POOR IN SPIRIT

Spiritual poverty is a frame of mind and we are all invited to it. It is a certain recognition of our own human limits, which makes us open up to God, and lose our ambition to be self-sufficient. It turns us from our abilities and ourselves and turns us toward Jesus in trust and expectation.

True poverty is poverty of the soul and its lack of faith, hope and love. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3), He is stating that we are in the blessed reality of knowing our condition. And we are blessed further as we stay in hunger and thirst for this reality. Jesus continues to say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (5:3). This is when in our poverty of soul we know that there is something rotten and spoiled in the kingdom of this world and that we are not made for this world kingdom only but also for the kingdom of God. To know this is to want His “kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.” Without spiritual poverty we will never care much one way or the other about ourselves or anyone else.

At the bottom of our being we all want to be poor and admit our limitations and liabilities. We want to drop the constant flurry of busyness, buying and borrowing to somehow bolster our egos and make us believe we are ‘doing good’ and ‘making it’ when all the while we are slipping into the empty existence of having everything and possessing nothing in our souls.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus