Poverty of Heart: The Way of Silent Love

This afternoon I have given my time to study and quiet reflection and it has been and continues to be an enjoyable day. Having the time to be quiet to read, meditate and pray is of such a value to the soul. Below I wrote a short piece on the Purity of Heart as the way of silent of love. This afternoon I have been looking at what makes the heart pure and that is a poverty of the heart. At the deepest level of our being, we know that in order to have purity of heart we need to come to grips with the poverty of our heart. 'Apart from me,' Jesus said, 'You can do nothing.' Reading again from my book on Carthusian spirituality, the conference speaker writes,

The needy heart, its hands open to God. It does not put obstacles in the way. It presents the emptiness of its poverty before the infinite generosity of its Father. Its poverty makes it like God, because its capacity to receive is limitless. As the heart is always ready to receive more love and the spirit more light, God is not able to refuse it. Poverty is the door of blessedness, blessedness since Christ chose to become poor for us to transfigure poverty into divine abundance...

We ought to be clear-eyed and loving in our acceptance of poverty. It is not that easy, however. It isn't easy to accept the inability of our soul to grasp God, the immense gap between our most exalted notions and the ineffable mystery of light. It is isn't easy to relinquish all of our pretensions, all of our self-sufficiency, our sense of personal importance, our 'rights' before God. We are even prepared to go to enormous lengths to appear righteous before God, a righteousness that comes, just a little, from ourselves.

One of the great paradoxes of our faith is that our poverty is actually our wealth. 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The writer continues,

Poverty, this poverty, is true blessedness. It is freedom from that recurring anxiety of a perfectionistic personality that is primarily concerned with its own affectation and never with the grandeur of God; a freedom also from that fear that recognizes clearly enough our misery before God, but is unable to go beyond it with a faith that lays the foundations of our peace and hope beyond ourselves - not on the sand of our deserving, but on the rock of Christ. Because this blessed poverty is a poverty for love, the love of the one who loves and knows love in return. Who is poorer than the one who loves and who is richer? He receives everything completely gratuitously, he is utterly dependent on the Beloved who is his joy, he absolutely rejects his own resources. He knows himself to be nothing, but has assurance that the gift he makes of this nothing gives happiness to the other. Our poverty makes God happy because it permits him to give us his love, and God wishes only to give himself.