggar?  I don’t mean what kind of physical situation describes a beggar.  We all know what that looks like (or at least we think we do).  I’m asking a different question.  What is the psychological and emotional experience of the beggar?  In other places I have argued that the fundamental condition of ptochoi is desperation. The beggar cannot afford pride. His existence depends on raw vulnerability.  His appeal to the benefactor’s compassion must be pure, unadulterated humility.  And in this state, he may encounter another psychological necessity: the need to mourn.

“An unwillingness to mourn leads one to abdicate from language and from the pain it represents.  As Adam Phillips succinctly phrases it, ‘Depression is a self-cure for the terrors of aliveness, of being alive to one’s losses and therefore to one’s desires.’  Denial mechanisms are ‘forms of anesthetic, unconsciously sustained poverties of language that pre-empt a knowledge of feeling.’ Kristeva speaks of the ‘despondent intoxication’ that greets idealized versions of the old love.”[2]

A beggar for God, Yeshua’s description of the first condition of a Kingdom citizen, knows what it means to experience loss, to encounter the pain of being alive in a broken world, to recall what might have been. But this isn’t the only kind of mourning that Kingdom citizens face.  There is another mourning, the mourning over past disconnection, past self-concern, past deliberate arrogance, past denial.  This is the mourning of the grief of God’s absence in our preoccupation with ourselves.  A beggar for God knows not only what might have been but also what was.  Both cut to the heart.

If we can’t talk about our experiences of loss, if we pretend that life goes on without the pain of separation from once-held desires and hopes, and the remorse over our failures to engage the yetzer ha’tov, then we fail to enter into that promised rest because we don’t allow language to bridge the gap between our internal trauma and our external masks.  We need to mourn over our past self-idolatry.  God heals through words but those words must be filled with the personal inventory of regret.  Perhaps that’s why “blessed are the poor” is followed by “blessed are those who mourn.”  You can hardly have beggars for God who have not experienced the next of the Beatitudes.

Topical Index:  poor, ptochoi, mourn, Luke 6:20

[1]See the Appendix in my book, The Lucky Life https://skipmoen.com/books-audio/beatitudes-book/

[2]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, p. 60.