Dilated by the Touch of Mystery: The True Wealth of Christian Poverty

All forms of relationship as they exist within creation are images which reflect the love of God himself, who has created us in his image and likeness. Whether it is the relationship of parent and child, of husband and wife, of friends, or of siblings, these relationships manifest the mystery of God himself as a Community of Persons. But as beautiful as these created relationships are in themselves, they are not enough to satisfy the human heart, and they powerfully (and at times painfully) point beyond themselves. It is not that they are bad, or even unnecessary, but that they find their place, not in being absolute, but in being sheltered and sustained within the Absolute.

The beauty of relationship within this world points toward the perfect Mystery of the Trinity and to our invitation to share in the life of the Trinity. This is the most central and important invitation for every person: precisely the invitation to surrender to the Trinity who calls us lovingly to himself. This invitation, which is made present in every single moment of our life, has profound implications for the way in which we view our concrete existence and the daily unfolding of our life. It often happens that someone experiencing a “transition” period in life—whether discerning a vocation, or an important decision, or experiencing the apparent failure of one’s plans or hopes—begins to feel “suspended” in “no-place.” They feel as if they are stuck between two places—the past and the future—and are tempted to think that the present finds its meaning only in relation to what has come before or in relation to the decision that will follow later.

The fact of the matter is that these times are, rather, moments of profound grace. This is because they are experiences of deep spiritual poverty, in which the securities and safeguards on which we ordinarily rely fall away, and we must seek for meaning in something deeper and more enduring. We have a thirst for this enduring stability, for the undying constancy of Love—which is able to shelter, encompass, and hold us at every moment. However, because of the disordered movements within us due to original sin, we tend to seek this security in things that cannot provide it. These things may indeed be good, even very good, but they are still not God. They are not big enough to encompass and hold our hearts, which burst beyond the confines of all things created toward the infinity from which they have come.

This is true even for the most blessed of human relationships. If in times of transition and spiritual poverty we are tempted to grasp to past or future, or to create meaning through our own efforts to achieve something in the present (rather than turning inward to the sustaining Love of God that transcends all external things), the same is true for times of spiritual or temporal “wealth.” When we feel that things are going well, that we have been blessed by God, or that relationships are flowering in a beautiful way for us, this is also an invitation to fall in love with the One in whom alone our hearts can be at rest. The danger is that we will settle for the immediately accessible, which at the moment may seem satisfying, rather than allowing it to open up before us a yet deeper Mystery.

Indeed, only in openness to this transcendent Mystery can these good things maintain their true meaning and their authentic goodness. This is because they are held within his arms at every moment, and find their meaning only as an expression of his own infinite Love, flowing from and returning to his intimate bosom. If we want these relationships, these blessed experiences to last, then it is necessary to allow them to flower wholly within the sheltering embrace of God. He alone can be the Foundation that endures, the Bridge that can carry all created goodness and beauty across the boundary of death into the fullness of eternity, where it is not dissolved, but rather brought to its radiant perfection.

In a word, the attitude of a loving and trust-filled spiritual poverty is the precondition for authentically receiving and possessing anything within this life, whether materially, spiritually, or personally. True wealth consists precisely in this spiritual poverty: this radical openness to receive and to give, enfolded within the all-encompassing Love of God himself. When the human heart grasps, it automatically reduces reality to its own size; but when it opens itself to receive, it allows itself to be expanded and dilated through contact with the Mystery that approaches it in every thing and beyond every thing.

Then there blossoms a beautiful harmony in our experience: between God’s presence in every created reality and relationship, and the way that these realities find their unique meaning sheltered within his loving and affirming embrace, and they way that our hearts dilate within and beyond all of this toward the immensity of the One who both transcends and pervades all things, enveloping us within the intimacy of his Divine Embrace.

However, we can often be like the Samaritan woman who comes to the well at noonday, in the blazing heat, to draw the water that will never quench our thirst. We are perhaps wounded by past experiences of rejection or misunderstanding, and we are afraid to open ourselves vulnerably to another. Therefore we seek to relate to others, and to the world as a whole, as something that is within our control. It is “safer” this way. But our hearts bear within themselves the image of the Infinite! Therefore we cannot be content with anything that is within our control, under our possession…for our longing is precisely to be in the possession of another, to be sheltered, held, and protected within their embrace.

