Around the Year with Emmet Fox: A Book of Daily Readings

by Emmet Fox

March 31 THE PURE IN HEART Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God (Matthew 5:8). This is one of those wonderful gnomic sayings in which the Bible is so rich. It is a summing up in a few words of a whole philosophy of religion. Let us begin by considering what the promise in this Beatitude is. It is nothing less than to see God. To “see” in the sense referred to here, signifies spiritual perception, and spiritual perception is just that capacity to apprehend the true nature of Being that we all so sadly lack. We live in God’s world, but we do not in the least know it as it is. Heaven lies all about us—but because we are lacking in spiritual perception, we are unable to recognize it, to experience it, and, therefore, so far as we are concerned, we may be said to be shut out of Heaven. We are very much in the position of a color-blind man in a beautiful flower garden. All around him are glorious colors; but he sees only blacks, whites, and grays. If we suppose him to be also devoid of the sense of smell, we shall see what a very small part of the glory of the garden exists for him. Yet it is all there, if he could but sense it. Out task is to surmount these limitations as rapidly as may be, until we reach the point where we can know things as they really are—experience Heaven as it really is. That is what is meant by “seeing God.” To see God is to apprehend Truth as it really is, and this is infinite freedom and perfect bliss.