St. Paul teaches: “Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” There is a whole swathe of people who take this to mean that the Church should only be worried about saying prayers, worshipping correctly and reading the Bible. However, as St. Paul makes clear we are not angels and thinking of what is “above” does not preclude thinking about what is happening all around us. In fact, what he is urging is that we see all that we are enduring through the lens of eternity. Thus when Jesus presents the Beatitudes he talks about the poor, the hungry, the persecuted, the sorrowing. These things of earth are overwhelming until we start to see them “from above,” as God does. The Church attends to issues of justice, of the economy, of violence, of grief because God is concerned about those things. In fact, because Jesus shared humanity with us, attention to these human things is our avenue to the divine.
