Virtue of Poverty Part 4

The Virtue of Poverty IV

We pray, Lord, that you guide us in this reflection, and we consecrate it to your Sacred Heart. We ask St. Joseph for the grace of his protection and place this teaching in the Immaculate Heart of our Mother.

Poverty in the Life of Christ

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We will start the fourth reflection of the Spirit of Poverty Retreat by sharing some beautiful reflections from Fr. Cantalamessa’s book Poverty:

The Old Testament introduces us to a God that is open for the poor, while the New Testament shows us a God who Himself becomes poor.  Only the Gospel tells us about a God who makes Himself one of them, choosing weakness and poverty for Himself, “though He was rich Jesus Christ became poor for your sake, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9).

The two essential components of the ideal of Biblical poverty are now made clear: to be for the poor and to be poor.  John Paul II combined both aspects in his catechesis on poverty. The Church feels ever more strongly the impulse of the Spirit to be poor among the poor, to remind everyone of the need to conform to the ideal of poverty preached and practiced by Christ, and to imitate Him in His sincere and active love for the poor.”

(Poverty, p.27)

Father

Fr. Cantalamessa’s clarification of poverty is very important in that the Lord became one of us in our poverty. It frames the spirit of poverty in love. When one loves, one pours himself or herself out to fill the need of the beloved. This is what Jesus did. As we become one with Christ, the Holy Spirit, who is love, moves us to give ourselves to the other. That is the authentic spirit of poverty.

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Recall these words Jesus spoke to us in 1/30/2018:

My little one, I have chosen you to bear fruit for the Kingdom of God on earth. The mission is not easy, for the ways of God are never the ways of the world. All who are chosen by God to fulfill His plan on earth are hated by some, rejected by others, ill-treated, persecuted, for I came upon the earth to set one against another, for the ways of God will never be accepted nor appreciated by those who live for the things of this world. You have been asked by God to bring Him victim souls. A victim soul must fix his eyes on Christ, must desire with all his being to become one with his Master, must be willing to learn from Him and imitate Him. He must be willing to fight against all his disordered desires. This requires certain disciplines for my disciples.

My disciples wear My yoke—the wood of the Cross, united to Me. I am their All. My disciples are the men and women consumed in love and desire for Me. They choose to live this way of life for love of Me and the consuming desire to be made perfect, which is to become Love. Only in this way will My disciples reflect the face and light of God in the world. These are my victim souls that possess the power of God on earth.

Therefore, if we are going to be Jesus’ victim souls, we must become men and women who imitate Our Lord in the virtue of His poverty.

Fr. Cantalamessa quotes St. Paul as he continues writing about poverty in the life of Christ.

Although Christ was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, so that by His poverty, you might become rich. (2 Cor 8:9)

St. Thomas comments:

He endured material poverty in order to give us spiritual riches. Christ’s poverty is an aspect of His self-abasement in the Incarnation.

St. Paul tells us that Jesus Christ became a victim for sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.  (2 Cor. 5:21)

Father

Only the Holy Spirit can allow us to understand this because the human mind itself resists this movement of love.  Think of the Lord becoming poor, pouring Himself out to make us rich.  Think about a mother or father who sometimes spends a fortune on his child who is sick.  They do not count the cost because their love moves them to pour themselves out, even to become poor for the child.  Only love can understand the authentic spirit of poverty because it is a function of love.  What Jesus did and what he invites us to do is to be like Him.  The true value of our talent, wealth, and time can be measured by the extent to which we enrich others with our ability to love.

Levels of Poverty

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Blessed Angela Foligno explains three degrees of Christ’s poverty.

Christ’s poverty was of three kinds: Christ, the way, the guide of our souls, exemplified the first degree of the most perfect poverty by choosing to live poorly and to be poor, bereft of all earthly possessions. He kept nothing for Himself: no house, vineyard, coins, money, estate, dishware, or any other possessions. He neither accepted any earthly goods nor wanted to accept anything but a life of extreme bodily neediness, with scarcity, hunger, thirst, cold, hard labor, austerity, and hardship … The second degree of poverty, greater than the first, was that He wished to be poor with regard to relatives, friends, and all earthly affections … The 3rd and supreme degree of poverty was that Christ stripped Himself of His very self and became poor with regard to His own power, wisdom, and glory.

Therefore, Jesus was poor in things, poor in support, and poor in prestige.

It’s beautiful that it is Blessed Angela of Foligno who writes about these three degrees because she was a wife and mother, surrounded by much wealth, and for a large part of her life, she lived very much in the world, immersed in the quest for greater wealth and social position. It was not until the age of forty that she recognized the emptiness of her life and sought God’s help in the sacrament of penance. It was from there that began a transformation in her life where she began to embrace the virtue of poverty.

