by James Martin
A few minutes later, a woman in a green Land Rover pulled into our driveway, walked into the shop, spied the enormous sculpture, and promptly bought it—for a few hundred shillings more than our asking price.
“See?” said Agustino. “Your prayers were answered.”
When seeking help, Agustino’s first recourse was to ask God. When expressing gratitude, his first instinct was to praise God. He relied on God more than I did.
In later conversations it became clear that his trust had something to do with his poverty: his daily life had a precariousness that reminded him of his fundamental reliance on God, something that the more affluent often take for granted. Agustino seemed to be a close friend of God, too. Many of the poor, at least in my experience, evince this quality.
God meets us where we are. And the poor are often already close by.
Still, overly romanticizing the poor is a danger. Not all are cut from the same cloth. Not all are religious. Not all are believers. Even talking about “the poor” is problematic. Gauddy and Agustino are not so much members of a vague sociological group called “the poor” as they are individuals.
Nonetheless, the refugees with whom I worked were, in general, more ready to rely on God and more ready to praise God than I was.
This gratitude made many of them more generous, too. One afternoon I visited Loyce, a Ugandan woman to whom we had given a grant for a single sewing machine. She lived outside of Nairobi in a wooden shack in a largely rural area. Upon entering her dimly lit home, I found that Loyce had prepared an elaborate meal: roasted peanuts, vegetables, and even meat, a rarity for her. It must have cost a week’s earnings. I was stunned by her generosity. Loyce gave, as Jesus said of a poor widow in the Gospels, “out of her poverty” (Mark 12:41–44).
Not every refugee was as generous as Loyce. So again, it’s wrong to generalize. But my experience with many of the refugees points out what happens when you refuse to take things, or people, for granted, and when you are able to take stock of your blessings. Your gratitude increases.
God is good, as Gauddy said.
Every time these things happened in Kenya, I thought of a line from Scripture that had long baffled me. “The Lord hears the cry of the poor.” It was also a line from a popular contemporary hymn we sang in the novitiate. But why would the Lord hear the cry of the poor in particular? Why wouldn’t God hear the cry of everyone? It seemed partial. So did the line from the Psalms, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted” (34:18). Why?
In Kenya I found an answer. In many of our lives a great deal comes between us and God: concerns about status, achievement, appearance, and so on. Less stood between the refugees and God. Overall, they were more aware of their dependence on God. So, like Gauddy, they praised God in good times; like Agustino, they called on God when they were in need; and like Loyce, they expressed gratitude with generosity.
The poor place themselves close to God, the poor have less between them and God, the poor rely on God, the poor make God their friend, and the poor are often more grateful to God. And so God is close to them. This is one reason why Ignatius asked the Jesuits to love poverty “as a mother.”
DOWNWARD MOBILITY?
Here’s what you might be thinking: Those are inspiring stories about Gauddy and Agustino and Loyce, but what do they have to do with me? Do you expect me to live like a refugee?
In general, whenever I speak about living more simply, people’s reactions tend toward extremes. They fall into two categories.
Are you out of your mind? I can’t give up everything I own— that’s ridiculous! (That’s the most common response.)
I feel guilty when I think about how much stuff I have that I don’t need. When I think about the poor, I feel awful. But there’s no way I can live simply. It’s impossible for me to change. (This is closer to the response of the “rich young man” in the Gospel of Matthew.)
The two responses display (1) anger and (2) despair.
Both responses block us from freedom. If we dismiss the insights that come from the poor and reject the invitation to simplicity by saying, “I can’t live like that,” then these insights and invitations will never make a difference in our lives. Making the message unattainable also makes it easier to reject. Likewise, when we wallow in guilt and decide that it’s impossible to change, we are subtly letting ourselves off the hook, excusing ourselves from change.
Both responses mean that freedom cannot take hold.
The invitation to live a simple life does not mean giving up everything you have. Surrendering all your possessions is the right path for only a very few people, mostly those who choose to live in common with others. We’re not meant to live exactly like Gauddy or Agustino or Loyce. But the opposite of their situations—that is, a total immersion into our consumerist culture, which tells us that we can only be happy if we have more—is a dead end.
Nor does the invitation to a simple life mean you have to feel bad about yourself. But, from time to time, it’s good to feel the sting of conscience. Ignatius said the voice of conscience sometimes feels like the “drop of water falling onto a stone,” a sharp feeling that awakens you to reality. If you feel guilty about how much stuff you have, perhaps this is an invitation from God to give some of it away, to live more simply.
But it is an invitation to freedom, not to guilt. The turn to a simple lifestyle frees us, reminds us of our reliance on God, makes us more grateful, and leads us to desire “upward mobility” for everyone, not just for the few. Ultimately, it also moves us closer to the forgotten and outcast, something at the heart of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, and a theme frequently mentioned in the Old Testament. It reminds us that people like the refugees of East Africa, people you may never meet, are part of our lives. As Dean Brackley writes in “Downward Mobility,”
This vision reveals a fundamental equality of all human beings that overshadows all differences. In other words, the outcast has the potential to shatter my world. When I can identify with the outcast, allowing her to come crashing in on my world, the ladder collapses, at least for me, exposed as a colossal fraud. The superiority of the great dissolves together with the inferiority of the small. If only for a moment we all appear naked and on an equal footing. This crucial experience shows that identifying with the outcast enables us to identify with everyone. I can say, “These people are all just like me.”
