As a matter of fact, yeah! Philip Yancey claims to have discovered that Jesus' Beatitudes unveil "a plain formula of psychological truth, the deepest level of truth that we can know on earth." Yancey writes in The Jesus I Never Knew:
"The Beatitudes reveal that what succeeds in the kingdom of heaven also benefits us most in this life here and now. It has taken me many years to recognize this fact, and only now am I beginning to understand the Beatitudes. They still jar me every time I read them, but they jar me because I recognize in them a richness that unmaskes my own poverty.
Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . Blessed are the meek. A book like Paul Johnson's Intellectuals sets out in convincing detail what all of us know to be true: the people we laud, strive to emulate, and feature on the covers of popular magazines are not the fulfilled, happy, blanced persons we might imagine. Although Johnson's subjects (Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Bertolt Brecht, et al.) would be judged successful by any modern standard, it would be difficult to assemble a more miserable, egomaniacal, abusive company.
My career as a journalist has afforded me opportunities to interview 'stars,' including NFL football greats, movie actors, music performers, best-selling authors, politicians, and TV personalities. These are the people who dominate the media. We fawn over them, poring over the minutiae of their lives: the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the aerobic routines they follow, the people they love, the toothpaste they use. Yet I must tell you that, in my limited experience, I have found Paul Johnson's principle to hold true: our 'idols' are as miserable a group of people as I have ever met. Most have troubled or broken marriagtes. Nearly all are incurably dependent on psychotherapy. In a heavy irony, these larger-than-life heroes seem tormented by self-doubt.
I have also spent time with peopel I call 'servants.' Doctors and nurses who work among the ultimate outcasts, leprosy patients in rural India. A Princeton graduate who runs a hotel for the homeless in Chicago. Health workers who have left high-paying jobs to serve in a backwater town of Mississippi. Relief workers in Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and other repositories of human suffering. The Ph.D.'s I met in Arizona, who are now scattered throughout jungles of South America translating the Bible into obscure languages.
I was prepared to honor and admire these servants, to hold them up as inspiring examples. I was not prepared to envy them. Yet as I now reflect on the two groups side by side, stars and servants, the servants clearly emerge as the favored ones, the graced ones. Without question, I would rather spend time among the servants than among the stars: they possess qualities of depth and richness and even joy that I have not found elsewhere. Servants work for low pay, long hours, and no applause, 'wasting' their talents and skills among the poor and uneducated. somehow, though, in the process of losing their lives they find them." (pp. 118-119) (my underlining)
Me: Yancey's reflections ring true. It's not a matter of trying to sound pious. It's the down-to-earth truth and reality.