Weavings Newsletter – Poor in Spirit - January 2014
Defining Terms by Percy C. Ainsworth
We can be "spiritually poor" without being "poor
in spirit." The spiritually poor are all of us in our human weakness,
ignorance, and sinfulness. But the "poor in spirit" are those of us
who realize and confess that we are weak, and ignorant, and sinful.
And it would seem that there is no confession more difficult to
extort from the human heart than this confession of spiritual poverty. How we
refuse to believe that we are poor! ...We do sometimes get a glimpse into that
inner place, that empty place. And we know that we are poor―very poor. ...How
we guard the secret of our soul's hunger. We do not understand that in doing so
we are at war with our own happiness.
From Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol.
XV, No. 1 (January/February 2000), (Nashville, TN: The Upper Room, 2000),
31-32.
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Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven. (Matthew 5:3, NIV)
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Poverty Is Where the Blind Fish Live by Kristen Johnson Ingram
It began on a Sunday in April when I listened to a sermon on the
Beatitudes. As I drove home, I found myself thinking, I'm not really poor [in
spirit]. My life is full of God.
But [really] I was guilty of gluttony and avarice, because my
spiritual closets and cupboards were burgeoning, and because I kept consuming,
kept pursuing more and more of God.
So I decided to become intentionally poor in spirit. ... But you
can't empty your mind and spirit as easily as you can clean out your closets.
...Oh, the theology I had stored! The hymn stanzas! The rites in which I had
participated! The sermons I've written and preached, or sat and heard; the
books I continued to read, the hundreds of Bible passages I knew and loved! I
was full, full to overflowing.
If I could just make myself not pray, not think, not know, then
maybe I could be poor in spirit and thus gain the kingdom of heaven.
Like Paul, I knew what I wanted—to become poor in spirit—but I
could not do it. And I finally—also like Paul—cried out, “Who will rescue me?”
“I will,” said God calmly. “You only had to ask.”
I couldn’t do it, but God could, and God doesn’t give you a
stone when you ask for bread; and I was plunged down into that cold sea where
there’s no light. Down, down, down I fell, like Alice descending through the
rabbit hole. …I plummeted through the dark water of hopelessness, and sank into
colorless silt. I had no company but the blind fish who have never beheld
light, who live and die in the thick muck without ever having seen one of their
own kind: the blind, mute, handless fish of the bottom. Like them, I was dumb
and unseeing. I had no fingers to touch anything, but there was nothing to
touch anyway…
I was laid waste. I was nobody. It was worse than feeling
despair. I was despair, and I cried out, “Enough!”
I thought I had been there for a century, but it had been fewer
than thirty seconds. I had experienced the abyss of unknowing, and as I
catapulted toward the surface, I asked, “What did I learn?”
“You found out what was at your center,” God said. …What you saw
is who you are without me.”
“Then I am poor,” I said.
“Destitute,” God answered, and I laughed and gazed out at the
kingdom of heaven, which was now mine.
From Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol.
XV, No. 1 (January/February 2000), (Nashville, TN: The Upper Room, 2000),13-18.
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[Complete article]
Poverty Is Where the Blind Fish Live
Kristen Johnson Ingram
It began on a Sunday in April when I listened to a sermon on the
Beatitudes. From the pew I agreed with the vicar’s statement that we are all
poor in spirit, all in need of God to change us from what we are into what God
is. But as I drove the seventeen miles home from church, gazing past the
silvery rain beating on my windshield, I found myself thinking, I’m not really
poor. My life is full of God.
I understand intentional poverty: as part of my oblate’s vows in
a religious order, I had already begun ridding myself of material belongings.
My donations to the Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul were generous: I got rid
of antique dishes, splendid books, expensive clothes and elegant jewelry.
But I was still guilty of gluttony and avarice, because my
spiritual closets and cupboards were burgeoning, and because I kept consuming,
kept pursuing more and more of God.
So I decided to become intentionally poor in spirit.
scuba diver photographThis is a shapeless, indescribable
experience. In the most primitive sense of the word, as a human being, I am of
course poor in spirit. My sins are manifold; any worthiness I might claim is
nothing more than a pile of filthy rags. I am, as one of the pages in the Book
of Common Prayer so perfectly states, not worthy so much as to gather up the
crumbs under God’s table; not worthy so much as to say a single prayer, not
capable of getting anywhere near the glory that is God. I am not even humble; I
am nugatory. But it’s not my personal undeserving I was called to experience:
that’s an easy one. My task was trying to divest myself of spiritual
accumulation.
