Meeting abstract
The Spiritual and Psychological Strength of Living According to the Beatitudes of the Gospel
Josip Bošnjaković
orcid.org/0000-0002-2324-8717
; Catholic Faculty of Theology in Đakovo, Croatian Chatolic University, Zagreb, Croatia
*
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
The Beatitudes are the compass of Christian action, the worldview of a person who believes, and they are realized in concrete everyday life in dealing with painful situations in life since Jesus calls blessed the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, the hungry and thirsty for righteousness, the merciful, the pure of heart, then the peacemakers and persecuted for righteousness sake. These conditions and processes are often found in the background of people who have mild or severe mental difficulties. Jesus calls people blessed because they disapprove of violence, injustice, hypocrisy, heartlessness, wars, and at the same time, as a result of a traumatic experience, they leave behind, and in themselves, the light of a better world, already present and achievable, and not just “in another world”. In addition to being literary and stylistically extremely precious (e.g. woven into 72 words, i.e. 36 + 36), the Beatitudes contain a vertical (God-man) and a horizontal dimension (man-man) and are also a programmatic text, i.e. they bring about change at the reader. The text of the Beatitudes, without the man who reads it, would have no meaning, but likewise the man-believer without knowing and living the Beatitudes, remains a deeply impoverished being. In the midst of traumatic experiences, words of bliss become an instrument of growth to transform a person into a being with a strengthened identity. Bliss, symbolically speaking, is a violin that a person picks up as a result of life's sufferings, and by playing the composition changes the traumatic experience into an experience of growth.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
321132
URI
Publication date:
23.9.2024.
Visits: 80 *