Chasing Lady Poverty

More on poverty as a foundation for recovering culture

For those who haven’t clicked the “about” page, here’s what this Culture Recovery Project is all about.

Several years ago, I experienced a sharp longing for a more unified life. As a householder, I was in the throes of welcoming new technology into my home, hoping it would help harness the countless needs of my business and growing family, but instead of the promised simplicity and streamlining, I began to feel my life fragmenting. Every woman wears many hats, but my differing identities began to clash and shatter, and I no longer felt whole. I found the maintenance of a virtual online identity was far more interesting than my non-electronic one, and the real-life self began to wither. Since that real-life self was the one who wrote novels and mothered children and was married to my husband, I grew alarmed. 

These journals are the fruit of my self-diagnosis. Not only was I fragmented, but I discovered our culture was fragmented and those fragments had begun to polarize at a disturbing clip. I began questioning how I could knit them back together, picturing the exercise as lashing so many barrels together in a shattering shipwreck, like the Swiss Family Robinson. It is our culture which is shattering in the sea, and I am asking myself what can be saved from the wreckage. As a castaway myself, I am not concerned with grand plans for politics or pop culture or national revival but with the country of my own heart and the landscape of my own mind, and the children the Lord has given me, for we are signs and portents in Israel. This process I have dubbed the Culture Recovery Project, and these Journals are my questing manuals. I hope they serve useful for any other castaways and refugees who find themselves on a similar journey.

In a previous article, I stated that the foundation for any project of Culture Recovery must be poverty. I feel that I need to go into this assertion a bit more deeply, and more personally, which is difficult for me to do, and also to talk about the role of St. Francis who succeeded in starting a revival within the Catholic Church without meaning to do anything other than follow his passion. St. Francis, the medieval allegorist that he was, personified Poverty as a beautiful Lady and loved her incurably and enduringly, choosing her over and over again, frustrating his followers with his refusal to even touch money or mark a hut as his own. It was Francis’s devotion to poverty that drew my attention to it as I began setting up housekeeping after my marriage.

You see, often housekeeping involves poverty, or at any rate, fear of poverty. Money management is typically studied frantically by those who have made mistakes and need to gain better control over their finances: at any rate, that’s when I start studying it, when my account balances are in the negative. 

However, I live in what economists used to call a First-World country and I soon discovered the main problem of housekeeping is not scarcity but abundance: glut and clutter are our everyday menaces. In America, if you do nothing, “stuff” will accumulate around you like mold on white bread and eventually overwhelm you.

This is because this country is rich and generous, and people love to give. And here, the problem of riches taking over our hearts—or at any rate, too much of our time and attention—is a serious problem. The Scripture warns that the love of money is the root of all evil, and money is the temptress ever-wooing to be let into the heart.

I did not want to fall in love with money—and I didn’t want my children to either. Ironically, though we householders fear poverty, we are more in danger of centering our home and our lives around its opposite: maintenance of our stuff. 

Why should entertaining our greatest fear be our starting place for housekeeping? Well, if you are afraid of something, you generally have to pay attention to it. That’s one reason to discuss it. But Christ’s blessing upon poverty intersects that fear to make me wonder if that very object of our anxiety could be our salvation in the end.

Christ praised poverty, and as He saved my soul, I feel inclined to pay attention to those things He praised, particularly if I don’t understand them. According to two Gospels, He praised both actual poverty (St. Luke’s) and being poor in spirit (St. Matthew’s), which is even more perplexing. His followers went on to continue to bless poverty and develop some crucial Church doctrines that have important economic ramifications, such as the Universal Destination of All Goods.

I was also aware that our modern understanding of economics is an ongoing problem, one that Mother Church has called upon lay people to address, time after time after time. In a further article, I will give a short history of the Church’s teachings on the economy, explaining why this problem is crucial for us to take apart and figure out at this juncture in history. Solving that problem has remained on the “Honey Do” list Mother Church gave us for centuries—actually since the advent of the market economy, and someone has to do something about it. I am going to try my hand at it, probably badly, at least so that others can become aware of it. But first let me return to St. Francis.

The Secret Love of St. Francis

Most everyone is familiar with St. Francis, that most gregarious and universal of Catholic saints, who exploded into a too-tired Christian culture with the force of a bomb, a weapon of mass construction. If you know a little bit more about him, you will know that his odyssey into sanctity began with an obsession with a lady no one had ever met, the Lady Poverty. This was the age of allegory and so his passion was not as strange to his fellow Assisians as it may be to us. Yet of the many mysterious and prophetic things that Frenchie Bernadone said and did, this was by far the most mysterious. He directed all the passions and longings of a lover towards her, extolling her loveliness and seeking her amorously. Like the medieval courtly lovers who sought only to worship a lady espoused by another, he adored her as the chosen spouse of Christ. Few among Francis’s followers seemed to share his mad passion, and it was the first article of his order abandoned by his more conventional followers, but the love affair remains resonant in the fragmented Franciscan order and prophetic even today.