But you can’t empty your mind and spirit as easily as you can
clean out your closets. And if it be true that the rich find it impossible to
enter the kingdom of heaven, I didn’t have a chance.
In her astonishing book I Went to the Animal Fair, Heather
Harpham said she’d be all right if she could just get away from herself for a
few days, and I knew what she meant. How much of the God my life was full of
was really God, and how much was simply what I had been taught or had read? I
peered back through the shadowy images of my life and saw my small self sitting
on my father’s lap to hear him read my Sunday school paper. At five or six, I
could recite that God made me for God’s own pleasure, that there were three
Persons in the Godhead. I was eight years old when I went to Vacation Church
School and confessed what I had known since before I could talk: that Jesus
Christ was my Savior. When I was eleven I memorized The Catechism so I could
give the correct answers for my confirmation exam.
God became the focus of my life: I have written fourteen
Christian books and only God knows how many religious magazine articles. I
learned to read, study, pray, meditate, contemplate constantly. I went to
retreats and conferences, I taught at retreats and conferences.
Oh, the theology I had stored! The hymn stanzas! The rites in
which I participated! The sermons I’ve written and preached, or sat and heard;
the books I continued to read, the hundreds of Bible passages I knew and loved!
I was full, full to overflowing.
I could not write fast enough or homilize loudly enough to
unload all I knew—in fact, my knowledge became even more entrenched as I wrote
and talked. I could say “Aquinas, Tillich, Barth, Teilhard” as easily as I
could say egg, mustard, lemon, and oil. I was a devotee of liturgy, a full
participant, conscious of both grace and doctrine. My relationship with Christ
was also rich: my spiritual life was not based only on theological knowledge
but also on the fact of my experience. And I was trying to dump it all in order
to become emptied. If I could just make myself not pray, not think, not know,
then maybe I could be poor in spirit, and thus gain the kingdom of heaven.
I said, “I’ll discard everything I know. I’ll reduce my life to
just you and me, Jesus, alone in the wilderness,” but that was also
self-defeating: I couldn’t experience Jesus without also triggering a thousand
religious mnemonics: Son of God, truly God and truly man, begotten, not made. .
. And by proposing that we meet in the wilderness, I had even created a
theological setting. A wilderness contains at least dirt or rock, and rock is
something. Nothing was what I sought, and everything but nothing emerged from
my well-furnished mind.
I couldn’t not hear the belief that resided in my mind. I tried
pretending I knew nothing, and knowledge smacked me in the face. Then I sought
to visualize piling my quandary on a goat and set the goat free in the
wilderness. But Azazel’s sacrificial animal just roamed around in my head,
nibbling on my consciousness and requiring me to consider the nature of a God
who came as a man to be the one, full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for
sin.
So I tried instead to be “open-minded” and to consider every
religious principle as equally valid to every other. I forced myself to dally
with the vague New Age ideas that I had hitherto considered either heresy or
silliness. I confronted absurdities like astrology and Tarot, I peered into the
dark meanings of occultism. I am not drawn to those things, and I even felt a
flicker of fright when I addressed them. And besides, each of those engagements
requires a first premise; and a good strong first premise was not the kind of
poverty I was seeking.
I’d hoped I could cast off all the theology I’d learned—after
all, I had already shed much of it, already decided, long ago, that Augustine
was wrong about original sin, that John Chrysostom was anti-Semitic and a prig,
that Aquinas complicated the obvious. So how hard would it be to dump the rest?
It tuned out to be impossible. I could rid myself temporarily of their names,
and even for a moment quit attaching ideas to them; but the ideas, like the
smell of smoke in a room, lingered on. Well, then, I would jettison expectation
and throw away hope so I could become completely needy and thereby gain the
kingdom of heaven.
But if I know I want heaven, if I strive to become impoverished
for the sake of possessing the Kingdom, then I also have to admit I know the
rest of the story. The more I tried to want nothing, the more obvious it was
that I had hanged myself on my own logic, was hoist by my own pious petard.
Like the Psalmist, there was nowhere I could flee from God: I took the wings of
the morning and settled at the farthest limits of the sea, and ran headlong
into my own faith. I tried to make my bed in hell, and there God was. I said,
“Let the light around me become night,” and felt God moving toward me in the
hot darkness. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. . .
