Lent day eleven: active purity

"Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God."

To be clean of heart (or "pure of heart" in classical translations) is to see the world as God sees it. Great Catholic writer Frank Sheed used the analogy of the sunrise. The beautiful thing about a sunrise is not just the sun itself but the fact that you can see that light of the sunrise all over everything else: on trees, cars, house, animals. People. To be pure of heart is to see that light of God when we behold any part of hs Creation, particularly a person.

Again, like mercy, we think of cleanness or "purity" as passively or even lazily keeping our noses clean. But purity is a challenge. We have to be actively pure. Purity means that not only do we actively do what God would have us do, but we do it with the right motivations in our hearts. We love and serve others because when we look at them, we see the Christ within them. We see that they are created to be sons and daughters of God. The love of Christ must be the driving force behind everything we do. But it starts with how we see the world, and the people in it. We have to see as God sees.

How do we see as God sees? It starts with famiiarizing ourselves with the data that we have on God, in the form primarily of his revealed Word. The first thing we notice in Genesis is that God saw His creation, particular Man and Woman, as "very good."

It takes work and patience to grow even a tad familiar with God's own vision of humanity and the world, but it is worth it. Although one is tempted to think that "seeing God" is a reward for seeing as God sees, I would suggest it is a natural consequence of seeing the world through the eyes of God. If I see the world more and more with God's eyes, and recognize that my eyes are not mine but His, then the more I will be reminded of Him every place I go and in every person I meet. And after a lifetime of that, I will have been prepared to see God not just dimly through the written Word or through my experience of other people pointing the way to Him, but face to face in Heaven.