The Sacrum Commercium, an early Franciscan treatise on poverty which is well worth reading, tells of the encounter of Francis and his companions where reality and allegory are blended in a mysterious manner retold in the language of the Song of Songs:

While they were hastening to the heights with easy steps, behold Lady Poverty, standing on the top of the mountain. Seeing them climb with such strength, almost flying, she was quite astonished. ‘It is a long time since I saw and watched people so free of all burdens.’ …

And so Lady Poverty greeted them with rich blessings; ‘Tell me brothers, what is the reason for your coming here and why do you come so quickly from the valley of sorrows to the mountain of light?’ 

 They answered: ‘We wish to become servants of the Lord of Hosts because He is the King of glory. So, kneeling at your feet, we humbly beg you to agree to live with us and be our way to the King of glory, as you were the way when the dawn from on high came to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.’

Much as Christians still yearn for the days of the newborn Church of Acts, where all goods in joyful innocence were shared in common, so the poverty of Francis still haunts those of us who consider following the King. Poverty was indeed the lady who Christ as a babe embraced and her setting-up-house was the early Church, but since then she has hidden in her cenacle, emerging only when she is needed and no one else will come.

So who is this elusive Lady? I have long wondered for over two decades over this early prayer of St. Francis. I have pondered it and prayed to come to know her better. I feel compelled to share this haunting in hopes that it will provide a way out of the tangled overgrown wilderness we find ourselves in and lead us to a better grasp of the Christ who loved her.  

Lord, show me Poverty
Whom You loved so dearly.
Merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
I am full of yearning for my Lady Poverty.
I can find no peace without her.
You, Lord, it was, who first aroused love for her in my heart.
Grant me the privilege of possessing her.
I yearn to be enriched by this treasure.
I earnestly desire that it might belong to me and mine forever.
For Jesus, You were very poor,
And I want to call nothing under heaven mine,
But only to live on what others may give me.

This prayer of St. Francis—an actual one, unlike his famous “Make me an instrument of peace” prayer, whose historical lineage is more muddy—struck me as fundamentally disorienting. Francis was middle-class (as am I) and his upbringing had been devoted to the production and acquisition of material comforts. But his drive for poverty was more than just reaction against his parents (though that does seem to be an element!). In an age when poverty is invariably coupled with an invitation to social agitation against it (the 1950s War on Poverty, for example), even paying attention to poverty per se can have political ramifications that obscure its spiritual significance to Christ and to Francis. 

The Minimalistic Fallacy

In discussing poverty, it is important to differentiate her from her similarly-appointed fellows, namely minimalism and simplicity.

Nowadays, minimalism is the fad and trend, but in reality, the impulse to minimalism is about as old as materialism, and I believe the two are related. Materialism expansively says, “Take whatever you like!” while Minimalism says, with a hint of a wrinkled nose, “Of course, it would be gauche, it would be uncouth, it would be so off-trend to take it all. You only want a slim fraction of it; you want to curate a collection of the Few Very Best. One mustn’t look greedy.”

But yet, the apparent generosity of Materialism and the apparent ascetism of Minimalism are both a sham. Both are in thrall to money, and hence neither can ever satisfy. A whole industry has been built up around these two heiresses, an industry ostensibly geared to generate minimalism, which inevitably results in more storage units. Every season we are exhorted to simplify, simplify, simplify by getting rid of stuff, but the very next buying cycle, we are encouraged to update, splurge, redecorate, and restock, thus creating glut--- thus the cycle continues and expands.  Minimalism is in many ways driving the discretionary consumer economy these days, and so it will continue, as long as the dragons of catastrophic wealth keep us captive.

The ideal of minimalism, especially solitary tiny-house back-to-the land minimalism, periodically affects the American mind like a virus that is activated by the cancer of materialism. Not a few Americans have cast off all obligations and set off for the wilderness, only to return to write a book or start a speaking tour. Only in America, heavy with the bounty of good harvests and ample forests, could such forays be indulged in. “The world is too much with us,” as Wordsworth observed, and not only the Catholic Hopkins agrees that, “all is seared, bleared, smeared with trade, and shares man’s smell.” But casting it all off, only to drift back, unconverted, may cure the fever but not the tumor.

Minimalism is not poverty, although it might resemble it in its superficialities. Minimalism is something. Poverty is a nothing. Poverty means recognizing that someday, all the carefully curated treasures will be so much rubbish in someone else’s storage shed, yard sale, estate auction, or landfill detritus, and the hands that clutch them, the brow that creases, and the mind that pulses with anxiety will be skeletal, the skull empty of it all. Since we cannot keep it, ultimately, we hold it loosely, stewarding it until the Master calls, in the form of a beggar, an annoying relative, a friend in need, strangers in distress.

