POOR AND FREE?

The following is a passage from the admirable The Wound of Love: a Carthusian Miscellany. The author, anonymous like all Carthusian writers, has been discussing spiritual poverty, in the context of poverty, chastity and obedience. I found these paragraphs very striking, even for those who are not monks or nuns They merit being read with real attention. 

We have no right to claim as our own the good which we do. We do not even have the absolute certainty of believing in God, of loving him or our brothers. Each morning we must receive everything anew in faith. God creates us truly at every moment. The past, we entrust to his mercy; we must empty our memory of its supposed riches so as to change it into a pure movement toward God himself beyond his gifts. This movement is lived uniquely in the reality of the present moment, in our conforming to the will of the Lord for us, here and now, in our communion of love and our close attention to him. Here poverty and simplicity become one. For the future, we entrust ourselves to God. We do not, as it were, have an account in some celestial bank, all we have is our faith in the love of the Lord, our hope and our desire to love. 

            We must not be anxious before the demands of true spiritual poverty. We are never so well off as when we have nothing. We are free and available for anything. Our ego, weak as it is, would like to cover its nakedness with furs made of material things, and intellectual and spiritual goods. The obscure light of faith is a light indeed, and whoever becomes accustomed to it will not abandon it for all the sweetness and consolations of days gone by. May God preserve us from our virtues! Our faith allows us to discard this deceitful covering in order to walk in truth along the path which is no path, which leads us to the Father in Love, that is, in the Spirit of Christ. The man who is poor finds the gates of death open, and he passes freely into the Kingdom of God. For if we despoil ourselves, it is in order to rediscover the innocent nakedness of God’s image in our hearts and thus to clothe ourselves in Christ (Galatians 4:27). Our poverty is the poverty of the children of God, who ‘having nothing, yet possess all’ ( 2 Corinthians 6:10), in hope and in faith. We have received ‘a spirit of adoption as sons, by virtue of which we cry “Abba! Father!”’ (Romans 8:15-17).