When we realize the emptiness of all material things,
we are free to encounter God.
All that is “self” must be abandoned
if we are to follow Jesus.
The road He travels
is the road of self-emptying.
When profit is the aim and law of life,
then humanity suffers a great loss.
We all crave to be on the receiving end of
a gift of love;
but our very craving masks a deeper,
more profound human need:
to give love.
The less you have,
the less you have to distract you
from God.
To become poor is to know
the richness of God.
The danger of building up riches
is that an accumulation of wealth
makes it easy to succumb
to a self-complacency
which makes God superfluous.
Without clinging to anything,
we must patiently stand before God
with open hands.
Jesus is not asking us to get rid of our possessions;
he is asking us to lose our attachment to them.
He knows an unfettered mind is essential
to reaching the emptiness
where God can meet us.
The impulse to accumulate all we can
needs to be thwarted.
We have no right
to own more than we need.
And we need far less
than we want.
Voluntary physical poverty is a means
to a healthy spiritual poverty.
Exterior and interior poverty are close friends.
When we have possessions we need to maintain them. That becomes the cycle some of us know as “life.” Some find this a good life. It is the only life they know. Others, like me, are different. I try to be a minimalist and seek when and where God needs me. It is a choice. A choice I made.