The other mistaken identity of Lady Poverty is Simplicity, the simplicity of the Amish housewife at her bread bin, of the nun scrubbing the cloister floor, the monk baking bread. Simplicity dresses our childhood in unmuted hues: she decorates the shrine of previous ages of history, whose complexities are worn away by time. Simplicity is often confused with her counterfeit, Easiness, who flirts with our spouses and friends, and who drops filters over every new plan or possibility, opening hidden doors and carving out escape hatches. But true Simplicity can be recognized by the hard work she requires, as the Amish, the religious, our previous selves, and all our ancestors would loudly agree. She is blind to trends and oblivious to fashion: simplicity is not a romantic. Simplicity is the Benedictine serving tea to the wild-haired Franciscan bride, shaking her head over the latter’s muddy bare feet and dramatic adventures. Simplicity is fond of America and indulges our sentimentalism for it (she has long ago given up on Europe). Even her admirers agree she has no ear for music, a blurred eye for beauty, and is a little too indulgent with modern architecture.

Allegory aside, why do we yearn for simplicity frequently, recurrently? To be simple is to be wholly one thing, all of one material or purpose. To be a unity, to live as a unity.

Our world is fragmenting fast, and we panic and yearn to return to simplicity. Simplicity is our antidote, but it eludes us because we are not, by our lifestyle, simple. So long as we live by our desires, we must be polytheists.

We are not all one thing, not even those of us who are Christians. We all multitask, juggle multiple personas and jobs, slicing our lives into thinner and thinner compartments. We thread together contradictions and avoid conflicts of interests, even our own interests. We maintain online or public personas which contradict our private lives. Our lives are often sacks of sewn-together chaos. Our purpose is not unified.

What is my purpose? I am a Christian, a woman, a wife, a mother, a homemaker, an author, an editor, an artist. Can my life telescope down into one unit: follower of Christ? What if it could?

And simplicity is a servant, but not a goal. Any search for simplicity will be futile until we decide what our way of life means. Civilization is more convenient than chaos, but order is not equivalent to meaning. Who decides what it all means?  The technocrats? The search engines? Democracy? The strong? The smart? The tribe?

Yet we need simplicity, we need that one central thing that we can center our lives around.  It needs to be real, not a mere ideal, touching our lives at all the edges, shaping us and helping us shape each other, nudge each other into wholeness, keep us touching reality. This one thing is really One Man, and we need to build a way of life that allows Him to touch us and shape us daily, hour by hour.

Christ did not really talk about simplicity—but His followers did. Simplicity does not mean having one sofa, two chairs, a coffee table with one book and one decorative implement arranged on a sisal rug.  Simplicity means being all of one thing: it means being pure and whole.  A simple heart is a heart that’s all about one thing. I want, as Rich Mullins sang, to have Christ be that one thing: I want a simple heart, not a divided one.

Trends and fads are fun, but they are not a recipe for simplicity, nor for peace. I don’t want to update my home: I want my home to be continually approaching one goal. That’s how simplicity in the home works: it’s all oriented towards one goal, despite the chaos and the cluttering.  Decluttering and ordering are not to achieve simplicity but to achieve that goal.

So rather than simplicity, poverty. If we must have worldly goods –and homemaking is intrinsically connected to worldly goods—we need to order them and orient them so that they do not rule us, they do not woo us, they do not betray us.  Perhaps the best way to break their hold upon our hearts is to detach from them altogether and seek poverty first.

How Poverty Teaches Us All

Lord, show me Poverty
whom You loved so dearly…

What was this poverty Francis ached for as he began his walk with God? Why did he see her as a lady, the loveliest of ladies?  Perhaps because he was an artist and a poet and he saw what others could not: Lady Poverty is the only way to beauty.

The artist must empty herself to create. The soul must empty herself to become like Christ.

Poverty is, as I said, lack and want. It is the humiliation of not being able to buy the meal you want, of having to return the too-expensive purchase you cannot afford to keep. It is not enough. It is shame and ache and frayed nerves, chewed fingernails, the agitated search, the hollow knowledge of nothingness, the black-circled eyes, the averted face and lowered head, the broken safety net, the cold shoulder, the hidden tears, the agony of want.

Each of us has experienced personal poverty. It need not be material. The having-nothingness. The naked surrender to hopelessness. The friend who doesn’t call, the invitation never extended, the hug or kind word yearned for and never received. We lack strength, energy, virtue, perseverance. We give up. We can’t. We surrender to our own brokenness. We are not kind enough, strong enough, patient enough, holy enough. The Gospel never quite breaks through our wooden souls.

This is poverty.

