On Limits, Blessing, and Authentic Human Happiness ( by Micha Boyett )

Sermon on the Mount by Carl Bloch (1877)

“Maybe Christians shouldn’t use the word luck,” a mentor said in the car when I was in high school. I craved spiritual conversations with grown ups then, and I sealed this memory in my imagination. This woman’s friend had recently shared a miraculous story: her husband had dived into a shallow pool, slammed his head and come out unscathed. This was not luck, her friend insisted. It was blessing. God had prevented this man from breaking his neck. 

“Maybe,” my mentor wondered aloud to me, “If we believe God is in control, then anytime something good happens, we’re blessed.”

Right? 

I took that conversation to heart and turned my language around. I was blessed when the boy of my dreams—Taylor Mendell!—asked me to prom as a sophomore. I was blessed when I got the academic scholarship I studied so hard for. I was blessed when all the teachers who loved me and my nerdy, people pleasing presence voted me Girl of the Year as a senior. 

And then I went to a Southern Baptist university, which in 1998, was a strange collective of performative spiritual-speak. It wasn’t long before I was pretty certain faith was mostly an act my peers participated in for social advancement. I was tired of being asked where “God [was] leading me” that particular week, or how much “the Word” was speaking into my life. 

And I was over being blessed. Not when the real world was falling apart outside my tiny, closed-off college campus. I started to think about that story of the diving-husband. Surely there was another woman out there who did lose her husband when he dove in a shallow pool. Why would God bless one person and not another?

What about the endless folks who die of diseases, the ones who lose their jobs, the people in our communities who don’t have food on their tables? Why don’t they get the blessings?

I switched my language back to luck in my twenties. Luck seemed more true, less cruel. I didn’t want to worship a God who gave middle class girls like me access to education, financial support, and career opportunities, while those who didn’t grow up with health insurance, a three-bedroom home, or parents with salaries were somehow living without the generous hand of God. 

I didn’t turn back to examine my old language until my late thirties, when my son Ace was born with Down syndrome, and much of the old evangelical guard on the Internet came out to declare blessings. 

Ace was an angel here to teach us all how to be kind! My son was worthy of memes! I swung along a pendulum: there were those who saw my child’s disability as deserving of pity, and those who declared my son heavenly in nature. Neither was true: both views dehumanized his life.

The reality is that Ace was and is a Person. A person here for himself, a person with likes—trampoline jumping, hula hoop twirling, garden digging, high-five giving—and dislikes—loud noises, dogs that jump, forced-chair-sitting, picking up toys. 

My son is a human, here to be a human. 

For all the religious posing in my evangelical past, I found the antidote to blessing in the words of Jesus. I didn’t necessarily seek out the Beatitudes as much as they appeared inside me, a well-worn list of the people Jesus was interested in having on his team, a list that continually came to mind when I struggled to give words to the gift of my son’s life. 

Blessed are the impoverished of spirit, blessed are the grieving ones, blessed are the ones who lack power… 

I couldn’t shake that Jesus was always blessing people, but his blessings looked a lot less like preventing catastrophes or getting girls prom dates, and a lot more like meaning-making, helping folks discover a real and authentic life. 

In the Gospel of Matthew, the radical litany of blessings that Jesus proposed on hillside outside of Capernaum consisted of nine human experiences of suffering, generosity, and longing. In a world that has always lived by a script that honors those who wield power and those who live with ease, Jesus’s words in Matthew 5 offer an entirely different narrative.

In his book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, scholar Jonathan Pennington suggests that in his list of Beatitudes, Jesus borrowed from a much-used speaking device of the Greco-Roman virtue tradition. In taking that tradition into account, it's fair to suggest that when Jesus used the word makarios, the word we usually translate as blessed, a better translation might be authentic human happiness, wholeness, or flourishing. 

This was the language I was looking for when Ace was a baby. I wanted him to be blessed, but not based on some notion that he was half-angel, half-human. I didn't believe his life was easy; I believed his life was sacred.

When Jesus’s words swelled in my chest at the sight of my son, I was experiencing a full-body knowing that Ace’s life—his limits and his longings—were leading him to a kind of wholeness. I didn’t have a definition for that wholeness, or what Ace’s authentically good life might look like. But I knew that somehow, in the heart of the divine, there is an invitation for all of us to a true sort of flourishing, one found in our limits, in our aching humanity. 

The Beatitudes told me that sacred blessing / wholeness / flourishing was not only transforming Ace, but everyone around him. 

I like that word whole. 

Whole are the weak ones. The poor in wealth and the poor in soul. They are caretakers of the dream of God. 

Whole are the ones who grieve. They will be invited to a divine banquet. 

Whole are the powerless ones and the ones who release their power. They will recognize that the entire earth has always been theirs.

Whole are the ones who long for justice that restores and dignifies. They will be filled with mutually dependent love. 

As I write this I wait for Ace’s school bus to arrive. He will stare out the bus window, his big blue eyes behind thick circular glasses, searching for me as he pulls up. He’ll appear at the top of the school bus stairs and twinkle his eyes at me. 

“Ace, no jumping today,” I’ll say. 

His aide Martha will repeat my warning. “Ace, don’t you jump.” My nine-year-old will sigh, and take slow motion steps down two of the stairs. Then he’ll giggle and jump off the bottom step before I can stop him. I’ll catch him. I always do. 

When I ask him how his day was he won’t answer with his voice. My son doesn’t speak. But we’ll pull out the ipad he communicates with, where he tells me how he feels: happy, calm, mad, tired, etc. 

Lately he says he feels “calm” when he gets home. We sit on the couch together and I tickle his hand, or I push him on the swing in our front yard. I’ll sing a song and he’ll make noises along with me, off key. He’ll lead me into the kitchen, where he’ll open the drawer of snacks, grab his favorite protein bar and hold it up for me to unwrap. We’ll sit together in the quiet while he eats. He’ll use the ipad to ask for more.

There’s a lot I’m not sure about, but I know about authentic human happiness—the kind of happiness that lives at the bottom of striving, performing, and appearances. 

I know about wholeness that arrives when our stories aren’t perfect, wholeness that shows up in our limits, wholeness that is built on longings for a good and just world. I know about being stretched toward love. Which, I suppose, means I’m blessed.

* * * 

Micha Boyett (MFA, Syracuse University) is the author of the recently released Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole. She’s also the author of Found and a contributor to the New York Times bestseller A Rhythm of Prayer, edited by Sarah Bessey. She is cohost of the award winning The Lucky Few podcast, creator of The Slow Way podcast and newsletter, and has written for various publications. In addition to her work as a writer, she is a part time youth director at Good Shepherd Church in NYC. Boyett lives with her husband and their three sons.