Poverty is the Healthiest and Happiest Thing

To this end, let us not allow ourselves to get caught up in the round-and-round ruts of our own circular thinking or our self-referential striving. For hyper-intellectualism and hyper-asceticism are just as much illnesses of the human spirit as everything else, even if they are less visible. For they do not look like the “tax collectors and prostitutes” of Jesus’ day—and of our own—publicly scandalous and therefore widely condemned; they rather appear like the Pharisees who considered themselves the spiritual elite, and, in fact, even like the humble Pharisees who in their fearful or energetic striving for righteousness faced up against the limits of their own hearts and minds, their own activity and resolve. There is a reason that Jesus said to Nicodemus, a Pharisee who came to him in the night of his own striving, that he had to be born again. There is no other way for us to attain true freedom than a radical revolution of spirit and of mind. And this happens not only at the beginning of our journey of faith, but again and again. We cannot give into the temptation to “settle down” in our spiritual life, to find security and repose in our spiritual practices or theological concepts. For if we do so then our “spirituality” becomes a prison, even if it is a padded prison, and we fail to take flight into the expansive breadth of life and love for which God has created and redeemed us.

As G.K. Chesterton said about the appropriate remedy for those bound in the cycles of unhealthy thought:

In these cases it is not enough that the unhappy man should desire truth; he must desire health. Nothing can save him but a blind hunger for normality, like that of a beast. A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle, just as a man in a third-class carriage on the Inner Circle will go round and round the Inner Circle unless he performs the voluntary, vigorous, and mystical act of getting out at Gower Street.

Really, the only way to get free of our self-preoccupation and our narrow “certainties” or fears is to “get off the train” in an act of faith and surrender, placing our life entirely in the hands of Another and setting out on an adventure into the abyss of his love. I am not, of course, speaking against the dogmas of our faith or the certainties that are born in the intellect and the heart in response to God’s self-revelation. These are not just signposts of some other reality beyond themselves, but purveyors of the everlasting truth of God and his way of relating to the world. But they are also not to be reduced to dry and sterile formulas that we can set as trophies on the shelves of our minds to display whenever we are asked a question or whenever we feel insecure and vulnerable before the anguish and the beauty of a reality that always surpasses our limited comprehension. They, rather, are but the voice of God communicating the mystery to which we surrender, and inviting ever anew precisely such surrender. After all, the very thesis of Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy, from which these quotes come, is that the Christian creed alone can safeguard the true adventure and freedom of love from the countless pitfalls both moral and intellectual which could derail it. As he says, we all long for “the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.”

Chesterton is also a proponent of the limits that safeguard freedom and provide it a space for flourishing. Whether they be the limits of a creed, or an act of the will, or a commitment, or anything else, love blossoms not in vagueness but in specificity, in the long-abiding contemplation of a single flower, in the enduring fidelity of a love that grows from first fervor to rich and succulent fruit. In this regard, he is of one mind with C.S. Lewis who spoke of the mystery of reality in which things, like the stable in Bethlehem, are “bigger on the inside that they are on the outside.” This is true whether it be the institution of marriage or small acts of charity or the depths of intimacy wrought between God and a human heart in apparently mundane and ordinary prayer. And precisely because of this, in all that we do, let us not cling or perform or build ourselves up. Let us rather walk in poverty and in wonder (they are really one and the same). Here let us call to mind the words of Thérèse of Lisieux, which reveal the real path of sanctity for all of us and the one disposition by which we can truly stand confidently in God’s presence: that of total poverty and empty-handedness, which receives everything from his hands like a beggar, like a child, at every moment. She said:

After earth’s Exile, I hope to go and enjoy you in the Fatherland, But I do not want to lay up merits for heaven. I want to work for your Love Alone with the one purpose of pleasing you: To console your Sacred Heart, and to save souls who will love you forever. In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands. Lord, I do not ask you to count my works. All our justice is stained in your eyes. I wish, then, to be clothed in your own Justice and by your Love to receive you as my eternal possession. No other Throne, no other Crown do I want but you, my Beloved! i

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i. Act of Oblation to Merciful Love. Quoted from: https://stpaulcenter.com/posts/st-thérèses-act-of-oblation-to-merciful-love