The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [93]
Finally, here’s a challenge: get to know the poor. That’s difficult for some of us, since we are sometimes trained to ignore them, view them as lazy, or fear them. But finding opportunities to volunteer in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter (and finding appropriate and safe ways for your children to do so as well) will introduce you to people like Gauddy, Agustino, and Loyce in your own community. You will soon come to know them not as “the poor,” but as individuals with their own stories.
They will have often suffered much, and it may, initially, be hard to be around them, but they can also teach you a great deal about gratitude, about perseverance, and about being close to God.
POVERTY OF SPIRIT
Many poor men and women instinctively turn to God: like Gauddy during times of joy or like Agustino during times of hope. One reason is that they live another kind of poverty that often accompanies material poverty: the radical understanding of dependence on God, called “poverty of spirit.”
Poverty of spirit is an overlooked concept within many spiritual and religious circles. “Blessed are the poor in spirit” is the first saying in St. Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount (5:3–12). But for many believers, those words are just as mysterious as they were when Jesus first uttered them. If you ask a practicing Christian if he should be charitable, he will say yes. If you ask if he should be poor in spirit, he might say, “Huh?”
Perhaps not surprisingly, I first came into contact with real poverty of spirit in East Africa, but in a roundabout way.
Though I had looked forward to going to Nairobi, once I arrived I felt a crushing loneliness, since I was cut off from friends in the States, worried that I couldn’t endure two years in East Africa, and concerned about picking up some rare tropical illness. (Before I left, my doctor gave me a pamphlet that helpfully pointed out all the exotic diseases I could contract while there.)
On top of that, I was first assigned to a job that consisted largely of paperwork. Had I come to Kenya to push papers? In a few months, I would begin my work with the small businesses, the best job I’ve ever had, but at the time, life was both boring and lonely.
During this low ebb, my Jesuit formation director sent me a book to encourage me: Poverty of Spirit, by Johannes Baptist Metz, a German Catholic theologian.
Metz speaks of poverty of spirit as the inherent limitations that every human being faces in daily life. It is the spiritual awakening that comes with knowing not only the talents and gifts given us by God, which fill us with a grateful confidence, but also our limitations. Poverty of spirit means accepting that we are powerless to change certain aspects of our lives. “We are all members of a species that is not sufficient unto itself,” he writes. “We are all creatures plagued by unending doubts and restless, unsatisfied hearts.”
Poverty of spirit also means accepting that everyone will face disappointments, pain, suffering, and, eventually, death. Though this should be obvious to anyone who has thought seriously about life, Western culture often encourages us to avoid, ignore, or deny this essential truth—we are limited, finite, physical: human. And part of being human is that we sometimes suffer and are often powerless over what happens to us, to others, and to the world around us. Accepting this means moving closer to poverty of spirit.
Unlike the material poverty that brings misery to hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings and which I