Meditation~Poverty

Poverty is born from the discovery that I belong to Another; I exist because I am loved in an individual way by Another:  My being is from first to last totally relative to Him, though not without the mystery of my freedom.

If I am the work of Another, nothing is mine, because everything is given to me by Him.  At the same time, however--here is the paradox--everything is mine because I have been given to know the purpose for which it exists, a purpose which Jesus revealed at the end of his life:

....That they might know you, Oh Father, and him whom you have sent (John 17:3)

It has been given to me, then, to know the great reason why God made the world.  But I have been also asked to live out every relationship and use everything while keeping this reason in mind.  This apparent paradox is the locus of the thrilling and fascinating secret of poverty.

Everything has been put into my hands for a positive purpose.  To live in the awareness of this fact means to live poverty.  Poverty, then, is not something that grinds man down, but something that lifts him up.  His relations with things acquire a lightness and a freedom that are otherwise unimaginable.  Poverty is the beginning of those "new heavens and new earth" of which Saint Peter speaks ( 2 Peter 3:13), the beginning of a truly human world.

Poverty cannot exist unless it is fed by hope, that is to say, by the certainty that we have been given what really counts in life and that no one can take it away from us.  Everything else is accessory and functional: whether you have a hundred books or one book, a hundred pieces of furniture or one, is not what is important.  The decisive thing is what we need in order to participate in the kingdom of God and to spread it in the world.  The point is not that everything else is no longer valuable.  It is just that its usefulness is measured in function of this goal.

So you see that poverty is freedom from things, the awareness that it is God who fulfills our desires. If I place the hope of my fulfillment in possessing a certain thing, I am no longer hoping in Christ, but in that thing.  If however, I hope in Christ who gives me that thing, then I am free of it.
~Bishop Massimo Camisasca, Diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla, Italy.  Fra. Saint Charles Borromeo.