Shortly after her conversion, her husband and children died. Selling most of her possessions, she entered the Secular Franciscan Order. She was alternately absorbed by meditating on the crucified Christ and by serving the poor of Foligno as a nurse and beggar for their needs. Other women joined her in a religious community.

Growth in poverty is very similar to what we learned in the Simple Path to Union with God regarding humility. In the first degree of humility, we come to know and experience our misery, nothingness, and total dependence on God.  In the second degree of humility, one receives the desire of God Himself, the desire for the Cross. It is the same with poverty; there are different degrees.

Purification of Our Desires

Let us now go back to the words Our Lord gave us in the message, “Mission of the 12,” in which He instructs us how to live poor like Him. Our Lord said to us:

… A victim soul must fix his eyes on Christ, must desire with all his being to become one with his Master, must be willing to learn from Him and imitate Him. He must be willing to fight against all his disordered desires. This requires certain disciplines for my disciples… 1/30/18

The Lord is telling us that, to grow in poverty, we need to practice disciplines of our will, and this requires sacrifice. In the Simple Path to Union with God, the Lord speaks to us about the First Nail of Crucifixion, the purification of our desires. The Lord again mentions the word “discipline”. He says to us:

The purification of your desires is the first stage of purification in My Sacred Heart. You begin to move only according to My desires and not yours. You no longer do what you want to do nor go where you want to go; but now, you go only where I take you. You choose to live each day according to what is most difficult, not what is easiest. This will require a greater discipline of your will, greater silence, and stillness of soul in Me. 1/16/14 (The Simple Path to Union with God, p.187)

The Lord is telling us if we truly want to become one with Love Crucified, we must choose, as He chose, to be poor, to deny ourselves things we want, for love of Him.

Hebrews 12:10-11

For they (parents) disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

In the message, the “Mission of the Twelve,” the Lord gave us five specific disciplines based on the Gospel of Matthew10:1-24.

1)    Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper.–– This means we must detach from the riches of this world, trusting that God will provide. This is the first degree of growth in poverty. It is a choice we must be willing to make.

2)    No bag for your journey. ––The Lord explained:

My disciples must allow My spirit to detach them from all disordered attachments.

I asked our Lord, “My Lord, how do we know what is a disordered attachment? Anything that weakens your desire for Me distracts you from loving Me, or takes your gaze from Me. 1/30/18  

These words must be branded in our hearts and remain with us daily so that we may see the amount of distractions that keep us from loving Christ, the number of things that take our gaze away from Him and weaken our desire for Him.

3)    Nor two tunics–– The Lord explains, My disciples must live simply as I did, poor, never in excess 1/30/18.  If we ponder the life of the Holy Family, we see the beauty of how they lived so simply. In today’s world, we live in excess of everything.  The word “simplicity” is synonymous with poverty. In 2011, Our Lord spoke to us about simplicity:

The call to simplicity is the call to detachment from the attachments of the flesh, both exterior and interior. As you grow in simplicity, you are emptied of all the attachments that prevent you from being filled with My life, My Blood. As you detach from material things you grow in the virtue of poverty. As you become poor in the things of the world, you become rich in the things of heaven. The poor in spirit are rich spiritually, thus gaining true happiness on earth. Thus, you see that the tactic of Satan is to make you desire richness in the things of the world.

But the spirit of poverty is far greater than physical poverty. It is detaching from your own ideas, desires, plans, dreams, goals... It is complete abandonment to Me, your God and Savior. This requires great diligence and abandonment to My Spirit. I desire the simplicity of the innocence of a child with its mother... It is pleasing to the Father and to the Son to have you place your complete trust in Us.

12/13/11

This is the process of truly becoming a living chalice.  A living chalice is a person who has allowed themselves to be emptied of everything to be filled with God.  That is where the beautiful virtue of poverty brings us.

Father

In every moment, in every step of this discipline, the focus is Jesus. We learn from Him to love.  When one loves, giving of self becomes natural. This discipline is worked out through a constant awakening of our hearts to love as Christ loves. It is then that the eyes of our spirit become more open to free ourselves of our many self-attachments and be more attached to God, who is present in others.

Lourdes

The Lord continues to explain to us:

As you detach from material things, you grow in the virtue of poverty. As you become poor in the things of the world, you become rich in the things of heaven. The poor in spirit are rich spiritually, thus gaining true happiness on earth. Thus, you see that the tactic of Satan is to make you desire richness in the things of the world.

But the spirit of poverty is far greater than physical poverty. It is detaching from your own ideas, desires, plans, dreams, goals... It is complete abandonment to Me, your God and Savior. This requires great diligence and abandonment to My Spirit. I desire the simplicity of the innocence of a child with its mother... It is pleasing to the Father and to the Son to have you place your complete trust in Us.