Seen this way, who can have Christ without having poverty? It is impossible. Without that internal daily emptying, Christ can never enter the packed closet of our inner soul. The graces we receive lie like stacked gift boxes, unopened.

Poverty is emptying that closet. Poverty is being the blind man who says, “Lord, I want to see.”  To not have poverty is to be a Laodicean, claiming to be rich and well clothed, not seeing one’s wretched nakedness, not only blind but lukewarm—and in danger of hellfire. I was a Christian for decades before I could say with true sincerity, “What a wretched sinner I am.” Without poverty, our conversion withers on the vine, and the beauty we might have manifested withers.

So, poverty must be interior, but the interior is not enough. Christ’s life, the life-wrecking, earth-shattering ideals of Christianity shrivel into hypocrisies if they remain abstractions.

There must be an incarnation. Meat must be made of them, or they will fail. The kingdom of heaven needs real doors, real windows, rooms inhabited by real soldiers and servants that come among you.

Which is why Francis was not content with poverty in spirit, as our uneasy pastors are so hasty to assure us. He wanted poverty in body as well. So, he gave it all away, save for one habit, to live with his Lady.

As a young housewife, I beheld Francis’s radicalism in awe and perplexity. I am not an acetic. I frankly love the body and all earthly pleasures and find them congenial companions. I gloried in my bridal gifts and set about outfitting my first household, a little attic apartment, with pride. I dreamed of transforming it into a princess’s castle, with soft coverlets on the bed, fetching outfits, carefully-contrived artwork, colorful pottery, and shining glass windows. The Middle Ages represents for me my archetype, my gaze into hidden beauty. But yet, there was Francis, beckoning.

Who was this Lady Poverty? What was so beautiful about her that Francis, son of a clothing merchant, certainly the best industry to be in if you loved beauty—and in Italy! During the High Middle Ages! —could leave all the fashion and pomp behind for her rags and nakedness.

I hesitated, but I began periodically to pray this prayer, which has never become rote and which never fails to move me, a cri de cœur.

I can find no peace…

Merciful Jesus, have pity …

You Lord it was Who first aroused love…

Please grant….

I yearn….

I earnestly pray…

For Jesus, You were very poor…

It is so difficult for me to write these words, for it is difficult to write about a spiritual reality. But I dare to say that Lady Poverty came to us. Which may be why the difficulties we have experienced never seemed to bite us as hard. The one effect of poverty which bemuses me is that by embracing her, all material things seem to be richer and more satisfying. There is a thanksgiving that follows the stripping away.

I can only reach for examples from others to explain its elusiveness. The great Alexander Solzhenitsyn, evoking the grinding poverty of the Russian concentration camp he endured, had the character of Nerzhin in his novel The First Circle say, recalling the prison food they were given in the gulag,

Can you say you ate it? No. It was like holy Communion, you took it like the sacraments... You ate it slowly, from the tip of a wooden spoon, entirely absorbed in the process of eating, in thinking about eating – and it spread through your body like nectar… Can you compare that with the way people wolf down steaks?... It’s not a matter of how much of it, but of the way you eat. It’s the same with happiness – it doesn’t depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to snatch from life, but only on our attitude towards them.

While not experiencing anything on the level of the sufferings of Solzhenitsyn and others, I can understand this encounter. For Lady Poverty comes to minister to the Christian in need and remains with those who accept her, making lack sweet and rags into garments of lilies finer than the robes of Solomon. And like Christ, her profile most readily emerges only in the memory, as in the above retrospection.

For you see, the poverty Christ blessed is not destitution. He bade us not worry about what to eat, drink, or wear, for our Heavenly Father would provide for us. Those who lack food, water, and clothing are truly destitute, and we should help them immediately. That is the call of the Gospel. But when we ourselves lack these necessities—and there are times our family has lacked them—we are urged to call out to God, addressing Him lovingly as our Heavenly Father, and asking Him to provide for us. Then we must beg the Holy Spirit to open our eyes and our ears to hear Him, so that we can recognize His daily provision. If we are to live from day to day without these necessities, we must calm our hearts and look to Him expectantly.

“Has anyone trusted in the Lord and been disappointed? Or cried out to Him and been ignored?” asks Sirach in his second chapter. Again, sometimes the stealthy hand of God is visible only in hindsight: the Scriptures teach us we must constantly look back upon our own spiritual history to catch Him in the act. When you are in desperate need, look back at your previous times of need and discern His provision. You will be surprised how often you will find He was there, caressing you, when you thought you wept alone in an empty room.

Years afterwards, our own young daughter, looking back at our family’s times of need, observed how much more she appreciated things like food and clothing during our times of relative poverty and wished that she and her own family could always be poor to experience this treasure. And that was when I began to realize that Lady Poverty had come to journey along with us, that she had been there with us all along, and that the prayer I prayed without understanding was heard.