"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8)

🙏 Questions for reflection

• What do I most value? Do I subordinate love of these things to my love of God, so as to truly seek Him "in singleness of heart" (Wis. 1:1)?
• Have I spurned the intellectual life – the study of Sacred Scripture and Theology, but also any enquiry concerned with truth – perhaps regarding it as something abstract and far removed from the practical life of charity, or perhaps simply out of sloth? How have I used my intellect to its full capacity to lead me into a deeper love of God and neighbour?
• Have I allowed intellectual pursuits to replace prayer rather than to better prepare me for it, and even to become suffused with it?
• Do I manifest my faith by persevering in prayer each day, or do I give up when there appears to be no immediate consolation?

📚 Further reading

• St Augustine, Sermon 360B. St Augustine explores the relationship between faith and purity of heart. 
• Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXVII. Dante places the first half of this beatitude on the lips of the angel of chastity, as souls leave the terrace of the lustful and proceed to the top of Mount Purgatory. The sixth beatitude is fitting not only because of the connection to chastity, but also because it signals the completion of the purgation of all of the seven deadly sins.
• St John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel. Magisterial treatise which thoroughly deals with the role of the intellect in the spiritual life. See especially Book I in which the crucial importance of reason in the so-called "active purgation ('night') of the senses" is revealed.
• John of St Thomas, The Gifts of the Holy Spirit.
• Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life. An anonymous prayer from the Syriac tradition alludes to the translucency of a pure heart that enables the divine light to shine out of us.
• St John Cassian, Conferences. In the first conference, Abba Moses proposes that the Kingdom of God is the ultimate end of the monk, but it is "purity of heart" that is his scopos (his immediate goal, the means of attaining the end). 

🗎 The text of this meditation is available here.

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