Tuesday’s Reflection
THE JOURNEY of becoming free people is a long and arduous one. It is marked along its entire course by choices to give and forgive, to serve and to sacrifice, to love as Christ loves us. However spiritually satisfying, these are never easy choices.
Take giving, for example. Contrary to popular and intuitive reason, the deepest generosity most often grows out of a basic experience of poverty. . . .
St. John Chrysostom taught that poverty has less to do with what we have than with what we want. There are some among us with great wealth whose desires are insatiable, reckoning their relative “poverty” against the wealthier. There are others in our midst who possess virtually nothing, yet consider themselves richly satisfied. I remember my brother recounting a freshman sociology class exercise in which the professor asked each student to indicate their family income and what they considered their economic status to be. My brother’s was the lowest family income in the class, and he was the only one who considered himself wealthy. He was probably also the only one who had spent ten childhood years in Third World countries.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” taught Jesus. Only when we understand that we are utterly needy because we imagine we possess what is not truly ours, regardless of appearances; only when we see that we cannot keep good health permanently and that our very being is rooted simply in God’s creative love; only when we recognize that everything we call “our own” is but a constant, sustaining gift of the Spirit—only then are we free.
- Weavings, Feb/March/Apr 2011 (Cross-Purposes)
From pages 37-38 (“Obedience: The Deepest Passion of Love” by Marjorie J. Thompson) in Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, February/March/April 2011. Copyright © 2010 by The Upper Room. All rights reserved. Used by permission. http://www.upperroom.org/bookstore/. Learn more about or purchase this book.
Today’s Question
What is the spiritual definition of freedom? Share your reflections.
Today’s Scripture Reading
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