Friday, August 25, 2023
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Poverty makes a good host
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all our mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Three chapters earlier a sincere but rich young man asked Jesus much the same question. The young man went away sad, but Jesus loved him. And perhaps, in time, he returned to follow Jesus.
But this questioner was not sincere. A Pharisee testing Jesus, wanting to prove his rejection of their rivals the Saducees, asked him what the greatest commandment was. Not that he wanted to follow it, but just wondering what Jesus would say.
The Pharisee, like me, like most of us, had trouble with his answer, because loving the Lord our God with all of anything is not the way we live our lives. I say the words, sure, but in the silence that echoes inside me I follow all sorts of idols.
Two solutions come to mind: suffering and poverty, which certainly is itself a kind of suffering. In The Order of Things James Schall SJ repeats Socrates’ adage, “It is better to suffer evil than to do it.” Schall remembers Socrates’ death: “He would not do evil, so he suffered, rather cheerfully, the consequences of his refusal. He drank the hemlock.”
Of course martyrs followed Christ’s example, but with a difference. Schall reminds me that “Christ is the God-man executed by man.”
Once in the time of the judges there was a famine in the land … Naomi lost her husband and then her two sons and had nothing. In poverty, she prepared to leave and return to her ancestral home in Bethlehem. Then her Moabite daughter-in-law told her she would go with her. “Wherever you go, I will go, wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Henri Nouwen writes beautifully about the other solution to idolatry – poverty.
Poverty is the quality of the heart that makes us relate to life, not as a property to be defended but as a gift to be shared. Poverty is the constant willingness to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward to new, unknown experiences. Poverty is the inner understanding that the hours, days, weeks, and years do not belong to us but are the gentle reminders of our call to give, not only love and work, but life itself, to those who follow us and will take our place. He or she who cares is invited to be poor, to strip himself or herself from the illusions of ownership, and to create some room for the person looking for a place to rest. The paradox of care is that poverty makes a good host. When our hands, heads, and hearts are filled with worries, concerns, and preoccupations, there can hardly be any place left for the stranger to feel at home.
I like most of us come-lately’s scoff at the Pharisees’ hypocrisy. I want to think I would sell everything and follow Jesus. As Peter said, “Where else can we go?” What else could we do?
But I am only able to wonder, to imagine. In my own time I can fear God and obey the commandments, and spend time in conversation with God, getting to know him and how much he has only my best interests at heart. I do not have to see evidence of his promises, but only believe them.
The Lord keeps faith forever, gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets captives free.
The Lord gives sight to the blind and raises up those who were bowed down.
The Lord protects strangers, and He shall reign forever.
 (Ruth 1, Psalm 146, Psalm 25, Matthew 22)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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