The spirit and this virtue are a life of Jesus. Virtue and a perpetual poverty. The eternal word adopted it in his becoming man. He took what was most humiliating about poverty. The bode of beasts and what was most difficult about it. The stable. The major. The straw. The cold. The night. He was born far from the homes of men who offered him no assistance in his need. To be poorer still, the word made flesh will be born during a journey and refused hospitality on account of the poverty of his parents.
He then spent a portion of his childhood in Egypt. In a hostile land. Hostile to the Jewish people so that his parents would be still poorer and more forsaken.
In Nazareth his spent 30 years in the practise of poverty. His home was poor to be convinced of this. It is enough to see the poverty at his home. His furniture was poor. He had only what was strictly necessary. His clothes were poor. His tunic was of common wool. His food was that of the poor. It was the fruit of the labour of a poor carpenter.
Who could earn the necessaries of life? Jesus wanted to appear poor in all he did. He considered himself the poorest of all. He always took the last place. He honoured and respected everybody.
Just as the poor do. He listened humbly to the instructions in the synagogue. He never made a show of wisdom or extraordinary knowledge. But lived the life common to those of his rank. He went along like a poor man and went along unnoticed like in everything he did and procured for himself.
See him during his apostolic life (his mission). He continued living like the poor. He knelt on the bare ground for prayer. He ate barley bread. The bread of the poor. He lived on charity.
He travelled like the poor. He experienced hunger and thirst as he could not satisfy it as he pleased.
His poverty made him contemptable in the eyes of the rich and the great. Despite of that he did not hesitate to tell them “owe you rich men of the earth”.
He chose poor disciples like himself and forbad them to have two coats, or provisions for the future, or a staff to defend themselves.
He died forsaken and stripped even of his poor garments.
He was buried in a borrowed shroud and laid a tomb offered by the charity of friends.
Even after his resurrection, he appeared in the trappings of poverty.
Lastly, in the sacrament, he deprives himself of all freedom and all ownership in order to have nothing for him to call his own.
In a way, Jesus is in the Eucharist as he was in His mother’s womb.
Wrapped up in the sacred species and hidden beneath them. Awaiting from the charity of man and the articles required for worship. Such as the poverty of Jesus. He has loved it and made it.
(Audio Available)
