Poverty of Spirit

 Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

While she is aware many saints sought actual poverty, Leseur says, "This is not my vocation." As the wife of an upper middle class professional, and one with severe illness, she wasn't free to choose it. There is nothing in the essay about solidarity with the poor or any particular insight into actual poverty. She does say that as far as is compatible with her "state in life" she will practice "a little poverty," by which she seems to mean certain self imposed penances. The insight here is not profound.

She distinguishes between Poverty of Spirit, which she defines as detachment from all that is purely human, and Poverty of Heart, which she defines as cutting oneself off from every attachment that cannot last eternity. Leseur addresses poverty of spirit sharply, but it bleeds into her previous writings on renunciation, detachment, and humility. There are no new insights, and it isn't her best piece.

Compared to the radical poverty of Francis, the active solidarity of Vincent de Paul, her writings on this subject sound weak, vague, and self centered.

I've always been haunted by the admonition to "live simply that others may simply live..."  I don't always do it well, but I've tried to store up my treasure where neither thieves nor moths can get to it. In our over rich culture, when people die for lack of clean water, adequate health care, and sufficient food, we can't afford ivory tower concepts of poverty. I don't know that I do any better than Leseur actually did.

Still the point is face poverty of power and rely on God, poverty of grace and ask for it, poverty of virtue and throw ourselves on his mercy, to walk in joy no matter what God gives us or takes away because His will is always to our benefit and His ways are not our ways.

Renunciation

 Renunciation of self is perhaps the most difficult of all.
                                                      Elizabeth Leseur
 
It is month four and Leseur is getting really serious.  She is treading in some dangerous territory! If I were a contemplative nun, I might understand renunciation and how it applies more clearly.  I'm wondering if I'm up for this. Perhaps I'm making it harder than it is.

This Lent I coordinated a program once a week after 10 AM Mass in our parish. What I didn't realize was that that particular Mass is the one most frequently used for funerals. Today I want to my third funeral for a perfect stranger in six weeks.

As is often the case I found my mind wandering, fantasizing about my husband's funeral. That isn't quite as morbid as it sounds. He is chronically ill. The first time I almost lost him I was forty, almost thirty years ago and I started planning the funeral as a sort of black humor. My thoughts run not only to hymns and readings, but to imagining who might travel here, what sort of gathering we might have, and what toasts I might make.When distracted in church I've learned to give it over in prayer. The Holy Spirit (object of our Lenten studies) came back with two thoughts. The first had to do with my fantasy of all those we love from our entire extended family gathered in my yard. I realized with delight that what I actually imagined was heaven, the ultimate family reunion. Our destination isn't the funeral celebration, it is God who will gather us all to himself.

I tried to sidestep the second thought, but it kept coming. Why Greg's funeral? What about mine? The inevitability of death isn't a new thought, but it has become more profound in my soul. All of this, whatever "this" is today, is temporary. That, my friend, is renunciation. I can accept that. It puts all things in their proper place.

But what about the meantime? I went back to LeSeur's list.

• Renunciation of evil. Check. At least I think so. "Of all things that might make me tend toward evil," is a bit dicier and I'll have to rely on the Spirit to point those out.
• Renunciation of the world. She says "those things that are solely of this world and have no place in the afterlife. She goes on,"I resolve to live for God alone, and for souls and for friendship..." Friendship! It is one of the things that goes on.  She notes also that she "lends" herself to the world to perform the duties of her place in life and of charity. She makes it sound manageable when she puts it that way, but I have work to do.
• Renunciation of self, she says is perhaps the most difficult of all. Yet, I already know that I can't be filled with Christ if I don't empty of self. Tough, but clear.
• Renunciation of human desires. She says that can be either for the sake of others or in a spirit of mortification.  I think this means actually embracing every opportunity to let another choose—dinner, which movie to watch, what to do on Saturday, and when to enjoy the blessings of the marriage bed.  Knowing it and remembering on time are two different things.
• Renunciation of spiritual joys and consolation. I wanted to whine, "That's not fair!" Actually I had just read two passages in The Imitation of Christ that said the same thing. If we cling to the gift instead of the giver we're going to fail.

