Peter Bolland
Hello St. Paul’s! Please be seated.
I was 18 years old when I first read Gandhi’s autobiography. I read it because my philosophy professor told me to. And that guy was amazing, so I did what he told me to do.
And it was in Gandhi’s autobiography, called My Experiments With Truth, that I first learned about the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount.
You see I didn’t grow up Christian, so I didn’t know much about the Bible.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known to us by his honorific title Mahatma Gandhi—Mahatma, the Great One—was 18 years old when he left his native India to study law in London.
There he fell in with a group of local theosophists who were studying the Bhagavad Gita. Sure his family back home were devout Hindus, but he wasn’t. But something about the Gita grabbed him and called him deeper.
Written around the time of Christ, the Gita tells the story of the warrior prince Arjuna, charged with leading an army on the cusp of a great battle. As the battle is about to begin, Arjuna experiences a crippling panic attack. He has grave doubts about the morality of war, because, who wouldn’t?
The rest of the book is Krishna counseling Arjuna about the necessity of moral action, despite the danger and the morally ambiguous, murky outcomes of any course of action. It is your duty to act, said Krishna, but do so without any attachment to outcomes. “Let go. Use the Force Arjuna.”
And early on in the story it is revealed that Krishna is not just Arjuna’s chariot driver and boyhood friend—he is Lord Krishna, an avatar or incarnation of Vishnu—you know, God.
And as a kid I was struck by Gandhi’s seamless synthesis of Krishna’s teachings with the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount—another avatar of the Lord—about letting go and loving your enemy and turning the other cheek, all the while cleaving fiercely to the conviction that God or Brahman is the only reality, and we are all part of that one reality, and that we must always act in alignment with truth and justice, not self-interest, even if it means sacrificing our comfort. And our work must be done without attachment to outcomes or timetables. As Gandhi later wrote, “It is for us to make the effort, but the results are always in God’s hands.”
He was so moved by the teachings of Jesus and Krishna that for his entire life, Gandhi carried a copy of chapter two of the Bhagavad Gita and a copy of the Sermon on the Mount in his pocket, and he read them both every morning—these were his morning prayers. This was how he girded his loins for the battles ahead, one battle after another.
What struck Gandhi most about Jesus was his counsel on non-violence—that when you are met with force you must eschew violence and instead walk the moral ground of self-sacrifice.
People misunderstand non-violence as passivity, as laying down like a doormat and letting the world wipe its feet on you.
But it turns out non-violence is the most courageous, the most disciplined form of combat there is. Any fool can pull a trigger, or throw a punch. It takes real steel to not pull the trigger or throw the punch when every fiber of your passion is screaming “Do it! Do it!”
After three years in London Gandhi landed his first job as a lawyer in South Africa. It was a one year contract. He would stay there for 21 years.
And it was under the brutal repression of the white supremacist apartheid system in South Africa that the Gandhi we all know and love came to be—the highly skilled activist who blended spiritual depth with real-world pragmatism like few others.
During one of his many imprisonments in South Africa Gandhi read Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” the blueprint on how to practice non-cooperation with illegal and immoral systems, in an effort to overturn those systems.
Use only moral and non-violent methods. Keep working within the system, even when you’re struggling to overturn it. Be open and public about your actions—no masks, no hiding. And be willing to accept the consequences of your civil disobedience—prison, job loss, damaged reputations.
The only people hurt by our civil disobedience should be us.
Between the Gita, the Sermon on the Mount, and Thoreau, Gandhi was building the foundation of the Satyagraha, his sacred campaign of non-violence, the campaign he wielded so effectively against the British Empire during the waning years of its century-long colonization of India.
Another huge influence in Gandhi’s life was the Russian novelist and Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy, and his book The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You.
For Tolstoy, Christian love was not some comforting mealy-mouthed sentiment, but a dangerously fierce warrior stance. Love is energy, Tolstoy argued—the only energy that can bring about meaningful change. Gandhi would come to think of it as soul-force (as opposed to body-force), language Martin Luther King would adopt and bake into the American Civil Rights Movement.
