JESUS, MODEL OF POVERTY

Beati pauperes spiritu.
Blessed are the poor in spirit. (Matthew v. 3.)

I
THE spirit, virtue, and life of Jesus are a spirit, virtue, and life of poverty, and of an absolute and perpetual poverty. The Eternal Word adopted it at Bethlehem. On His becoming man, He took what was most humiliating about poverty, the abode of beasts, and what was most difficult about it, the stable, the manger, the straw, the cold, the night. He was born far from the homes of men, who offered Him no assistance in His need. In order to be poorer still, the Word made flesh willed to be born during a journey and be refused hospitality on account of the poverty of His parents.

He then spent a part of His childhood in Egypt, a foreign land hostile to the Jews, so that His parents might be still poorer and more forsaken, if that could be. At Nazareth He spent thirty years in the practice of poverty. His home was poor; to be convinced of this, it is enough to see the poverty of that home at Loreto. His furniture was poor; He had only what was strictly necessary, and even that was very plain, the kind poor people use; our Lady's wooden dish, still preserved at Loreto, is a good proof of it. His clothes were poor; His tunic, which we may see at Argenteuil, was of common wool; His swaddling-clothes were of coarse cloth. His food was that of the poor; it was the fruit of the labor of a poor carpenter, who could earn only the necessaries of life.

Jesus wanted to appear poor in all He did. He considered Himself the poorest of all and always took the last place. He honored and respected everybody just as the poor do. He was silent and listened humbly to the instructions in the synagogue. He never made a show of wisdom or of extraordinary knowledge, but lived the life common to those of His rank. He lived like a poor man and went along unnoticed and forgotten like one.

In everything He did and procured for Himself, He sought what was poorest. See Him during His apostolic life. He kept on wearing working clothes and continued living like the poor. He knelt on the bare ground for prayer. He ate barley bread, the bread of the poor. He lived on charity. He traveled like the poor and, like them, experienced hunger and thirst without being able to satisfy it as He pleased. His poverty made Him contemptible in the eyes of the rich and the great; in spite of that He did not hesitate to tell them: Vae vobis divitibus! "Woe to you, O ye rich men of the earth!"

He chose disciples poor like Himself, and for bade them to have two coats, or provisions for the future, or money, or a staff wherewith to defend themselves.

He died forsaken and stripped even of His poor garments. He was buried in a borrowed shroud and laid in a sepulcher offered by the charity of friends.

Even after His Resurrection He appeared to His Apostles in the trappings of poverty.

Lastly, in the Most Blessed Sacrament His love of poverty leads Him to veil the glory of His Divinity and the splendor of His glorified humanity. He deprives Himself therein of all freedom and of exterior action as well as of all ownership in order to be all the poorer and have nothing He can call His Own. In away, He is in the Eucharist as in His holy Mother's womb, wrapped up in the Sacred Species and hidden beneath them, awaiting from the charity of man the matter of His Sacrament and the articles required for worship. Such is the poverty of Jesus: He has loved it and made it His inseparable companion.

II
WHY did Jesus Christ choose this constant state of poverty?

In the first place, because as a child of Adam He had adopted the state of our exiled nature, which had been stripped of its rights over inferior creatures; in the second place, because He wanted to sanctify by His poverty all the acts of poverty to be performed in His Church. He became poor in order that through His not caring about earthly possessions He might detach us from them and impart to us the riches of Heaven. He became poor so that poverty, which is our condition, our penance, and our means of reparation, might through Him become honorable, desirable, and lovable. He became poor to show us and prove us His love. He remains poor in the Sacrament, in spite of: His glorified state, in order always to be our living and visible model.

And thus poverty, which in itself is not likable since it is a punishment and a privation, becomes noble and full of charm through Jesus Christ, Who adopted it as His form of life, based His Gospel upon it, and made it the first of the Beatitudes and His Divine heiress.

It is holy through Jesus since it was His great virtue, and since it repairs God's glory, destroyed by Original Sin and our own personal sins. It gives rise to the virtue of penance by the privations which it entails. It furnishes a natural occasion for the practice of patience, which is quite indispensable for the completing and perfecting of our undertakings. It sustains humility which it feeds with the humiliations that are its unfailing companions. It supposes that one has enough meekness and strength of character to face a long siege of suffering; for suffering without consolation or friendly assistance usually follows upon it. It must be meek, for one does not give anything to an insolent beggar. It must be full of deference and respect towards all those who give it help. It must be grateful, for that is its power. It must pray, for that is its life. And what glory poverty gives to God!

