The Deadlies: Greed

 Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God.

Matthew 5:3

This one is both obvious and subtle. I scanned various writers for ideas and found a sea of things:

1. Hands full of gold cannot reach for God. In other words, filling ourselves with wealth as our aim and goal leaves no room for God in our hearts and souls. Greed is a form of idolatry. 
2. Overabundance, while others go hungry, is a sin against charity.
3. If you have two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you and the other to the man who has no shirt. (That gem is from Saint Ambrose)
4. Wealth isn't in and of itself evil, it is the heart of man that is the problem.

Greed is the great American sin. I refer to the CEOs who take multi-million dollar bonuses while laying off workers.  I refer to those who refuse to tax the rich and call attempts to help the poor "socialism." But I also believe it infests us all on every economic level-the striving, the focus on "security," the striving for promotions, and the need to accumulate savings for a future that may or may not arrive.

We all work to live. The key problem words are focus and goal. When wealth takes up our deepest striving we are in trouble.

When generosity is weakened, we are in trouble. Even a cursory reading of the Gospels makes it clear that God has a preference for the poor and values generosity. Yet, our culture has a dozen ways to discourage charity. Don't give to panhandlers, they are fake or they will use it for drugs. How do you know that charity is legitimate? Don't enable that nephew, he'll fail again. You name it.

When anything takes our focus off God, we're in trouble. The great commandments are "Love the Lord your God with your whole heart" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." Greed is a sin against both of those.

Last but not least I cycle back to the poor in spirit. It doesn't mean going to the extreme and selling all you have as Jesus advised the rich young man (though that could be a heroic good, provided God led you to it). It does mean treating your wealth as on loan from God for his purposes, and being indifferent to it as it applies to your own sake. 

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.

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.