Leseur recommends obtaining these things in prayer. It's the only way. I was right at the beginning this is hard. It is at least becoming clearer. I'll have to be satisfied with that.

Silence

Silence is good for the soul, essential to recollection, and conducive to humility. Remember Our Lord's silence throughout His life and during the hours of His passion.

Elizabeth Leseur           

I discovered Leseur's writing only recently and was struck by the simplicity of her spirituality. She begins a series of "retreats," each with a resolution, with Silence. She has a resolution for each of twelve months. The beginning of a new year struck me as a good time to consider them one by one.

When I see the word silence, I tend to think of it in terms of shutting out noise. Turn off the TV. Shut out the news.  Retreat to a spot where there is no sound. Avoid social media. Get off the Internet. Quiet your insides. Those are all things to do. That isn't what she means.

Leseur writes about being silent. Her emphasis is on not talking, and particularly about not talking about herself. For years I've grappled with something that skirts the edges of her thought but misses the heart of it. I have tended to focus on listening, being attentive to God and learning how to do that by learning to be attentive to Greg first of all and all others as well. My mantra has been listen don't talk in prayer, in social life, and in business. It's my mantra because I'm not very good at it. My natural instinct is to blurt out every thought.

How is that different from what Leseur writes? I realized that by focusing on listening I'm in expectation of receiving something. While it can and should open me up to compassion and care, it is in the end an openness to receiving, not giving. Leseur sees keeping silences as a value in and of itself; it is part of her great emphasis on humility, the emptying out of self. That wasn't a value to me in my twenties. As I age I see the emptying as the absolute necessity of the spiritual life and I know it for the virtually impossible challenge it is. 

So. Silence. She talks at length about all of the things about which she won't speak: the petty, the mean, the material, but also her own interior life, her spirituality and blessings granted her. She leaves it all between her and God. She does write about it so perhaps I can be excused for keeping this journal.

Her final resolution is, I resolve to hide my spiritual life, and, to great extent my sufferings, interests, and material or personal occupations under a veil of silence.

Wow. Perhaps I can take baby steps in that direction.

Poverty of Spirit

Ten years of Franciscan education left me with the concept of poverty deep in my consciousness. It was, to great extent, exactly that, a concept.

"Blessed are the poor"
"Holy indifference"
"Live simply that others may simply live"

All those words have swirled around my spiritual and practical adult life. Now in my seventieth year I find myself returning to them again and again and wondering if I ever understood the idea at all.

In Light in the Darkness Elizabeth Leseur writes eloquently about silence, humility, and renunciation in ways I've never heard them before. Perhaps I wasn't listening. Perhaps as age takes its toll and losses mount, as they inevitably do in life, I understand them better. She even had me with "mortification," an old-fashioned word that would have made me cringe at twenty, but which begins to make sense in marriage or in any life with others when you look at the things life actually sends you.

It comes down, I suspect, to letting go. We can learn to let go of ego, of greed, of the need to win, to be right, to be powerful. We can do it without losing sight of our own great value as children of God. We empty ourselves out in order to be filled. The extent to which we can do that is the extent to which God can take over and do His work in our life and use us for the sake of those he sends our way.

Various writers and various saints have used different words to describe the same process. "The Little Way" of Therese of Lisieux is not that different than holy poverty. Maybe I'm beginning to have an inkling of what the great ones understood utterly. I hope so because the one thing I know for sure is, I have a long way to go and am unlikely to have too many years in which to do it.

I gave up trying to be a hero for God long ago, seeing it for the foolishness it was. Maybe it is time to let go of my life completely and let God have it. My dearest Franciscan mentor once wrote to me, "In your passion for truth and justice, don't neglect poverty and humility." I should have listened then.