For The Love Of Poverty

The poorest man in a religious community is not necessarily the one who has the fewest objects assigned to him for his use. Poverty is not merely a matter of not having “thing”. It is an attitude which leads us to renounce some of the advantages which come from the use of things. A man can possess nothing, but attach great importance to the personal satisfaction and enjoyment he wants to get out of things which are common to all—the chant in choir, the sermons in chapter, the reading in the refectory—free time, other people’s time… Often the poorest man in the community is the one who is at everybody else’s disposition. He can be used by all and never takes time to do anything special for himself. 

Poverty—can bear on things like our opinion, our “style,” anything that tends to affirm us as distinct from others, as superior to others in such a way that we take satisfication in these peculiarities and treat them as “possessions.” “Poverty” should not make us peculiar. The eccentric man is not poor in spirit. Even the ability to help others and to give our time and possessions to them can be “possessed” with attachment if by these actions we are really forcing ourselves on others and obligating them to ourselves. For in that case we are trying to buy them and get possession of them by the favors we do for them. What one of us, O Lord, can speak of poverty without shame? We who have taken vows of poverty in the monastery: are we really poor? Do we know what it is to love poverty? Have we even stopped to think, for a moment, why poverty is to be loved? Yet You, O Lord, came into the world to be poor among the poor, because it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. And we, with our vow, we are content with the fact that we legally possess nothing, and that for everything we have, we must ask someone else’s permission? Is this poverty? Can a man who has lost his job and who has no money with which to pay his bills, and who sees his wife and children getting thin, and who feels fear and anger eating out his heart—can he get the things he desperately needs merely by asking for them? Let him try. And yet we, who can have many things we don’t need and many more which are scandalous for us to have—we are poor, because we have them with permission! Poverty means need. To make a vow of poverty and never go without anything, never have to need something without getting it, is to try to mock the Living God.

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