In Holy Scripture, the widow and the orphan are symbols of the oppressed poor, of those who have no means of defending themselves. God becomes their champion. . . It is quite certain that no amount of seeking holiness or union with God, no amount of prayer or penance, no amount of good works will do us any good or give glory to God if we have the wrong attitude towards the poor.
The beautiful commandment from God, which sums up and includes all God’s laws, is the one that tells us to love God and love our neighbor. True love for God is not possible without love for our neighbor, and that love for neighbor must be a reflection of God’s love for him. It follows, then, that if we love God we shall love our poor neighbor, our defenseless neighbor, more than any other. Our attitude to the poor determines whether we love God or not.
It is not only true that God so loves the poor that unless we love them God cannot feel at peace within us; it is also true that He receives more from the poor than from anyone else. Jesus was more pleased by that poor widow who put only a penny into the collection box in the temple than by all the rich people who gave a great deal.
. . . We often comfort well off people who want to be holy by telling them that it is not the possession or non-possession of wealth that matters but whether one is attached to one’s possessions or not and what one does with them. I suppose this is true, but if you read all Jesus said about the rich and about the poor, there does not seem much comfort for those who are well off and believe themselves not to be attached to their wealth. It is extremely hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.
There are not many people who admit that they are rich. Whether one is rich or poor depends [in a sense on] where you establish the poverty line. I remember when I was in Rome many years ago, some Franciscan Friars from the United States came over in order to study at one of the universities there. Now all Franciscans take a vow of poverty, as did these Franciscans from America, but they were used to living in poverty by American standards, and they were horrified at the depths of poverty that Italian Franciscans experiences as a matter of course. . .
In our attempts to become holy, to get closer to God, to pray better, and so on, if we do not seem to be making any progress, one thing to look at is our attitude to the poor and the use we make of our own resources. It may be we are living too well in terms of comforts and luxuries and wasting on ourselves what others desperately need. It is not very easy to decide what is a reasonable standard of living in our own individual circumstances; and in taking our Lord’s teaching about riches and poverty seriously, we are not asked to force poverty on our rich friends or rich families, if we have them. It is a personal and individual affair.
What we have to be careful about is spending money on ourselves when we should feel awkward doing so if we saw Jesus . . . with His arm round the shoulders of a starving or impoverished person from Calcutta or Africa or South America as He watched us spend it. It might even be that if we had such a mystical vision of Jesus watching us as we spent money on ourselves, the starving man or woman would not be seen as a companion of Jesus but as Jesus Himself: “Whatever you failed to do to one of these least of my brethren, you failed to do to me.”
So let us couple with our real and good spiritual longings and intentions . . . and our resolutions about prayer and penance and spiritual exercises a real search for poverty suitable to our own lives. At least let us never waste a single penny when God needs it so much to help His really poor.
