Set Yourself on the Right Way
Friday, November 7, 2025
Elias Chacour is a Palestinian Arab-Israeli and a former archbishop of the Melkite Greek Catholic church in Palestine. At one point in his ministry, Chacour went against the orders of local authorities to build a secondary school to educate the youth in his community in Galilee. He drew on his understanding of the Beatitudes to strengthen him in overcoming many challenges to its completion:
Knowing Aramaic, the language of Jesus, has greatly enriched my understanding of Jesus’ teaching. Because the Bible as we know it is a translation of a translation, we sometimes get a wrong impression. For example, we are accustomed to hearing the Beatitudes expressed passively:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
“Blessed” is the translation of the word makarioi, used in the Greek New Testament. However, when I look further back to Jesus’ Aramaic, I find that the original word was ashray, from the verb yashar. Ashray does not have this passive quality to it at all. Instead, it means “to set yourself on the right way for the right goal; to turn around, repent; to become straight or righteous.”
How could I go to a persecuted young man in a Palestinian refugee camp, for instance, and say, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” or “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”? That man would revile me, saying neither I nor my God understood his plight, and he would be right.
When I understand Jesus’ words in Aramaic, I translate like this:
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you who are hungry and thirsty for justice, for you shall be satisfied.
Get up, go ahead, do something, move, you peacemakers, for you shall be called children of God.
To me this reflects Jesus’ words and teachings much more accurately. I can hear him saying, “Get your hands dirty to build a human society for human beings; otherwise, others will torture and murder the poor, the voiceless, and the powerless.” Christianity is not passive but active, energetic, alive, going beyond despair….
“Get up, go ahead, do something, move,” Jesus said to his disciples.
Ultimately, the secondary school was completed and allowed to stand, despite the lack of official permits for water and electricity.
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5 on Friday John Chaffee
1.
“Food is not evil, but gluttony is. Childbearing is not evil, but fornication is. Money is not evil, but avarice is. Glory is not evil, but vainglory is. Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse.”
– Maximus the Confessor, 7th Century Monk and Theologian
One thing I enjoy about the early patristics and monastics is that they actually had a relatively well-developed understanding of good and evil.
For many of them, the distinction that matters most is how a thing is used. We are prone to think that things are evil in themselves, but God looked at the whole creation and called it “Tov Me’od/Strongly Good.” What is potentially evil is how we use the things God has called “Strongly Good.”
The actual difficulty arises when we start avoiding things that can be used for the wrong reasons. Things such as money, alcohol, sex, food, etc., are then avoided because they might tempt us. What really needs to happen is for us to re-examine the attachments we have to such things.
2.
“When a system is not dominated by anxiety, everyone is free to speak truthfully, everyone is free to listen curiously.”
– Chuck DeGroat, Author and Therapist
Unhealthy, reactive, and anxiety-driven families or workplaces do not allow people the freedom to speak their mind. In such systems, there is no such thing as a “feedback loop” in which the system has channels for people to share their experiences.
It is not uncommon for me to hear that a church system does not have annual reviews or exit interviews for its staff or for congregants who leave for another church. Sometimes the fear of conflict leads us to cut off even the chance for a disagreement, even if it could lead to healthy learning and then healthy course correcting.
For a system to be healthy, its members need to grow in their own health, their own non-reactivity, and their own non-anxious presence. Once there are enough of that type of maturity, a tipping point can be reached, and the larger family, community, or workplace can adopt that same level of health.
3.
“We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
– Brene Brown, Researcher & Sociologist
In an effort to avoid being sad…
We also numb our ability to experience joy.
We cannot have the light without the darkness.
The goal is not to excise or cut out all the darker, heavier emotions. The goal is actually to feel them appropriately. To avoid them is to only delay their eventual explosion or “seeping out” when we do not want them to make themselves known.
I am a couple of years into this task of learning to integrate all the emotions. I used to be dominated entirely by existing on the intellectual level. It was as a result of some severe pain that I learned the secondhand destruction that can come from not integrating my own emotions without judging myself.
As a reminder, I repeat three words to myself…
“Integrate, integrate, integrate.”
Or, in other words…
“Make-whole, make-whole, make-whole.”
Or, in other words…
“Holy, holy, holy.”
4.
“It is only through shadows that one comes to know the light.”
– Catherine of Siena, Italian Mystic
This is also known as the via negativa.
We want to know God by the via positiva, through the good things, the pleasant things, the enjoyable or easy things.
There is a strange paradox: we are most aware of God’s presence because of the experience of God’s absence. Likewise, we are most aware of our need for love because of the lack of love we experience from those we might most expect it from.
Years ago, I took some high school guys out for wings. These three chaps did not come to my youth group or Sunday school with any regularity, and yet we sat and talked about God and faith for close to 3.5 hours.
During that time, I said, “You know, I only came around to appreciating and wanting the holy life because I got tired and frustrated enough of the opposite that I began wanting the holy life for myself, and not because others wanted it for me.”
Again, as Catherine would say, “It is only through shadows that one comes to know the light.”
5.
“Anything touched by the light becomes a light itself.”
The best way to deal with the dark is not to avoid it, but to shine an exposing, illuminating, cleansing light on it.
And, in so doing, that which was previously dark becomes something that passes that same light forward.