So, as it turns out, Gauddy, Agustino, and Loyce have a lot to do with you.
BUT HOW DO I DO IT?
That still raises the question, How can you live simply? Given that you’re not called to give up everything, how can you simplify your life and respond to the invitation to live with less stuff coming between God and you?
Let me suggest three steps, of increasing difficulty. Then a challenge. In all these things, trust that God will help you along this path, because it’s a path to freedom, which God desires for you.
First, get rid of whatever you don’t need. It’s the obvious first step to simplifying. What should you do with all that stuff? Well, once again, the extra coat you’re not using doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to the poor. Call a local church, shelter, or clothing distribution center.
But some friendly advice: don’t give your junky stuff to the poor—toss that out. During the novitiate, I worked in a homeless shelter in Boston for several months. One day I handed one fellow a tattered orange corduroy jacket. “Ugh,” he said, “I wouldn’t wear that!” Initially I thought, He should be grateful. Then, as if reading my mind, he said, “Wouldyou want to wear it?” No, I wouldn’t. The poor deserve decent clothes, just like you do.
Second, distinguish between wants and needs. Is it “nice to have” or “need to have”? Do you “need” a bigger television or the latest phone or the newest computer? Or is it something you want because your friends just bought one or because you’ve seen it advertised? It’s difficult to resist the desire to have what friends have and what marketers say you need, but again, turning these things down l
eads to freedom.
Think of it like a diet. Hard as it is, you feel better if you avoid unnecessary calories. You’ll also feel better if you avoid unnecessary purchases—lighter, healthier, freer. Go on a buying diet.
Third, get rid of things you think you need, but can actually live without. This goes beyond things you know you don’t need into things you believe you need but can, in a pinch, forego. This is something I still find difficult, even after twenty years living under a vow of poverty. But I’m always happier after I’ve walked this path. After a friend cared for my father during his final illness, I gave her a treasured possession: a multicolored quilt given to me by some of the refugees in East Africa, which I had used on my bed. It was hard to give it away, but every time I see my friend, and remember her great kindness, I’m glad I did so.
Finally, here’s a challenge: get to know the poor. That’s difficult for some of us, since we are sometimes trained to ignore them, view them as lazy, or fear them. But finding opportunities to volunteer in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter (and finding appropriate and safe ways for your children to do so as well) will introduce you to people like Gauddy, Agustino, and Loyce in your own community. You will soon come to know them not as “the poor,” but as individuals with their own stories.
They will have often suffered much, and it may, initially, be hard to be around them, but they can also teach you a great deal about gratitude, about perseverance, and about being close to God.
POVERTY OF SPIRIT
Many poor men and women instinctively turn to God: like Gauddy during times of joy or like Agustino during times of hope. One reason is that they live another kind of poverty that often accompanies material poverty: the radical understanding of dependence on God, called “poverty of spirit.”
Poverty of spirit is an overlooked concept within many spiritual and religious circles. “Blessed are the poor in spirit” is the first saying in St. Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount (5:3–12). But for many believers, those words are just as mysterious as they were when Jesus first uttered them. If you ask a practicing Christian if he should be charitable, he will say yes. If you ask if he should be poor in spirit, he might say, “Huh?”
Perhaps not surprisingly, I first came into contact with real poverty of spirit in East Africa, but in a roundabout way.
Though I had looked forward to going to Nairobi, once I arrived I felt a crushing loneliness, since I was cut off from friends in the States, worried that I couldn’t endure two years in East Africa, and concerned about picking up some rare tropical illness. (Before I left, my doctor gave me a pamphlet that helpfully pointed out all the exotic diseases I could contract while there.)
On top of that, I was first assigned to a job that consisted largely of paperwork. Had I come to Kenya to push papers? In a few months, I would begin my work with the small businesses, the best job I’ve ever had, but at the time, life was both boring and lonely.
During this low ebb, my Jesuit formation director sent me a book to encourage me: Poverty of Spirit, by Johannes Baptist Metz, a German Catholic theologian.
Metz speaks of poverty of spirit as the inherent limitations that every human being faces in daily life. It is the spiritual awakening that comes with knowing not only the talents and gifts given us by God, which fill us with a grateful confidence, but also our limitations. Poverty of spirit means accepting that we are powerless to change certain aspects of our lives. “We are all members of a species that is not sufficient unto itself,” he writes. “We are all creatures plagued by unending doubts and restless, unsatisfied hearts.”
Poverty of spirit also means accepting that everyone will face disappointments, pain, suffering, and, eventually, death. Though this should be obvious to anyone who has thought seriously about life, Western culture often encourages us to avoid, ignore, or deny this essential truth—we are limited, finite, physical: human. And part of being human is that we sometimes suffer and are often powerless over what happens to us, to others, and to the world around us. Accepting this means moving closer to poverty of spirit.
