The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
Just down the road from the Mount of the Beatitudes, right on the Sea of Galilee, is the Church of the Primacy of St. Peter. From there you can walk down to the shore and meditate while listening to the calming waters lap against your feet as you walk. Or you can do what I did and fall. Hard.
“James, take your shoes off, the water's great!” a friend called out to me. “Maybe you can walk on it!”
I can easily tell you that, as a longtime swimmer and a bad Catholic, I cannot walk on water. But even so, free of shoes and socks, I gingerly stepped on the smooth stones as a feeling of dread washed over me with the waves.
"I'm unsteady, this isn't safe," I thought. I looked over at fellow pilgrims, their peaceful smiles telling me I'd be fine. "Why am I feeling dread in the place where Jesus walked and preached?" I thought.
Then suddenly, I wasn't looking at the blue water anymore but the blue sky. I had slipped on a rock and fell on my back on the drier part of the pebble beach. I might as well have been hit with David's stone. It's like that "Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got into this situation" TikTok.
Some days it's easy to find ourselves in the Beatitudes. Other days it's hard.
At the Mount of the Beatitudes, I imagined what I'd think if I was sitting there hearing Jesus preach the Beatitudes. That, despite our material and spiritual poverty, our hunger, our suffering and our pain, we will find great reward in heaven.
As then and today, I wonder: Is that true? Why can't we find it here? Next to where we fell down?
Father Henri Nouwen once said: “The Beatitudes say, ‘Blessed are the poor.’ They don’t say, ‘Blessed are those who care for the poor.’”
"The blessing is located in our poor people, in people who are weak," he continued. "They are the ones we should stay close to, not because they need us but because we need to receive from them the blessing."
Even if we cannot find ourselves in the Beatitudes every day, or if we struggle to find a Beatitude alive in a single week, we should remain hopeful that we can at least find Christ Himself in the Gospel, in the Eucharist and in the grace between Sunday Masses.
When we do this, we can become a more Christ-like disciple who “is like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season, and whose leaves never fade.”
James Ramos is a Texas-based photo-journalist and designer. He loves good soup, swimming, dogs, a great looping TikTok, and anything by Father Henri Nouwen. Follow him on Instagram for more of his photography and writing.