When the outwardly poor are inwardly rich

This was the passage in the gospel that persuaded St Francis of Assisi to become an itinerant preacher rather than a contemplative recluse: a friar, that is, rather than a monk. It also reinforced his decision to live a life of radical and absolute poverty, possessing, quite literally, nothing. His poverty, however, wasn’t about having nothing, but about having everything – everything that really mattered, that is – and letting go of anything that distracted him from what mattered most. He was outwardly poor because he was inwardly rich. 

But radical poverty is an intrinsically problematic ideal. Not only is it personally difficult to put into practice – in that sense, Francis of Assisi is inimitable – but it is also both institutionally difficult to sustain and conceptually difficult to grasp. So, for instance, in the early history of the Franciscan Order, the poorer the friars were, the more generous the townsfolk and even royalty were towards them, not just with gifts of food and drink, but buildings and land and endowments – precisely those things Francis personally rejected and wanted his brethren also to reject. St Francis’s desire to live in radical poverty was so absolute that he was positively incandescent if he saw the brethren acquiring things, anything at all: he wouldn’t even let them possess personal prayer-books, let alone buildings. On one occasion, he pulled down with his bare hands a simple shack they’d built in his absence to shelter in during the winter. Paradoxically, the friars’ poverty was eroded by the people’s generosity. 

Poverty, of course, is always relative: everyone is both richer and poorer that someone else. But radical poverty, again somewhat paradoxically, requires either a system of self-sustenance, and therefore, as with monasticism, land and tools and agricultural wherewithal, or a well-funded benefits system to keep everybody vowed to radical poverty alive. Society can afford only the occasional Poor Man of Assisi and a limited number of followers, in that if everyone were to emulate St Francis and renounce all possessions, the world would come to an economic standstill. 

That having been said, however, there is a vital sense in which we all most definitely must emulate St Francis: like him, we need to recognise the danger of possessions and, like him, we need to see through the mesmerising illusion of ownership. 

At the heart of his poverty was the fact that he saw with uncomfortable clarity how possessions – no matter how many or how few – have the power to possess us; and possession can easily and rapidly give way to possessiveness; and possessiveness so easily and disastrously sets us at a distance from one another and blinds us to our dependence on God’s all-pervading providence. 

But even more tellingly, St Francis also saw that possession itself is an illusion. The truth is that we don’t, in any real sense, as opposed to legally, possess anything. How could we possess anything, in any serious sense, when we don’t possess even our very lives? Our lives are simply not our own: they’re given to us by God and, in due course, we will be required to let go of them. We receive our life from God’s hand each morning, and we hand our life back to God each night – and trust that his gift of life will be entrusted to us for another day. 

Seeing through the illusion of ownership and relying on God’s providence was what was behind St Francis’s typically dramatic gesture when he sent his father into an apoplectic fit, and doubtless made his poor mother blush from ear to ear, by stripping naked before the gathered townsfolk in the Bishop of Assisi’s courtyard, uttering, by way of explanation: “Our Father, who art in Heaven.” He was asserting the truth that is all-too-easily concealed by the illusion of possession: we have nothing that isn’t given to us, from life itself to the smallest thing in our ‘possession’; and that there is, ultimately, only one Giver, of life and every other gift, namely, God. 

In the end, Francis recognised that only by shedding the illusion of ownership do we see the deepest truth about ourselves and thereby recognise that we are already rich beyond belief. Which is why, much later, he says about poverty in his Rule: 

Let this be your portion, which leads into the land of the living. Dedicate yourselves entirely to this, my beloved brethren, and never wish for anything else under heaven for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Chapter VI, Rule of 1223