Blessed are the beatniks.

Long before the current craze of metal objects piercing ears, noses, tongues, navels, and even more adventurous parts of the anatomy, prior to the long hair, love beads, and peace signs of 1960s hippiehood, the Beat Generation raised eyebrows in the 1950s. Its progenitors, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, wrote novels and poems that challenged the beige blandness of the Eisenhower era.

Few people know that for Jack Kerouac, "Beat--a shorthand term for beatitude and the idea that the downtrodden are saintly--was not about politics but about spirituality and art," according to Kerouac scholar Douglas Brinkley. Jack Kerouac was enchanted by the mysticism of the Beatitudes. He had "faith in the idea of the holy outcast," which energized some of his major characters in his novels.

I first encountered some of the Beat Generation's poetry in high-school study hall. One of my classmates surreptitiously passed around "Howl," Allen Ginsberg's then outrageous poem, which begins, "I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix." This was a quantum leap from the usual fare high-school English classes of the '50s force-fed their students--things like Great Expectations and Silas Marner.

Not only did English class miss out on the world's first encounter with the Beat Generation's literature, but so too did religion class. No mention was ever made of Jack Kerouac's writing in my pre-Vatican II religion classes when it was assumed that all truth was best articulated through catechisms and textbooks with imprimatur.

Nonetheless, Kerouac was a deeply religious writer. He once responded to a divinity student's question about the theme of his most popular book, On the Road: "It was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him." Few people, however, saw either the Beat Generation, who popularly became known as "beatniks," or Kerouac's writings as particularly resonant of the Beatitudes of Matthew's and Luke's gospels.

Jack Kerouac hated the term beatnik, coined by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen in 1958. Kerouac claimed, "Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like Saint Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity."

Might Jack Kerouac someday emerge as one of the preeminent Catholic novelists of the 20th century? Might his books become classic spiritual texts someday? Probably not, because, unlike other spiritual giants, this creative and conflicted artist never attained spiritual peace before his death at the age of 47.

Might the practice of Christianity, including Kerouac's own Catholicism, someday become a "Beat Religion" positively addicted to the centrality of the Beatitudes? Stranger things surely have happened within the precincts of religion.

Peter Gilmour ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.