Unlike the material poverty that brings misery to hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings and which I saw daily in Nairobi, spiritual poverty is something to be sought. And I don’t romanticize material poverty: I have stepped over filthy streams of sewage and noisome piles of rotting garbage, eaten with poor refugees in drafty hovels, and seen all manner of physical deprivations and illness. Such poverty cannot be romanticized.
Poverty of spirit is different: it is a life-giving goal.
Poverty of spirit is another way of speaking of humility. Without it, we resist admitting our reliance on God, are tempted to try to make it on our own, and are more likely to despair when we fail. And since spiritual poverty recognizes our fundamental reliance on God, it lies at the heart of the spiritual life.
“Thus poverty of spirit is not just one virtue among many,” writes Metz toward the end of his book. “It is the hidden component of every transcending act, the ground of every ‘theological virtue.’ ”
THE THREE DEGREES OF HUMILITY
Ignatius put a premium on poverty of spirit. In the Spiritual Exercises, following the meditation on the Two Standards, he offers the framework of the Three Ways of Being Humble, also known as the Three Degrees of Humility.
In his book Draw Me into Your Friendship, David Fleming, S.J., describes Ignatius as laying out a spectrum of humility, in which we are encouraged to choose the greater degree, and so more closely follow Jesus. George Aschenbrenner, S.J., describes the three degrees in Stretched for Greater Glory, as “three ways of loving.”
The First Degree is one in which you would always be obedient to “the law of God” by leading a moral life. Here you would do nothing to cut yourself off from God. You want to do the right thing. Aschenbrenner says, “This amounts to loving someone so much that you would go to whatever trouble may be involved to respond to that person’s [in this case, God’s] explicitly stated desire.”
The Second Degree is one in which, when presented with an option for a choice in life, you strive to be free of wanting the choice that would bring wealth, honor, or a long life. It’s the classic example of Ignatian “indifference” or “detachment.” Not only will you do the right thing, you will be free to accept whatever life presents. In this stage, says Fleming, “the only real principle of choice is to do the will of God.” You are detached and strive never to turn away from God. “This degree of love,” writes Aschenbrenner, “goes beyond the first and presumes the freedom of indifference.”
The Third Degree, the “most perfect” way, is one in which you actually choose the more humble way, in order to be like Christ. You desire so much to follow him that, as Fleming writes, “his experiences are reflected in my own.” In other words, you choose to be poor and even rejected as Jesus was. Aschenbrenner notes, “Here the desire to imitate has become an eagerness to share . . . the whole being and condition of the Beloved.”
Is this masochistic? Another confirmation of those stereotypes about how “sick” Christianity is? Only if it’s misunderstood. The Third Degree of Humility does not seek poverty or rejection for its own sake, but as a way of identifying with Christ and as a way of freeing oneself from an exaggerated self-interest. The friendship analogy is useful: when your friend is suffering, are you willing to suffer with him?
The Third Degree is an often unattainable goal for me: most days I feel I can barely make it to the Second Degree! But it’s an important one, because it helps to move us toward freedom from disordered attachments that keep us from following God. As Brian Daley, S.J., noted in an article called “To Be More Like Christ,” this kind of humility makes us ready to be “as free as possible from our ingrained self-centeredness, as full a realization as possible of Jesus’ concrete call to each individual to be a disciple in his image.”
What Do You Believe?
Many Jesuit jokes play on our (supposed) struggles to be humble. One has a Jesuit, a Franci
scan, and a Dominican dying and going to heaven. They are ushered into God’s throne room, where God is seated on an immense, diamond-encrusted gold chair. God says to the Dominican, “Son of St. Dominic, what do you believe?” The Dominican answers, “I believe in God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth.” God asks the Franciscan, “Son of St. Francis, what do you believe?” The Franciscan says, “I believe in your son, Jesus, who came to work with the poor.” Finally God turns to the Jesuit and from his great throne asks, “Son of St. Ignatius, what do you believe?” The Jesuit says, “I believe . . . you’re in my seat!”
BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT
Poverty of spirit does not take away joy in life. Quite the contrary. It is the gateway to joy, because it enables us to surrender to ultimate reliance on God, which leads to freedom. “Paradoxically, then, we are truly rich,” writes Fleming, “with an identity that only God can give and no one can take from us.”
Reliance on God may sound like a recipe for laziness, as if you needed to do nothing on your own. But the reality is the opposite. It is a practical stance that reminds you that you can’t do everything. Many things are not within your power to change. Some things, outside of your control, need to be left to God. Spiritual poverty frees you from the despair that comes when you believe that you can rely only on your own efforts.
This insight can free you from a popular temptation these days: workaholism and messiahism. It’s easy to imagine that you are indispensable, that everything depends on you, that you must do everything. Diligence can degenerate into a subtle form of pride. “Look how busy I am—I’m so important!” Or “Everything depends on me!” Poverty of spirit reminds you that there is only so much that you can do.
Or as my spiritual director said when I complained about having too many tasks to do, “There is a Messiah, and it’s not you!”