Inner Cleanliness

July 7, 2026

Aleteia

 Hello!  How is each and every one? We are now half way through the year 2026.  How did you manage through the first half?  Surely you made it with flying colors, that is, you achieved all your expected plans for those months?  Anyway, we have the following half to continue achieving our goals. 

You know we have a junior staff by the name of Julyna.  When asked why that is, she said that her parents were not aware it was already July and when they did she was coming out of the delivery room. So when they were deciding on her name her father surprisingly or jokingly replied Julyna!  I realized the ingenuity of her father when I found myself on the first of this month exclaiming the same to her, naku! Julyna!  Happy birthday!  As she is good natured she just smiled and said thank you, miss.  It is so easy for her to smile.

This week the temperature has been rising and you and I need to take care and stay indoors, literally, inside your room. Only yesterday did I realize that.  The past days of the past week I have been stretching my resistance to heat only to reach the stage of feeling out of sorts.  So I thought I should be realistic and stay inside my room instead of sticking it out in the place where I usually work.

I did not give in to any regrets on this post being delayed.  I promised myself that tomorrow will be different.  We will be able to publish it anyway.

So let’s get back to serious business and continue with the third word of Christ on the Cross (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).

2  Blessed Are the Clean of Heart

On the hill of the Beatitudes, at the beginning of His public life, Our Lord preached: “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). Now, at the end of His life, on the hill of Calvary, He speaks to the clean of heart: “[Son] behold your mother, Woman, behold your son” (John 19:26–27).

This, of course, is not the beatitude of the world. The world is living today in what might be described as an era of calamity, which glorifies sex; hates restraint; identifies purity with coldness, innocence with ignorance; and turns men and women into Buddhas with their eyes closed, hands folded across their breasts, intently looking inward, thinking only of self.

It is just precisely against such a glorification of sex, and such egocentrism, which is so characteristic of the flesh, that Our Lord reacted in His third beatitude: “Blessed are the clean of heart.” 

The third beatitude and the third word are related as theory to practice and as doctrine to example, for it was the purity of Our Lord that made the gift of His Mother possible. This is the one supreme lesson to be drawn from this word — namely, that Mary became Our Mother because her Divine Son was purity itself. On no other condition could He have given her to us so completely and wholeheartedly. 

To understand how Mary became our Mother through purity, dwell for a moment on the nature of flesh. Flesh is essentially selfish even in its legitimate satisfaction. All its pleasures look to itself and not to another. Even the law of self-preservation implies, as the word itself states, a kind of selfishness. In its illegitimate pursuits, flesh is even more selfish still, for to satisfy itself, it must tyrannize over others and consume them to enkindle its own fires.

But God in his wisdom has instituted two escapes from the selfishness of the flesh: the sacrament of Matrimony and the vow of chastity. Each not only breaks the circle of selfishness but makes possible a greater and wider field of service. Or, to turn the truth around: the greater the purity of heart, the less the selfishness. 

The first escape from the selfishness of the flesh, which God has instituted, is the sacrament of Matrimony. Matrimony crushes selfishness, first of all, because it merges individuals into a corporate life in which neither lives for self but for the other; it crushes selfishness also because the very permanence of marriage is destructive of those fleeting infatuations, which are born with the moment and die with it; it destroys selfishness, furthermore, because the mutual love of husband and wife takes them out of themselves into the incarnation of their mutual love, their other selves, their children; and finally it narrows selfishness because the rearing of children demands sacrifice, without which, like unwatered flowers, they wilt and die.  

But these are only negative aspects of Matrimony in relation to the flesh. What is more important to note is that Matrimony cures selfishness by calling the flesh to the service of others. New horizons and vistas of devotion and sacrifice are opened to the eyes of flesh; others become more important than self; the ego becomes less circumscribed and more expansive. It reaches out to others, at times even forgetting self. 

Opusdei.org

And so true is this that there is generally less selfishness in large families than in small. A husband and wife may live only for one another, but a father and mother must die to themselves in order to live for their offspring. All unregulated and egotistic attachments, which destroy the integrity of a common life, are left behind them. Where their heart is, there is their treasure also. They lay their flesh on the altar of sacrifice that others may live, and this is the beginning of love.

But God has provided still another escape from the selfishness of flesh, one more complete than the sacrament of Matrimony, and that is the vow of chastity. The man or woman who takes this vow does so not to escape the sacrifices that marriage demands but to detach himself from all the ties of the flesh, in order that he may be free for greater service. 

As St. Paul puts it: “He that is with a wife is solicitous for the things of the world, how he may please his wife; and he is divided. He that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please God” (see 1 Cor. 7:32–33). 

The vow is a higher form of sacrifice than Matrimony, simply because it purchases greater release from the claims of the flesh. The greater the purity, the less the selfishness. He or she who takes it may be free to serve and love not just another man or woman and a few children, but all men and all women and all children in the bonds of charity in Christ Jesus, Our Lord.

Marriage releases the flesh from its individual selfishness for the service of the family; the vow of chastity releases the flesh not only from the narrow and circumscribed family, where there can still be selfishness, but also for the service of that family that embraces all humanity. That is why the Church asks those who consecrate themselves to the redemption of the world to take a vow and to surrender all selfishness, that they may belong to no one family and yet belong to all. 