Go down, I said. Go down where there’s no light, no memory, no
logic. I have to go down, I kept saying to myself. Go on down to where it’s
dark and murky, down below the deep water. . .
I wasn’t diving for abalone or exploring undersea caverns; I was
seeking poverty, and the journey to poverty is always downward. In everyday
speech, terms about descent describe poverty: hitting rock bottom, bottoming
out, down on your luck. . . So rather than pushing up to the light, I wanted to
descend into the clouded waters of separation, had to plunge into the dark cold
chasms where nothing fluoresces, had to find the opaque bottom of the sea where
the blind fish live.
The deeper I dived, the more rapidly I rebounded to the surface.
I was seeking darkness, and light kept flooding my consciousness. While I
longed to know nothing, my mind disgorged the poetry of George Herbert, the
steely lessons of George MacDonald, the wry observations of Jerome. When I
tried to deny the goodness of creation, spring burst upon me with the most
blossoms and perfumes in the history of our region. I reached for neutrality
and discovered new joy and new pain.
Though I kept trying to fall into unknowing, I always floated to
the surface: I’d wake in the morning and automatically start to pray, or I’d
look up at the Scotch broom, skyrocketing golden on our hillside, and breathe
my thanks to God. I’d get into a debate about gun control and start quoting the
New Testament. I’d watch a movie and unconsciously start applying theology to
its conclusions. I couldn’t yet create a spiritual vacuum, or even a spiritual
bare spot.
Why was I doing this to myself? I wasn’t sure. Apparently it was
something God called me to do, and I was trying. I knew what I was looking for.
I wanted what Titus found when he ripped open the veil of the Temple: nothing.
I wanted the nada the Spanish mystics talked about. I wanted even less than
nothing, if nothing is neutral: I wanted to be spiritually concave, destitute,
emptied so the Word didn’t resound in me. I wanted to sink toward a kind of
spiritual death, so I could start over again and get it right this time. I
wanted to sink into a kind of shadowy sheol where I could not even imagine God:
then, in that state of total poverty—a poverty that doesn’t even recognize
itself as needy—I might a new and untrained apprehension of divinity.
Like Paul, I knew what I wanted—to become poor in spirit—but I
could not do it. And I finally—also like Paul—cried out, “Who will rescue me?”
“I will,” God said calmly. “You only had to ask.”
I had been on a sort of reverse-Pelagian route, trying in
vain—not to redeem myself by my own goodness, but still, trying to do something
all alone, and of course failing. I say “of course” because it is futile for me
to try to achieve any deed in my spirit without the Spirit’s making it happen,
absolutely impossible to pray without God’s praying inside me, ridiculous to
try to have faith without God’s pouring faith down on me. But I had thought I
could undo alone: I believed I could, by my own volition, forget the hundreds
of Eucharists wherein I was fed, wipe out all the times I’d called on God and
been almost physically knocked down by Presence, thought I could, at will, undo
the fact of my faith.
I couldn’t do it but God could, and God doesn’t give you a stone
when you ask for bread; and I was plunged feet-first into that cold sea where
there’s no light. Down, down, down I fell, like Alice descending through the
rabbit-hole. No, it was worse than that: there was no French-speaking mouse to
swim beside me, no glimpse of a white rabbit with a pocket-watch, no thrill of
hope that at the bottom I’d find a rich looking-glass world. I plummeted
through the black water of hopelessness, and sank into colorless silt. I had no
company but the blind fish who have never beheld light, who live and die in the
thick murk without ever seeing one of their own kind: the blind, mute, handless
fish of the bottom. Like them, I was dumb and unseeing. I had no fingers to
touch anything, but there was nothing to touch anyway, except what trash
molecules filtered down to the nethermost, so the hopeless fish could eat.
I was laid waste. I was nobody. It was worse than feeling
despair: I was despair, and I cried out, “Enough!”
I thought I had been there for a century, but it had been fewer
than thirty seconds. I had experienced the abyss of unknowing and as I
catapulted toward the surface, I asked, “What did I learn.”
“You found out what was at your center,” God said. “Now you know
who you really are without—”
“You mean I don’t really exist as a person? You mean everything
about me has been an illusion?” I was enraged. My life had been for nothing!
“I mean everything about you has been redeemed,” God said. “What
you saw is who you are without me.”
“Then I am poor,” I said.
“Destitute,” God answered, and I laughed and gazed out at the
kingdom of heaven, which was now mine.
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without permission.
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