Memorize the Text:
"With only a little effort, all the beatitudes can be memorized. Once learned by heart, we carry within us for the rest of our lives a short summary of the teaching of Jesus Christ: the whole gospel in a grain of salt.
"Some churches see to it that the beatitudes become engraved in our hearts while we are still children. In the Orthodox church it is customary to sing the beatitudes every Sunday during the first procession, when the gospel book is carried out of the sanctuary into the main part of the church and back into the sanctuary again to be placed on the altar. Week after week the words are sung until they reach so deep a place that late in life, when the face in the mirror belongs to a stranger, these words will still shine like pebbles in a stream.
"Anything sung is easily memorized."
To Practice: What sacred texts have your memorized? Memorize the Beatitudes or another essential teaching from your tradition.
Look for Beauty:
"Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, had come to live in the slums not because she felt obliged by God to immerse herself in ugliness but because of the beauty she found in places of poverty and the joy it often gave her: the beauty in faces, the beauty of trees and plants that managed to survive despite urban desolation, the beauty of kitchen smells at supper time coming from neighborhood apartments, the beauty of the liturgy even in the poorest parish church. She often quoted Dostoevsky's words: 'The world will be saved by beauty.' "
To Practice: Consciously be on the lookout for the beauty that may be hiding in strange places.
