Caryll Houslander The Widow's Poverty

The Widow’s Poverty Caryll Houselander (+ 1954) The poverty of Christ is not destitution, though actually Christ was destitute for part of his life, and in every age one or more of the saints have had a true vocation for absolute poverty. Such saints are Saint John the Baptist, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Joseph Benedict Labre. For such a vocation there is room in modern life. So falsified are all our standards that we are inclined to forget that there is any such thing as intrinsic value ... Saints who are chosen by God to be destitute, to have literally nothing, are the pure gold that shows us that holy poverty has an intrinsic value. There was an old man who called at his bank every week and asked to see his money in gold. "I like to see what I have got," he explained. We Christians have "got" Christ's absolute poverty. Although we are allowed to have reasonable comfort ourselves, the grace and power of Christ's real destitution belongs to us. His homelessness, his nakedness, his loneliness, the poverty of the dead man on the cross, all that belongs to us as Christians, and in times of crisis we can draw on it. At all times we can rely on it; without it the gentler poverty would have no value and we should be a spiritually bankrupt race. The grace of Christ's utter poverty is given to all the destitute and homeless people in the world, outcasts and refugees; without it, they would despair. Anyone of us at any time now may need to draw on this pure gold of Christ's poverty. From time to time, like the old man, we want to see what we have got. Those saints who baffle the faithless by leading lives which seem to them to be useless, even selfish, lives like Christ's public life, poorer than the wild foxes and the birds, show us that his poverty is still our wealth, is still triumphant. Even in human nature as it is today, Christ, naked and foolish on the cross, can be king. Poverty, not destitution, the simpler poverty which many people experience, makes us more sensitive, more selective, able to perceive the poetry in life. Sunday, November, DAY BY DAY - MAGNIFICAT Missalette