But for both Tolstoy and Gandhi, our first task must be to become people of integrity, to cleave close to virtue, awaken into loving-kindness. We must change ourselves before we have any hope of changing unjust systems.
Only then can we move into the field of action, not in an air of superiority, but in a stance of supreme humility and the consciousness of service—that we are out here interrupting cruelty and working for justice not because we have all the answers, but because we simply can no long stand by while injustice rolls over everything that is good and beautiful and true in the world.
And the beatitudes are the script for fomenting that inner transformation.
Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes, a tone-setting preamble offered as a blessing, and as medicine for a world in pain.
The word “beatitude”—from the Latin word for “blessing”—signals the intent of these famous lines. Jesus speaks the beatitudes to bring the blessing of God into our midst, to bring God-consciousness into this present moment, here and now, and to minister to the woundedness of the world.
Jesus begins, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Poor in spirit—that’s us, losing sleep, afraid all the time, kicked in the gut, depressed, anxious, lost in despair. Yet Jesus chooses to start here, in our pain—and reframes our despair as an opening, an entry point, a necessary passageway.
And then he says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
Mourning is the willingness to feel grief for ourselves and for others. Mourning is empathy. Empathy for the suffering of others is not weakness as Elon Musk said—it is our superpower. When we mourn we feel the suffering of others, and we awaken to our oneness. Mourning is loving.
“Blessed are the meek,” Jesus said, “for they will inherit the earth.”
Meekness, gentleness, and tenderness are the portals through which our love pours forth. When we surrender and empty out to that which is holy, we are back-filled by an everlasting stream.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
That burning passion we all feel for truth and justice and fairness and kindness and a world that works for everyone?—keep that hunger alive. Maybe we don’t have to know what perfect justice looks like. Maybe the longing is enough. And to pray with our feet and just keep walking, together.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”
When we suffer wrongdoing at the hands of others, pause, breathe, root down into oneness, and fill your responsive actions with bold mercy and fierce loving-kindness. We must oppose what is wrong, but mercifully and with discernment and discipline. When others show no mercy, as they showed no mercy to Alex Pretti—that is when our mercy must shine brightest.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
And what is it to be “pure in heart?” It is to tend to our own mental and spiritual health. Our bodies, hearts, and minds are the tools we use to be the presence of God’s love in the world. If our tools are dull, God can’t do what needs to be done through our hands and voices and hearts and minds. As the great Hindu teacher Ramana Maharshi said, “The single greatest thing you can do for world peace is to show up awake.” When you work on your own awakening, you are working for the awakening of the whole world from this nightmare of fear, ignorance, and cruelty.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
To never give up on the possibility of peace. To draw everything and everyone into this present moment. Start fresh, again and again and again. Tell the truth about the past, but don’t live there. Be here now. Our resentments and our grievances are not our friends. Let them show us the path, and then start walking, without looking back.
Jesus said, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Listen to those who have suffered the most. Center their voices. As a straight, cis-gender, native born, able bodied, English speaking, educated, middle class white male, I’m not the one they’re hunting. So I am morally compelled to wield my unearned advantages to make room at the center for the voices of those shoved toward the margins by the very power structures that have benefited me. (These beatitudes are some woke stuff, eh?)
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, and your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
I love this last one, because it’s telling me not to despair—to rejoice and be glad, despite all the darkness. Our joy is part of our resistance to evil. Our laughter breaks the spell of the pomposity of cruelty. Our mockery steals the power of their authoritarian cosplay, their ridiculous masks, their theatrical thuggery.
Never have the words of our wisdom texts and the prophets who spoke them—Thoreau, Krishna, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Jesus—never have they been more powerful, more relevant, than they are right now.
And as Jesus said at the end of so many of his parables, “Let those who have ears, hear.”
Amen