Here, the Lord leads us deeper into the second degree of poverty.  It is the poverty of letting go of our own desires, expectations, and plans. He gives us two keywords that are united as we grow in this exterior and interior poverty—Abandonment and Trust.  He is calling us to be completely abandoned to Him, and to trust Him like a child. 

4)     “Nor sandals”––This Jesus explained to us requires a life dedicated to sacrificial love, penance, and renunciation.

Our Blessed Mother explained, through the teachings received from Rosa Mystica, the importance of accepting our little daily crosses in a spirit of penitence. She appears in the image with three roses— one gold, one red, and one white. The gold rose symbolized penance. Our Blessed Mother has also formed us in Love Crucified, to accept everything, the good and even what seems bad, as a gift from the Lord.  We are called to do even the most hidden and menial work of our vocations in a spirit of penance by pouring ourselves out in sacrificial love.

Father

Penance is better understood when we put others before ourselves. Every day, we have many opportunities to think of others and do what is often most difficult out of love.

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The process of being emptied of our desires and expectations is a very difficult process that requires much discipline and requires we grow in deeper prayer, silence, reflection, penance, and repentance.

Father

The Lord begins to fill us with more self-knowledge, to see what we could not see before. The ability to receive this grace of seeing what I must change, what I must do differently, and surrender, not just the material things but also all our attachments, desires, and will, is the fruit of our attentiveness and openness to respond fully to the Lord.

5)    Nor a staff–– Jesus explains, My disciples lean on Me; I become their support; I lead the way.

This is the second degree of poverty that Blessed Angela spoke about—growth in letting go of our controls and leaning on Christ to guide us.  How difficult that is for us.

Fr Cantalamessa, in his book Poverty, explains the third degree of poverty:

The third type of poverty is the most profound of all because it goes beyond the level of possessions and touches the sphere of being. (p.37)

In Christ, poverty shines out in its most sublime form: not in the fact of being poor (which can be an imposed or inherited state), but of becoming poor and becoming so out of love, in order to enrich others. (Poverty; p.37-38)

“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col 1:24)

Jesus asks us: “Will you be My victim soul?” This denotes a voluntary choice.

For us, as victim souls, this comes as a result of falling in love. As we see the level of Christ’s poverty, we fall in love with Jesus crucified, seeing how He gives everything and is stripped of everything for the love of us.  As we experience His great love, the Spirit begins to place in our hearts a love for the poverty of our Beloved, and we desire to be poor like Him.  This is the beginning of allowing the Holy Spirit to strip us of our many attachments. 

Father

There is no legalistic answer to how much we should give or how much we need to be disposed of because love does not have a yardstick or measure.  In the Old Testament, the law was ten percent, but in the New Testament, the model is Christ, who gave Himself in His entirety, becoming Himself poor.  Our goal, then, is to become like Christ in the context of our vocation, like mothers and fathers who live for their children, giving of themselves completely. So giving becomes no longer about meeting a measure or percentage, but rather a movement of the heart that is forever increasing and becoming one with Christ.

Lourdes

Fr. Cantalamessa warns of a potential danger we can face in pursuing this beautiful virtue of poverty.  He says:

Misunderstanding arises from attributing excessive value to the external, material manifestations of poverty. John the Baptist was much more rigid in terms of asceticism than He was. Jesus never fell into the trap some of his imitators later fell into of making material poverty absolute, using it as a measure of perfection and ending up being rich in the worst thing there is: in themselves and their own justice. (Poverty, p.39)

Focusing only on exterior poverty and not allowing the Spirit to transform the interior poverty of the heart is very dangerous.  It can lead to self-righteousness and the self-pride of placing judgments on others or believing one is holier than those around them, like believing the lie that the less I have, the holier I am.

Why did Jesus become poor?

Fr. Cantalamessa Explains in p 40-41:

Since in the wisdom of God, the world was unable to recognize God through wisdom, God decided to save those who believe through the foolishness of our proclamation (1 Cor 1:21)

In other words: Since the world did not recognize and honor God when He revealed Himself through creation in splendor, power, wisdom, and wealth, He comes to save fallen humanity by the opposite means, through poverty, weakness, humility, and foolishness.  He has decided to reveal Himself “in the guise of His opposite” in order to challenge human pride and wisdom. (Poverty, p.40)

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor. 1:18)

We also must choose the opposite of what our human nature wants. Our human nature wants comforts, to be noticed, power, wealth, recognition, and titles, and yet if we are to be like Christ, true victim souls, we must choose the opposite if we are to be authentic victim souls.  The Cross has to become our one and only desire, that is, the poverty of Christ.

But we preach Christ Crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to gentiles, foolishness.

