Friendship and Voluntary Poverty

Poverty is such a hard council! Jesus says to the rich man to sell everything that he has and follow him. He tells us to live off of begging and not to worry about tomorrow, and to give to whomever asks us. John Chrysostom said that there is nothing wrong with wealth as long as it is all given to the poor. St. Francis devoted himself to “Lady Poverty” and poverty is virtuous for the Franciscans in and of itself. St. Thomas thought that poverty was not itself a virtue, but embraced it as a means to other virtues. John Wesley said that the only reason to make as much money as you can is to give it all away, since heaven depended on it.

But it seems such a waste! Even for those of us who are convinced that poverty is indeed the way that God would have us live, even for those of us who have slowly come to reject the quest for comfort and the ideal of acquisitiveness to which we are habituated, poverty seems a council so far away. It is simply the case that very few of us, even when turned to face Lady Poverty, will do what Jesus said and simply sell everything we have worked so hard for and live as paupers.

There seems even to be a nagging query whether this is really the way God would have us live. Poverty - how foolish! How idealistic! Utopian! Wouldn’t it be better if we kept up a decent standard of living and gave much away? Think of all the suffering we could help stop. We must be “responsible” with what we are given after all. And yet the entire tradition and Our Lord at its head continually and patiently beacons us beyond.

So, all right, things are hard to give up. Comfort. Possessions. Privacy! It takes a gigantic soul to make a sudden move like St. Francis to abruptly sell and give all. For most of us the ascent to Lady Poverty will be gradual if at all. But God draws us along and one way he does this is by giving us friends. One thing we all know about friends is that they lean on each other. One’s abundance supplies another’s lack. Now one in one way, later the other in another – not keeping accounts or counting losses, since a friend’s good can never be my loss. This is an integral part of friendship. We all know of relationships that feel more like contracts, and these we do not really call our friends.

And so God helps us along especially by giving us friends who are materially poor. This is a true way to holy poverty. But I still mean friendships in a deep sense. I do not mean that all the poor should be our friends and so we should give to them. True as that may be, that is not much more likely than St. Francis’ conversion. And its not sufficiently personal. I mean friends that are really friends in the normal sense. Folks we’ve gotten to know over a long period of time. Whose back-stories, likes, dislikes, temperaments, loves, hates, vices and virtues we know. Whom we like to eat with, drink with, laugh and cry with.

The prospect of making a new friend is much less daunting than giving up everything I have. It is gentle, slow, joyful, familiar, open-ended. And, of course, as we make friends, if our friends are poor materially, then our goods will supply their lack. A friend may need food or shelter or clothing. These I have and these I will of course provide without a second thought, since her good is my own good. I may need a talk, a laugh, or a cry, and these she will give not keeping cost.

And slowly I begin to see emerge vaguely the nascent pattern of my own material poverty. This month I ate beans and rice everyday, took every free meal I could, tried not to eat between meals to save money on groceries. I couldn’t drive cause I was out of gas. I couldn’t eat out or go to the bar. I begged for some rent money from my parish. These trivial sacrifices are joyfully made since they allow me to supply my friends’ lack – to give a room, to make a pot of soup. They in their turn – not of course as repayment, but as my friends - keep up the house, pet the dog, bring home food when they have it, offer me a beer, keep an eye my bike, share their life-philosophies. None of us count the costs. “Cost” is, in fact, a strange way of putting it.

Thereby God is making us poor. He’s taking our superfluous stuff. It’s the same end as St. Francis attained after church that day by selling and giving, but the means are different. I could never call this a waste. It’d be hard for anyone who has ever had a friend, or a child, or a parent for that matter, to call this irresponsible. This is just what’s in our bones to do.

And of course all of this is just to say what Aristotle knew 2300 years ago, that friends are the key to virtue, which St. Thomas would later translate into St. Augustine’s terms: the path to holiness begins and ends with loving one’s neighbor.