(photograph: Wooden sculpture of the Virgin at Calvary, 15th C. Flanders/The Gruuthuse Museum (adjacent to the Church of Our Lady) Bruges, Belgium/ Julie Cook/ 2011)
August 18–Daily reading
Our Poverty, God’s Dwelling Place
How can we embrace poverty as a way to God when everyone around us wants to become rich?
Poverty has many forms.
We have to ask ourselves, “What is my poverty?”
Is it lack of money, lack of emotional stability, lack of a loving partner,
lack of security, lack of safety, lac of self-confidence?
Each human being has a place of poverty.
That’s the place where God wants to dwell!
“How blessed are the poor,” Jesus says (Matthew 5:3).
This means that our blessing is hidden in our poverty.
We are so inclined to cover up our poverty and ignore it that we often miss the opportunity to discover God, who dwells in it.
Let’s dare to see our poverty as the land in which our treasure is hidden.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Bread for the Journey
I was so taken by this entry from August 18th, in my Henri Nouwen daily devotional regarding poverty. When I think of poverty, I immediately think of a lack of food, a lack of shelter, lack of income, a lack of housing…I think of people who are struggling with the basics just to live and survive—
I don’t often think of the more intrinsic issues when I think of poverty.
Why is that?
Is it because of our Government’s defining of poverty, which seems based on income, or the lack thereof?
Is it because when we see people sleeping on park benches or in cardboard boxes in the middle of our urban world we equate that with Poverty?
According to Henri Nouwen, we all have areas of, or issues with, poverty.
That was/ is a powerful revelation for me.
Just because someone may have a secure job, a steady source of income, all of which insures the purchasing of food, clothing and shelter, which are met or are even exceeded, does not make them immune to poverty.
Just because someone has a nice home, a nice car, nice clothes does not exempt them fro Poverty.
Perhaps it is an aching heart, a void in one’s life, ill health, isolation, fear…all are forms of poverty. Places within our very being that find us “in need of”…
But there in those secret, or obvious, places of need dwells the Divine—our God, who seeks to fill the voids, the lacking, the needs…there, in the void, is the healing.
But first we must admit the void in order to begin experiencing the healing, the blessing, the Grace.
May I examine those areas of poverty in my own life rather than ignore them or deny their existence. May I find that healing Grace. May we all recognize the empty areas, the void within, our areas of need and find our God dwelling within…..
Amen.
Amen
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