I think that our Holy Father Francis said it well when he said that “Love is not loved.” Man has an inclination to love everything, but love itself.
In order to serve God we must rip ourselves of anything and anyone who claims our love before God. That is the proper expression of the Beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, because theirs in the Kingdom of God.”
Francis, coming very a very wealthy family and having a very ambicious father understood all too well how love that which is not love can supress man’s natural inclination toward the Divine. I say natural, because it has been given to us through grace; but it is often ignored.
As a consecrated lay Franciscan I minister to children whose families have a great deal of wealth, but their children all have disabilities. That’s why they come to our ministry. Unfortunately, these parents all want their children to attend college, if possible Harvard and to be financially successful. That being said,they demand that we prepare their children for a successful life. They show little interest in our effort to prepare their children to be the best human beings they can be.
They often place value on their children’s academic success and express great disappointment when they learn that their children have disabilities that they will have to live with their entire lives. No matter how we try to help them understand that their children have gifts and certain abilities that will help them survive and make a contribution to society, they are not satisfied. They want more. In the end, they don’t realize that they are not loving their children for who they are, but for who they project them to be. This is a perfect example of a lack of evangelical poverty, the desire for success. Success is measured not by what a person can contribute to society, but by what a person can achieve in society. This is an absence of poverty.
They often do not understand why most of us lay men with PhDs and Masters degrees would promise to live without property and work for less money than our counterparts in the secular world. They believe that this kind of detachment is only for priests and sisters.
When we try to explain that Francis discovered that Christ wants this kind of detachment from all Christian, they are baffled. They don’t understand the idea of having enough to eat, enough to stay healthy, enough to have a roof over your head, and enough to wear. The word “enough” is not in their vocabulary.
When I read the biographies and writings of our Holy Father Francis I can see how he understood the Gospels so clearly. A spirit of evangelical poverty is the same as being able to say, ENOUGH!
There are many things that we do not need. There are relationships that we do not need. There are places that we need not go to or forms of recreation that we do not need or that world cruise that is not necessary, especially when Christ is hungry, sick and abandoned.
Christ does not ask us to go hungry, homeless or to neglect our health and well-being. He does not ask us to neglect our need for relaxation and entertainment. Those are part of being human. Christ asks us to put aside what is more than enough, so that we can use our surplus to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick and provide for the elderly in our families and society. In return he promises us the Kingdom of Heaven.
He does not ask that we deprive our children of what they need. He only asks that we teach them to discriminate between what they need and what they want. Because what we want is not always what the soul needs in order to get closer to God.
Often, what we want gets in the way, because it takes time to care for the things that we have. It takes energy. Sometimes, it requires the use of violence to protect what we have. But the question must always be asked, do we have what we need or do we have what we want?
Shouldn’t God be what we want most in life and everything else come second?
In and of themselves material things and money are neither good nor bad. They are neutral. What we do with them is the issue and how much importance they have in our lives.
We don’t always need a closet full of clothes or the latest car on the market. We don’t always need that five bedroom house for three people. More often than not, that house will require so much care and investment that in the end it becomes the cause of stress rather than satisfaction.
In a sense Evangelical Poverty is a call to common sense, which is not always so common.
Fraternally,
JR
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III. POVERTY OF HEART