“You have forsaken me, the Fountain of living waters, and have hewed out cisterns for yourselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water,” as God says through Jeremiah the prophet (cf. Jer 2:13). But our restless thirst, which impels us to seek for water in so many wells, is itself a great promise of the Water that can satisfy. Do not all of our other desires correspond to objects which fulfill them? The desire for food is itself a sign that real food exists to nourish us; our physical thirst is a sign that real drink exists to quench us; the desire for human intimacy is a sign that our hearts were made for mutual love and communion with other human persons. But even if we have all of these things, there remains within us an unsatisfied desire. Indeed, the more profoundly we experience beauty and goodness in the world, often the more keenly we feel its inadequacy to truly bring rest to our hearts.

What, then, can satisfy this mysterious desire, this holy restlessness deep within us? It is nothing external—no job, no achievements, no comfort or worldly security, nor even a deep and enduring human love. All beauty within our world is but a “sacrament” that unveils something of the countenance of God, a word of love addressed to us and inviting us deeper. We can imagine that, within every created thing, there is a kind of “magnetism” that seeks to draw our hearts to the One who yearns to unite us to himself. The famous poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described this mystery as “inscape.” This is a kind of “bounded infinity” at the heart of every created reality, through which it reveals that it has come from the creative hand of God, remains rooted in him, and points back to him.

When we seek created things merely in their own right, separated from the ravishing beauty of the One who made them and holds them in existence, our eyes are blind to the profound and authentic meaning that they bear within them. Only when we are willing to go beyond them, toward God who both transcends them and also sustains them, can we approach them in the fullness of truth and love, discerning in them the radiance of God’s own light and presence. But how beautiful is this invitation! It means that God has so fashioned us that we cannot just remain of the surface of reality, but have been made to plunge into its depth through a loving and contemplative gaze. Yes, we have been made to gaze, without ceasing, upon the face of the One who is himself ineffable Beauty, complete Goodness, fullness of Truth, and perfect Love! He is present in all things, and indeed in all the circumstances of our lives, and yet these things, revealing him, also remain a kind of “veil” through which he invites us to pass in faith, hope, and love…so as to plunge into his own unspeakable Mystery.

It is prayer which gives access to this Mystery, or rather which allows this Mystery to begin to touch us and unveil itself to us. Prayer is first of all the willingness to allow oneself to be addressed by God, to be approached by him. Is this not, indeed, the reason that it is difficult for so many persons? To allow Another to take the initiative, to draw near to me, gazing upon me and addressing a word that I cannot foresee or control…this is a profoundly vulnerable experience. But as Martin Buber wrote: “God cannot be known as ‘He,’ but only as ‘You.’” This means that God cannot be grasped as a Proposition or a Theory, nor even in the “Third Person,” but can only be truly known in dialogue…in loving encounter, and the living relationship that flows from this. As Pope Benedict has so beautifully said:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny. In the same verse, Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.” We have come to believe in God’s love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. (Deus Caritas Est, 1)

Saint John Paul II said something very similar. Understanding that, as the beloved disciple wrote, “God is Love,” the Pope wrote:

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. … The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly—and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being—he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must “appropriate” and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself. How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he “gained so great a Redeemer”, and if God “gave his only Son” in order that man “should not perish but have eternal life”. (Redemptor Hominis, 11)

This is what God desires for us…to approach us in our thirst for happiness, in our yearning to know who we truly are, in our inmost longing for love and intimacy, and to unveil to us his own even more ardent thirst for us, his tender and constant love for us. This is true wealth, and the consolation to true poverty! Letting myself be enfolded in the Mystery of the One who is perfect Love! When my thirst encounters God’s thirst for me—his profound love for me and his delight in who I am—then true faith awakens and comes to life in my heart. It is almost as if I no longer “believe” in God as a mere choice or religious assent, but rather I allow him to breathe into me the certainty of his existence and his love.

This certainty in being known and loved by God, and the corresponding experience of the Beauty of God himself which his loves reveals to me…this becomes the foundation of my whole existence, and the light in which I see and experience all things. My life then becomes a life of prayer, for I begin to gain the confidence to let myself be vulnerable before God, who unceasingly comes to me in his love. In every moment I am open to welcome him and to surrender myself into his embrace. I welcome his mysterious and all-pervading presence; I abandon myself into the arms of the One who cradles me within himself; I recognize that the whole of creation is contained within this same embrace, and I can therefore see, receive, and understand all things more deeply and more truly than I ever have before.