Blessed are the Pure in Heart

An analogy that I commonly appeal to with regard to the Christian life is the notion of sight-seeing tour versus quest. This analogy does a good job of illuminating the meaning of pure in heart.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

A sight-seeing tour is all about experience. The whole point of such a tour is to see things. Anything that detracts from the experience is a loss, a kind of tragedy.

Because a sight-seeing tour is about experience, the way the tour is managed is important. That is, a tour that involves unpleasant accommodations, for example, is usually considered unsatisfactory — though for some, such inconveniences form part of the experience.

But a sight-seeing tour that, for some reason, fails to let you see the sights is a total loss. The experience is the entire purpose of the tour, and unless the tour provides the experience it is a waste of time and money.

If we look at life in these terms, we wind up with what is commonly called a YOLO mentality — the idea that “you only live once.” Or, as an infamous beer commercial from long ago put it, “You only go around once in life, so you have to grab for all the gusto you can get.” In this view, the purpose of life itself is to experience as much as possible, in particular to have as many “good” experiences as possible for whatever definition of good is meaningful to you.

Because you only get one shot at life, you have to make sure you get your money’s worth — that you fill it with as many good experiences as possible. Anything you miss is missed forever, an eternal tragedy.

By contrast, a quest is entirely focused on the goal of the quest. In this view, if you achieve the quest, anything you miss along the way is of little importance, while if you miss the goal, no matter what you experience along the way, the quest is a failure.

A quest might involve wholesale abandonment of anything and everything. It might involve suffering and hardship. The big danger in a quest is to lose focus or become sidetracked. That can cause you to miss the goal.

The over-logical fell for the witch
Whose argument converted him to stone,
Thieves rapidly absorbed the over-rich,
The over-popular went mad alone,
And kisses brutalised the over-male.

As agents their importance quickly ceased;
Yet, in proportion as they seemed to fail,
Their instrumental value was increased
For one predestined to attain their wish.

By standing stones the blind can feel their way,
Wild dogs compel the cowardly to fight,
Beggars assist the slow to travel light,
And even madmen manage to convey
Unwelcome truths in lonely gibberish.

– From The Quest by W. H. Auden

And to miss the goal of the quest is the ultimate tragedy.

The question is whether our lives as Christians are sight-seeing tours or quests. I do not think this is a difficult question from a purely abstract perspective.

The Bible tells us many things that lead us to think we are on a quest. Paul, for example speaks as follows:

… But whatever was profit to me, for the sake of Christ I thought of it as loss. In fact, I think everything to be loss because of the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, through whom I have lost everything and think of it as excrement so that I might gain Christ….

… Brethren, I myself do not yet see myself to have attained it; but one thing I do: forgetting what is behind, stretching out to what is ahead, I press forward to the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

– Philippians 3:7-8, 13-14

Paul’s perspective emphasizes focus. He is not distracted. He puts the past behind him. He sets his sight on one thing: the goal.

This is a key notion of what it means to be pure in heart. Many people think of this as a moral issue — to be pure in heart means to be morally pure. But this misses the point. As Kierkegaard puts it, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” Paul, in his focus on the goal of the high calling of God, exemplifies what it means to be pure in heart.

Again the question arises as to why this beatitude speaks of blessing in the present tense. How are the pure in heart blessed in the present?

From a negative perspective, we can see that the pure in heart do not sacrifice anything by their focus. Jesus spoke like this:

Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my name’s sake will receive one hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.

– Matthew 19:29

People see the loss of family or possessions as tragic, yet such losses are inevitable in this life. Rather than trying to cling grimly to the trappings of this life, the person who is pure in heart can pursue eternal good with the confidence that there will be recompense.

Another way to look at this is to understand that from one perspective life is a continual experience of loss. Every second is one second lost; as we get older our possibilities and capabilities decrease. Even if we become powerful and successful the time to exercise that power or to enjoy that success diminishes constantly.

The one who is pure in heart, on the other hand. seeks a goal that cannot be lost, an “unfading crown.” Such a person does not have to see life as loss, but as drawing nearer and nearer to the goal: “For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11).

Still another aspect of being pure in heart is illustrated by the parable of the soils from Matthew 13. The difference between the third, unfruitful soil, and the fourth soil that produces as much as a hundredfold, is that the third soil is not pure. There is too much going on there — in one sense too much “life”. The fourth soil only grows one thing.

So the one who is pure in heart will be successful in what God calls us to — bringing forth the word. One who is distracted by many things, on the other hand, will fritter away his life and be useless to God.

When I was a new Christian my initial reaction to this beatitude was to think, “What is so good about seeing God?” The idea of seeing God left me cold.

Ironically the notion of “sight-seeing tour” can help us understand the promise of this beatitude. People will pay large amounts of money just to see things. And people will describe various experiences they have in ultimate terms. For example, Edgar Mitchel, an astronaut on Apollo 14, described his view of the earth from the moon as follows: “My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.”

But if experiences in this life seem like glimpses of the divine, imagine what the actual experience of the divine would be:

The brightness of that sun could not be seen
Because no eye could endure it;
Could not be reported
Because no brain could survive it.

Not light does it give but life,
Yet life so vigorous as to be death
To anything that can die.

And so, with the coming of true day,
All that is mortal would pass away.
And yet, could we see but the spark of its rising,
We would, as we perished, call ourselves blessed.