That is why in that larger family of the kingdom of God, the priest is called “Father” — because he has begotten children not in the flesh, but in the spirit. That is why the superior of a religious community of women is called “Mother” — she has her little flock in Christ. That, too, is why certain teaching orders of men are called “Brothers,” and why women bound in religious life by the vow of chastity are called “Sisters.”

They are all one family in which new relations have been established, not by their birth in the flesh but by their birth in Christ — all selflessly seeking the glory of God and the salvation of sinners, under the one whom they love most on earth: their Holy Father, the successor of Peter, the Vicar of Jesus Christ. 

Now, if Matrimony and the vow of chastity provide releases from the selfishness of the flesh, and if increasing purity prepares for a wider service of others, then what should we expect when we meet perfect purity?

If a person becomes less and less egocentric as he becomes purer, then what should we look for in perfect sinlessness and perfect purity? If greater purity means greater selflessness, then what should we expect of innocence? The answer is: perfect sacrifice.

In a character in whom there is no selfishness, either for his comfort or even for his life, you have the sacrifice of the Cross. “For greater love than this, no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). With a purity that rises above all family ties and bonds of blood, Our Lord told us: “He that doth the will of the Father in heaven is a father, a mother, a brother, and a sister” (Matt. 12:50).

Our Lord on the Cross was so detached from the ego, so strange to selfishness, so thoughtless of the flesh that He looks upon His Mother, not uniquely as His own, but as the Mother of us all. Perfect purity is perfect selflessness. That is why Christ gives His Mother to us, as represented in the person of John: “Behold thy mother.”

He would not be selfish about her; He would not keep just for Himself the loveliest and most beautiful of all mothers; He would share His own Mother with us. And so, at the foot of the Cross, He gave her who is the Mother of God to us as the Mother of men. No human person could do that because the ties of flesh and the selfishness of the flesh are too close. The flesh is too close to us to enable us to share our mother with others. But absolute purity can. That is why the beatitude of purity is one with the third word, where selflessness, reaching its perfection in purity, gave His life that we might be saved, and gave us His Mother that we might not be orphans.

Purity, then, is not something negative; it is not just an unopened bud; it is not something cold; it is not ignorance of life. Is justice merely the absence of dishonesty? Is mercy merely the absence of cruelty? Is faith merely the absence of doubt? Purity is not merely the absence of sensuality; it is selflessness born of love and the highest love of all. 

Everyone with a vow is in love — not in love with that which dies, but with that love which is eternal: the love of God. There is a passion about chastity — what Francis Thompson calls a “passionless passion and wild tranquility.”

Chastity is not an impossible virtue. Even those who have it not may yet possess it. St. Augustine calls Mary Magdalene “the arch-virgin.” Think of it! The arch-virgin. He puts her next to the Blessed Mother in virginity; Magdalen, this common prostitute of the streets! She recovered purity, we might almost say, by receiving in anticipation of the Eucharist, the night she bathed the feet of Our Lord with tears. 

That day she came in contact with purity, and she so lived out its implications that within a short time we find her at the foot of the Cross on Good Friday. But who stands beside her? It is no other than the Blessed Mother. 

Catholicism.org

What a remarkable companionship: a woman whose name a few months ago was synonymous with sin, and the Blessed Virgin! If Mary loved Magdalen, then why cannot she love us? If there was hope for Magdalen, then there can be hope for us. If she recovered purity, then it can be recovered by us. But how, except through Mary, for why is she called Mother Most Pure except to make us pure?

Everyone can go to Mary, not only converted sinners like Magdalen but holy virgins and good mothers, for she is both Virgin and Mother. Virginity alone seems to lack something. There is a natural incompleteness about it — a faculty unused. Motherhood alone seems to have lost something. There is something surrendered in motherhood. But in Mary, there is “neither lack nor loss” (Sheila Kay Smith). There is virginity and motherhood — “springtime of eternal May.”

Purity, then, is not selfishness. It is surrender; it is thoughtfulness of others; it is sacrifice. It can even reach a peak where the Mother of Jesus can become our Mother. Away, then, with that false maxim of the world that tells us that love is blind. It cannot be blind. Our Lord says it is not blind. “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see” — see even God. Mary, open our eyes! 

— The Cross and the Beatitudes

Just keep it always in mind and heart that God is all knowing;  He knows you and myself more than you and I know our own selves.  Hence always bear in mind that what matters most is how you and I are in God’s eyes than in any other person’s eyes.   It is always good to keep God present wherever you and I go or always live each day in the presence of God.

As you talk with Him about the above thoughts during the quiet moments of your scheduled time of prayer, ask Him to help you keep Him present always.  Make Him your companion, your guide, your friend, in everything you desire, think, say, and do.  Thank Him for everything that goes well and not so well. Ask His help for anything you feel incapable or capable to do.  Remember without Him you and I can do nothing.  Express your sorrow for whatever negligence of yours or of others. Resolve to do better and to remember to fulfill your duties cheerfully and with love for Him.

If you know that God is with you at all times, you will be more and more aware of speaking with Him every step of the way.  It will come naturally to you to talk to him, to tell Him everything in your mind and heart and He will heed you and tell you more things that you also will heed.  It is going to be a meaningful and fulfilling relationship.

See how He is making it possible that this post be published on the day.       

See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”

 

Affectionately,   

Guadalupinky