God and
money. “No one can be a slave to two masters. He will either hate the first and
love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn. You
cannot be slaves both of God and money” (6,24).
When I
read that, my heart jumped. Jumped with a sort of strange joy! Sinner that I
am, I have chosen the better part. Poverty was a goal, the goal of my life. And
I finally achieved it.
But the
strangest thing happened! There was a time when I had nothing and I used to
beg. Oh! That was a beautiful time. Nobody depended on me and I was unknown.
How good that was—how good it was! Anyhow my heart still hungers for poverty.
The real physical poverty.
“But do
you know something, Lord? They have tied me with a thousand cords. Little cords
mostly, but I can’t move. They justify so much! Would you believe it, I’m
living in a blue house and it has to be paid for? I’m travelling on some kind
of plane that has to be paid for specially. Everything seems wrong somehow.
Will you please listen to that Gospel of yours? See. You said it.
So it’s
up to you now, to let me go into a poustinia where no one knows who I am. I
want to be poor. I feel sad. I love all the staff workers, but they are all
children. I know that you have given me children, but still. They talk about
poverty but they don’t want it. So it seems to me. I don’t know why. Probably I
am all wrong, but as I read St. Matthew about God and money, what can I say?
Somewhere I must be wrong.”
So there
is God and there is money and the eye the lamp of the body. Now I ask you—what
can a poor woman do? She has no money, so she doesn’t worry about it. But when
you come to think of it, she has a lot to give up besides money. True, money is
the source of all evil, but she can give up her will. It’s not easy. No, for a
poor woman it’s not easy, especially for a poor woman like me who had
education, this and that, and a child. No, it isn’t easy to give up the thought
of money.
Catherine
Doherty, Gospel of a Poor Woman
Reflection – Among the books I hope to write some day
(it’s a verrrry long list) is a book about Catherine Doherty’s love of and
understanding of poverty. I really don’t think there’s anyone else who quite
talks about it exactly as she does, at least not in the spiritual writers and
even great saints I have read.
Her initial
experience, first of almost starving to death in the Revolution, then of being
grindingly, humiliatingly poor in North American, then of willingly embracing
that level of poverty for the love of God, seared into her being a depth of
conviction about the necessary connection of poverty and holiness, poverty and
love, and a flaming desire (because of that connection) to be poorer and poorer
and poorer all the time.
When she and
her husband Eddie first arrived in Combermere, to a little unfinished six-room
house with no electricity or running water with very little money in the bank
to live on and not much prospect of that changing, she laments in a diary entry
that it was too bad that ‘she will never be poor again the way she had been in
Toronto’!
For her, the
initial days of her apostolate in Toronto in the 1930s were an experience of
life when there was literally nothing else for her but Jesus and Catherine. It
wasn’t even an apostolate, at first, not exactly. It was just this young woman
living in the slums, utterly indistinguishable from her neighbors, praying and
fasting and serving them, and living in this passionate love of Jesus Christ.
While she
bowed to the will of God, which was that she would be the founder of a
community and it would grow, and this would mean buildings and projects and
money in the bank (and in spite of her seeming grief over having to fly on an airplane and pay for the ticket, she really didn't have a problem with this), she never ceased to hunger for that depth of intimacy and
hidden union and absolute poverty with Him.
I want to
write about this at book length… mind you, I’m not sure who exactly would buy
such a book or read it. Because the other great pain for Catherine, and this
passage from the book reflects it, is that she was aware of how few other
people, even her beloved MH spiritual children, really shared this passionate
love for poverty.
We always want
to keep a few layers of… whatever… between ourselves and Jesus, don’t we?
Always want to cosset ourselves, just a little bit, protect ourselves, quite a
bit, keep control of our lives and our environments, a whole lot. For
Catherine, poverty in its naked physical expression was like an outward sign of
an inward attitude of utter abandonment, utter self-disregard, utter belonging
to Jesus to an extent that precluding any other belonging, being possessed in
such a way that meant possessing nothing. Living without layers - that's what she yearned for.
Because
Catherine loved Jesus, and because this is how her love for Jesus expressed
itself, she literally could not be poor enough, could never be satisfied with
how she or MH was living out physical poverty. It is a vision of Gospel life
and Gospel love that is never comfortable, always deeply challenging, puts an
end to complacency of any kind.