Poverty of Spirit
My friend Kelly brought this quote to my attention, and also provided the commentary above and below it. I’m a Thomas Merton fan from way back. Kelly is a member of the Continuing Students Program and lives in Switzerland.
There’s a famous passage from Thomas Merton where he describes being struck, on a busy street corner in Louisville, by the revelation of his own absolute mundanity (full text here: https://altruismmedicine.org/
Again, that expression, le point vierge, (I cannot translate it) comes in here. At the center of our being, is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. . .I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
Spiritual poverty is a confusing concept; sometimes used, in other contexts, as a sort of shorthand for the bankrupt nature of materialism, a ‘fall from grace,’ etc; or alternatively interpreted to suggest one should attempt an outward, material detachment. But true spiritual poverty, as Merton describes earlier in the passage, is absolute commonness. He is not special for being a monk, his robes don’t make him better than any other man. More fundamentally, he is not different from anyone (or anything) for any reason. That absolute poverty is no different from absolute honesty, from total surrender. The beauty of this phrase has helped me keep my pockets empty on a few occasions…
