By Fr. Roy Cimagala
That parable about the rich man and the beggar Lazarus (cfr. Lk 16:19-31) clearly reminds us that we need to live the Christian spirit of poverty, which, if understood properly, is not about what you have or do not have, or how much wealth you have or do not have. It is about emptying ourselves of any earthly attachments, even if we possess many resources in this world, to ensure that our heart is wholly given to God.
This virtue of poverty has the primary purpose of emptying our mind and heart of anything that can compete with or, worse, replace the love for God and for others, which is proper to all of us.
It’s not about running away from worldly things, much less hating the goods of the earth and our temporal affairs, but about knowing how to handle them so as not to compromise the fundamental law of love that should rule us.
To repeat, it is not just a matter of emptying ourselves but rather of filling ourselves with what is proper to us. In short, we practice detachment to acquire and enhance the attachment right for us as God’s image and likeness and as God’s children.
Christ many times praised this particular virtue, referring to it in one of the beatitudes as being “poor in spirit.” Also, in that episode where a rich young man asked Christ how he could enter heaven, the answer was, after following the commandments—which the young man said he was doing—to sell all he had, give to the poor, and come follow Christ. (cfr. Mk 10:21)
But we should be clear about one thing. Wealth in itself is not evil as long as we do not allow it to corrupt us. In fact, poverty and austerity can be bad if they are lived in bitterness and anger, if not hatred, against God.
Christian poverty is always lived in joy and gratitude and with a keen sense of what our earthly things are meant to be. That means that whatever wealth we have is used to give glory to God and to serve everybody else. It is not meant to be used for self-indulgence.
Money and richness can become a problem when we become so attached to them that we can no longer give ourselves fully to God. They can blind us to our duty to God and to everybody else. We may give the appearance that we are giving a lot, but if it is not the whole of ourselves, then it is not total self-giving, which God deserves and expects from each one of us.
Let us always remember that God wants the whole of ourselves. He wants our entire heart, not a divided heart. He wants to be everything to us—the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega. He wants to be given priority over everything else, including our own life.
Especially these days, when we are practically bombarded with so many tempting things, we should really be on guard. Otherwise, we end up completely materialistic and consumeristic, completely dead and numb to the spiritual and supernatural dimensions of our life as children of God.
We need to regularly check on what we have at the moment and what the real desires of our heart are, to see if indeed we are living the proper spirit of poverty and austerity that Christ himself lived. We know how easy it is for us to lapse into the opposite of poverty and austerity, like greed and envy. With the way the world is developing these days, this practice of self-examination is very important.
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