We are started a new worship series on the Beatitudes in our church with members invited to offer a brief personal reflection on the Beatitude for that day. I had poverty of spirit and wrote this.
In 1980 Herald Press published Living More With Less a companion to the More With Less cookbook. It promoted a “lifestyle” – although the author preferred the phrase “life standard” – of simple living. It includes many tips and ideas people had supplied for such things as how to make sandals from old rubber tires. (It was the 70s)
As I’ve been thinking about the beatitude of blessed are the poor in spirit, I’ve imagined writing a follow-up volume of Living Spiritually More with Less.
As Living More with Less was about taking on a certain voluntary poverty – at least a poverty of unneeded resources – a volume on poverty of spirit would be about getting rid of all those unnecessary things that distract our spirits from our true life in God.
Poverty of spirit means loosening our grasp on those things which give us a sense of security – including our resources, our independence, our ability to control our fate, our identity, and even our lives.
Living with a poverty of spirit means a radical detachment from everything but the one good thing, the one pearl of great price, and that one thing is God alone.
As Pope Francis wrote “Dependence on God liberates us from the exhausting quest for self-sufficiency.”
Living with a poverty of spirit is a life of deep humility and unending openness to the spirit of God.
Living with a poverty of spirit is living with a never-ending consent to the will of God.
So, that sounds wonderful and pious, and the obvious truth is I am so far from living with this poverty of spirit. I sadly remain deeply convinced of the necessity of all those distracting things that I look to for security. Rather than living More with Less I find living “a bit” with “enough” is much less risky. It’s just so hard to let go; to live into a poverty of spirit.
But I know I am not alone, and just like the book Living More with Less is filled with people sharing simple little practices to get a closer to the goal of a more just/responsible life, so too my Living Spiritually More with Less would rely on the wisdom and experience of the community for simple steps to help us move towards a life of poverty of spirit.