By Anthony Esolen
Pope Leo published an apostolic exhortation on poverty this week. Perhaps I should recommend it, at least in part, as a remedy for our ills. «Blessed are the poor —says Jesus—, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven».
The only time I met Father Benedict Groeschel, he was too weak to walk on his own. Several of us were giving lectures to a Catholic group in Boston, at Faneuil Hall itself, if I remember correctly —in the very belly of the secular beast—. «If you want to die a happy death —he said—, stay close to the poor». He had lived among the poor all his life, so I trust he knew what he was talking about. That it is true, I do not doubt. Why it is so, that is the question.
I have worked hard all my life so that my wife and my children —one of whom will never be able to live independently— are provided for when I die. I do not spend money on myself. Even with this deliberate distance from material goods, sometimes I worry about missing out on the good that Jesus offers us through poverty.
That is why, when I pray the Beatitudes, I do not say: «Blessed are the poor in spirit», because for me it would be an evasion. Nor do I believe that the poor will be blessed only as compensation, as in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Because Jesus was an example of poverty here and now.
The sparrows had their nests and the foxes their dens, but the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. He went into the desert to pray, without food or drink. On the Cross, he was stripped down to the skin, and all his Apostles, except the young John, abandoned him.
If I think about the Aramaic in which Jesus addressed the crowds, the identification between poverty and beatitude becomes more immediate and powerful: Blessed are the poor / [for] theirs is the Kingdom [of] Heaven. It is a verse of Semitic poetry.
We can assume that the Kingdom of Heaven will be given to the poor as a consequence of their poverty, but we can also say that poverty is the very condition for receiving the Kingdom of Heaven, not by God’s arbitrary will, but by the nature of both terms.
To be poor as Jesus was poor is to welcome the Kingdom of God. If we know what poverty and the Kingdom of God are, we know they are inseparable.
I do not want to be misunderstood, although I feel that I am only groping at a truth glimpsed only halfway. We would be wrong, I believe, if we saw this poverty only in a material sense, since materially poor people can be as greedy and hard-hearted as any miser.
We would also be wrong if we spiritualized it completely, so that people could content themselves with their full barns, expecting a quiet old age, convinced that God approves of them or that they are good enough.
Nor can it be half one thing and half the other. In some way we must cultivate a noble and free detachment from the goods we possess for a brief time on earth, as if they did not matter; or else, our poverty must be the material sign or the embodied discipline of that humility that alone allows God to enter the heart.
In some way we must work toward poverty, and that will be easier, as Fr. Groeschel said, if we mingle with the poor.
I cannot claim to know how to do it. Nothing in the life around me gives me the slightest clue, much less encouragement.
Obviously, the homeless must be cared for, and the poverty intertwined with moral chaos must be combated on the material and spiritual fronts. The State can do acceptable work on the first; it is powerless before the second, and sometimes worse than powerless; sometimes it sows the moral evil that impoverishes body and soul.
But I wonder how much of the harm caused by poverty could be alleviated through a general acceptance of poverty, or at least through a dislike for wealth, glamour, power, glory, and the incessant noise of libertinism.
There are partial precedents. Mink coats once cost prices that, adjusted to the current value of money, would leave us stunned. But those same coats are now despised. You can get one in an antique shop for a pittance.
Something similar could happen with oversized houses, if we finally conceived a healthy disgust toward them. No family needs two full bathrooms. Children of the same sex are better off sharing a room. We would be better off without two televisions. God knows we could be better off without any.
Then there is the paradox of the two-income family. When that becomes the norm, housing prices rise to adjust to what the market can pay, with no real benefit to family life.
We have seen the same inflation, accompanied by an intellectual and moral decay, when college costs were subsidized by government-guaranteed loans. The federal government made things worse by promoting labor policies that led companies to use universities as credentialing agencies, with young people, parents, and taxpayers footing the bill.
Think of a bridge that everyone must cross, whether they like it or not, and then think of the toll collector, who contributes nothing to the common good and extorts from everyone what they can pay, not what the use of the bridge really contributes to human life.
But look, I am straying from the point. Every discussion about poverty tends to veer off, as if the problem were yours, not mine. We must learn the healthy ways of poverty, so closely related to humility. Only children do not need to stoop to enter through the door of the Kingdom of God.
About the author
Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and most recently The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is Distinguished Professor at Thales College. Visit his new website, Word and Song.