 1 Cor 1:23

He became poor for your sakes, so that by his poverty you might become rich (2 Cor 8:9).

Father

We, in our human nature, are instinctively drawn to prestige, to people who have power, fame, and titles, but Jesus chose the path of the Cross and destitution. This is something we must constantly work to bring to the light. Jesus lived completely in the Spirit, free of having to control everything. He lived to give of Himself to the Father and others.

A gift is most precious as a result of self-denial, when the giver deprives himself of what is given. The Word deprived Himself of His divine wealth in order to share it with us. God’s poverty is an expression of His agape, of the fact that He is love. As St. Paul tells us, Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us (Eph. 5:2). 

When one gives up something precious to them, like time, money, or anything precious to them, it has immense value. That’s why the widow’s mite seemed outwardly almost worthless, but her sacrifice and love made it the greatest gift. The Lord gives us this opportunity to be limited, and then we can love more by sacrificing in love.

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The truth is, with Christ, we don’t lose anything; that’s the irony of it all. As we allow the Spirit to empty us and allow ourselves to let go, the more we are filled with God himself and the more we receive God, who is love and find true joy and happiness in life.

Apostolic Mission

Fr. Cantalamessa describes a second motivation for poverty: apostolic mission.

Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money- not even an extra tunic” (Lk 9:3). Christ’s teaching contains two different levels or forms of poverty: one required of everyone in order to enter the Kingdom, the other required of a few in particular in order to announce the Kingdom. This second and more radical demand Jesus makes to those He calls to share in His work of proclaiming the Kingdom and being totally devoted to its cause: the apostles, that small group of disciples who followed Him. (p. 47)

The Lord, too, has called us in Love Crucified to follow Him and to bring forth His Kingdom on earth. To accomplish this mission, we must accept to live this second, more difficult level of poverty that requires more of us.

The Lord spoke to us these words in the message, Mission of the Twelve:

My little one, I have chosen you to bear fruit for the Kingdom of God on earth. The mission is not easy, for the ways of God are never the ways of the world... You have been asked by God to bring Him victim souls. (1/30/18)

We have a mission from the Lord. In another message, the Lord tells us:

Respond by suffering all with Me in My sacrifice of love. Respond with courage and zeal, believing that God has chosen you to participate in the triumph of My crucified love to save the world. (8/6/17)

God has chosen us to help save the world through our union with Him as victim souls.  He tells us in another message in 2018:

My little one, you are preparing the way for My Second Coming. It is My hidden martyrs of love, crucified through Me, with Me, and in Me, that will usher in the reign of My Kingdom on earth. (1/11/18)

Each one of us in Love Crucified has an apostolic mission to become Christ’s victim souls and to raise up many victim souls to bring forth His second coming on earth.

Need for the Holy Spirit

Fr. Cantalamessa makes a very important point in his book Poverty that none of this is possible without the Holy Spirit. He states:

Only in the Holy Spirit can we live this new law of becoming poor, which Jesus Christ presents to us. John Paul II wrote: 

The whole work of renewing the Church, which Vatican II so providentially proposed and initiated, can only come about in the Holy Spirit, in other words, with the help of His light and His energy…

Wherein lies the difference between renewal “in law” and renewal “in the Spirit”? Positive law, being external to human beings, does not change the state of their hearts. In a word, it does not “give life”. It pushes a person to do or to avoid something by coercion, under threat of punishment, or blame. It is based on fear.

The interior law, on the other hand, which is the Holy Spirit Himself (Rm.8:2), changes the heart. It not only commands you to do something, but it helps you to do it. The Holy Spirit creates that new heart which willingly does the things God commands because it loves God and trusts him. It is based on love and moves a person to act by attraction.

The Holy Spirit is able to renew the evangelical ideal of poverty in the Church, by infusing a love for poverty. More precisely: by infusing Christ’s love for poverty. (Poverty; pp 30-31)

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The Holy Spirit is the one who creates that new heart that willingly follows God’s commands because it loves and trusts God.  The Holy Spirit can renew the evangelical ideal of poverty in the Church by infusing in each of us a love for poverty, more precisely by infusing Christ’s love for poverty to the point where we each can say, “I have fallen in love with poverty because I have fallen in love with Jesus Crucified!”

Father

The priorities of our love can be seen in the amount of time, resources, and attention we give to things. When we see Jesus, we see the priorities of God. What do we manifest to God by the time, effort, and resources we give to the things in our lives?

My disciples wear My yoke—the wood of the Cross, united to Me. I am their All. My disciples are the men and women consumed in love and desire for Me. They choose to live this way of life for love of Me and the consuming desire to be made perfect, which is to become Love. Only in this way will My disciples reflect the face and light of God in the world. These are my victim souls that possess the power of God on earth. 1/30/18

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