(In)voluntary Poverty: A Bowlful of Trouble

Since the Regional Meeting brought me face to face with the fragility of communities in our Order, the theme of poverty has been on my mind.  The Synthesis document of the last General Chapter speaks of poverty in our Order in financial, numerical, and spiritual terms.  It is in many ways linked with the cultural poverty of our society.  “On every continent the erosion of faith pushes monasticism towards society’s periphery.  It is where we say we wish to be, but how to we cope with finding ourselves there by relegation?”  Notice that what we are speaking if here is not a voluntary poverty, not the object of a vow, but an affliction not chosen, which comes upon us unsought and undesired.
 
St Benedict uses the word “poverty” – paupertas – only once, in chapter 48, where he says: “They must not become distressed if local conditions or their poverty should force them to do the harvesting themselves.”  This is different from dispossession, which is dealt with in chapter 33 on private ownership and in chapter 58 on monastic profession.  The principle of what we would call “religious poverty” is stated in RB 33, which draws from Acts 4: “All things should be the common possession of all, as it is written, so that no one presumes to call anything his own.”  Total dispossession is acted out in RB 58 when the novice is stripped of his secular garments and clothed in the monastic habit.
 
Dispossession, then, is something voluntarily chosen as a means to union with Christ and with the community.  Poverty, on the other hand, is something distressing, something to be avoided, something to be minimized through acts of kindness and material help toward ‘the poor’.  Poverty forces us into a corner from which we would like to escape, or places us under a burden which we would like to cast off.  Poverty constricts our freedom and causes us to question our chosen path, even to wonder whether God is still for us.  Poverty can suck the life out of us.  Properly speaking, there is no such thing as voluntary poverty.  What there is is a burden either resented or embraced.
 
“They must not become distressed…”
 
How do we avoid being sucked into a vortex of sadness and discouragement?  How can we come to that quiet heart that is able to embrace suffering – and not just passively accept it but find energy to act in the midst of it for the good of all?  How can we come to see our unwanted poverty as a via crucis which leads far more directly to our goal than any sacrifice we could have chosen for ourselves?
 
“Do not let your hearts be troubled.” (Jn 14:1)
 
This verse from the Gospel of John is one I struggle with every year during the Easter season.  If I am troubled, how can I not be troubled?  Is it possible to ‘untrouble’ myself?  The word “troubled,” in Greek tarassomai, is often used in the Scriptures to describe water: rough seas, big waves, a storm on the lake.  I like to imagine holding my own heart in the form of a great bowl, whose circumference requires the whole length of the arms for support.  In the bowl is water: troubled water.
 
The absence of trouble the gospel verse speaks of is not a false peace, a kind of enforced indifference achieved by suppression or avoidance of anxiety.  There has to be a basic acceptance of troubled waters rising in the heart, and a willingness to listen to them.  I am not tossed by the waves; I hold them in my bowl.  I am a witness to their turbulent movements, but I am not shaken.  I listen; I look; I understand; I accept; I offer words of consolation.  I hold, as in a bowl, this trouble before the Lord.
 
Evagrius of Pontus, fourth-century desert father and expert on movements of the heart, says this: in time of great distress, a person should divide their soul in two; one part is to console and the other part to be consoled.  This means that I am never only the victim of my trouble, I am always also both witness and consoler.  In John’s Gospel, the Holy Spirit is referred to as the Paraclete, which means “Consoler.”  The ability to stand apart from, observe and minister to one’s own inner turmoil is the work of the Holy Spirit within.
 
But what if someone tries to give me another bowlful of trouble?  Isn’t carrying my own bowl enough?  How can I possibly handle another?  Trouble in my family – can I deal with that?  Trouble in my community – do I really have to bother?  What about the trouble of other communities in the region, and the troubles of the Order, trouble in the Church, trouble in my native country, trouble all over the world?  STOP!  TOO MANY BOWLS!!!
 
“Then one of the four living creatures gave the seven angels seven golden bowls full of the wrath of God, who lives forever and ever.” (Rv 15:7)
 
Suddenly we have seven bowls, each one seething with troubled water.  The angels receive these bowls, hold them until the appointed time, and then pour them upon the earth.  Perhaps genocide is one such bowl, earthquake and tsunami another, drought and famine another, disease yet another, war, terrorism and exile one more, human trafficking and sexual abuse yet another, with environmental degradation adding the final touch.  How do we process all this, and how do we find a way to carry it without growing weary and turning away, or losing our sanity?  The thing is that trouble, suffering, poverty – whatever we call it – has a tendency to isolate, to turn us in on ourselves, to bring out our native selfishness.  What we need is a way out of isolation into solidarity and communion, so that we can hold these bowls with reverence and compassion, as the angels do.
 
An example: when I was a novice, I had trouble.  Someone had given me a postcard of a Mother of Sorrows icon, and I was in the habit of praying to her often about my trouble.  I wanted her to “show herself my mother.”  I wanted consolation.  But she wouldn’t give it to me – not in the way I wanted.  Gradually, I began to learn that when I took to heart stories of other people’s sufferings from the news or elsewhere, her maternal care became palpable to me.  I could feel her loving concern and even participate in it.  Focusing only on my own trouble had left me isolated, but welcoming other people’s trouble allowed me to experience Mary’s maternal love.  Mary holds a bowl too – a bowl of tears – and in sharing it with me, I think she wanted me to learn how to console, as well as to be consoled.
 
Another example: on the plane on the way back from Mepkin, we started to feel some turbulence and everything was shaking.  The woman sitting behind us started to hyperventilate.  She was gasping and her breathing in and out was alarmingly audible.  Her fear was threatening to take over and incapacitate her.  My automatic reaction was to take a hold of my inner bowl and stare into it, repeating the words I had just taken in during lectio, which happened to be from the book of Sirach: “Wisdom pours herself forth upon her children.”  My bowl was full of her trouble, and I poured over it a stillness whose source was beyond me.  The woman had a man with her, who just kept talking to her.  That’s all he did.  He just talked to her about whatever it was they were discussing before the turbulence arose.  And the woman, between gasps, kept talking back to him.  It was a little surreal, as if the panic attack were happening in one dimension, and their conversation in another.  But I realized that this was Evagrius’ teaching put into practice, with the help of a friend: one part is to console, the other to be consoled.  The distress passed.

And so may the Spirit Paraclete, the Consoler, give us the grace to hold bowlfuls of trouble, poverty and distress – our own, those of others, and the great bowl of the world’s suffering – with the embrace of a quiet heart.
 
I would like to close with the words of Mary Oliver in her poem “Heavy”:
“That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
 
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this
…
It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not
put it down.”