The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
Blessed are the poor in spirit. What an odd statement! Blessedness and poverty joined together—how can this be? In its secular connotations, poverty is almost always associated with misery, yet our faith considers evangelical poverty to be a virtue. For this reason, most religious orders require members to take vows of poverty, promising not to own anything but to live simply and hold everything in common. This practice encourages detachment from worldly possessions, which treats everything as a gift: we acknowledge that the things we use do not belong to us, but rather come from God, to be enjoyed gratefully while they are given to us and surrendered joyfully when we are called to give them up.
If detachment is hard to practice with material possessions, it is even harder with qualities we consider fundamental to our identity: our talents, intellectual abilities, memory, will, even the spiritual gifts we’ve been given. At some point or another, life will force us to surrender many of these things. A sudden injury renders us disabled. The natural process of aging robs us of our physical and mental capacities. A disease like Alzheimer’s steals our memory. In our prayer lives, we are all likely to experience desolation, when consolation has been stripped from us.
These are all experiences of poverty. Just as we are asked to practice material detachment, our Lord asks us to practice poverty of spirit. He calls us to recognize that even those things we think are constitutive of our identity are a gift from Him, not things to be clung to—and that when He takes those things away He does so because He wants to give us an even greater gift, if we have eyes to see: deeper intimacy with Him, with the God who became man, who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Phil 2: 7). C.S. Lewis wrote, “We are half-hearted creatures...when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.” To cling even to our most precious earthly possessions, our most treasured human abilities, is to content ourselves with mud pies, when what Christ is offering us by taking those things away is His very self.
The lives of the saints furnish manifold examples of such blessedness in poverty. St. Monica’s wayward son brought her to her knees in prayer, leading to her own sanctification and her son’s conversion. St. Patrick’s enslavement led to his conversion and the conversion of Ireland. St. Ignatius of Loyola’s debilitating leg injury forced him to reevaluate his life, leading to the founding of the Jesuit order. St. Thomas More wrote of his gratitude for the loss of his job and his ultimate imprisonment because it gave him time for prayer and contemplation. St. Teresa of Calcutta’s spiritual dryness gave her a deeper compassion for the abandonment felt by the poor. Spiritual detachment blessed these saints with true “wisdom from God” (1 Cor 1:30) as they found God in their poverty.
May God grant us also the grace of seeing our lives with the eyes of faith, to perceive the blessing in our apparent poverty as we surrender ourselves to our loving Father who always wants the best for us, and who gives abundantly even when He takes away.
Karen Celano lives in the Boston area with her family, where she serves as Dean of Academics and Middle School Director at a classical Catholic elementary school. She holds a Master of Theological Studies degree from the University of Notre Dame and is currently pursuing a Master of Classical Leadership degree from Benedictine College (KS). When she’s not working, studying, or homemaking, you’re likely to find her praying with the Benedictine monks or reading nineteenth-century literature.