No matter what happens, poverty is content with its condition because it comes from God. It offers as homage to God everything that makes up its condition. It is grateful for trials as well as for good fortune. It adores God in all things and prefers Him to any condition. Its wealth is in the holy will of God. It places itself in the hands of His paternal providence whether this be manifested through mercy, or kindness, or even justice. Jacta super Dominum curam tuam, et ipse te enutriet. "Cast thy care upon the Lord, and He shall sustain thee." Those that are poor supernaturally are God's property.

Oh! How enrapturing is the poverty which makes us love God above all else! Christian poverty is beautiful, but more beautiful still is religious poverty which honors God by giving up everything and abandoning itself in all things to His goodness. The love of pleasure ruined man; poverty rehabilitates him and restores him to happiness. But above all how admirable is the poverty of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament where He deprives Himself of all glory, of all freedom, of every kind of natural good, and where He depends on the charity of man and is at his mercy! That is real love!

Accordingly, all those who wish to be Saints must love poverty; and to become a great Saint, one must both love poverty and live in the state of poverty. Perfection or sanctity consists in our always preferring to have less than more, in simplifying our life by cutting down the number of its pleasures, in pauperizing ourselves for the love of our Lord, in imitating His poverty and in making it the law of our interior and exterior life, the form of the life of Jesus in us.

III
LET us consider the spiritual poverty of Jesus Christ; it is the crown and the life of the virtue of poverty. We are ignorant; consequently we ought to keep quiet and listen. Our Lord, Who knew all things since He was the Word or Intellect of the Father, was silent the greater part of His life, as if He had been totally uninformed. How difficult it is to persuade ourselves we should have that kind of poverty! We are full of spiritual vanity!

Jesus was endowed with all the virtues to the highest degree, and He declared that of Himself He had nothing. We have really nothing worthwhile in our heart. In the presence of God we are dry and barren like a stone or a beast of burden. Our heart does not know what to say to God; it can produce nothing but thorns and thistles. Is that anything to be proud of? It is a poor soil that can grow only weeds.

Our Lord's power for good was limitless; He nevertheless relied for everything on the power of His Father.

We are powerless for good. Our poverty is still more destitute in that than in anything else; for we have done a great deal of evil and very little good, and to make matters worse, we have spoiled with imperfections what little good we have done.

Such is the poverty of our soul. We must make a virtue of it. But to do this, we must go to our Lord through this state of poverty and perform acts of it like the child that is weak, ignorant, clumsy, and spoils everything but is nevertheless at peace with itself and happy near its mother. Its mother takes the place of everything; in like manner, let the poverty of Jesus be all our riches! A poor man is usually without resources, without learning, without power; nevertheless, he lives at peace in his condition. He is fond of his rags, since they entitle him to a share in the charities of the rich. If he has any sores, he takes pleasure in showing them; he earns his bread with them.

But is not our Lord more kind and tender than a mother? Is He not our sweet providence, our light, our all? Let us then serve Him in a spirit of poverty and in true humility of heart. Let us remain in the world without any protection; Jesus in the Sacrament has none, and neither have the poor. Who would not wonder at the interior and exterior poverty of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph?

A poor man has nothing, clings to nothing, can do nothing by himself, and knows he means nothing to others. If the opposite were the truth, he would be very rich; for the goods of the mind are much more valuable than the goods of the body, and there is more glory in our being able to give advice than to give a few pieces of silver.

Interior poverty, understood in this sense, becomes a remedy for the three concupiscences within us. It attacks vanity, the desire to know always more, and the sensuality of the mind. If we are convinced that we are lacking in mind, in heart, in energy, in constancy, and in strength, we shall practice poverty quite naturally and make it our condition. We shall want to depend on God for everything: on His light for our mind, on His grace for our will, on His love for our heart, on His Cross for our body.

But if we are to love this poverty, we must see it and love it in our Lord, Who is so poor in the Sacrament and is forever repeating to us: Sine Me nihil pot est is facere. "Without Me, you can do nothing, you have nothing. I am your only wealth. Do not seek any other either in yourself or around you."

IV
IF WE are bound to be poor by our state of life, what is the source of our sins against it?

And if we are not in the religious life, what is the source of the antipathy we experience against being poor out of love?

The first source of it is vanity. We want to have beautiful things among our personal belongings. We pick out what is best and precious and dazzling, under the pretext that such things last longer. It would be better to consult our Lord and the spirit of poverty; one act of this virtue would be more profitable to us than all that would-be economy.

Sensuality also leads us to transgress poverty by the extreme care we take of ourselves. What expensive measures we resort to against the slightest indisposition! Ah! Many of us are more afraid of poverty than of humility or modesty or any other virtue.

We must therefore take to poverty resolutely if we want to resemble our Lord. Let each one of us, according to his condition, aim at having fewer and less expensive things. Let everything that we buy or receive be a tribute to the holy poverty of our Master Jesus Christ.

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