So the first situation with which Exodus begins, and we begin, is the discovery of slavery and that it cannot be resolved by an act of rebellion or flight, because whether we flee or whether we rebel we remain slaves, unless we re-establish ourselves, with regard to God and to all the situations of life, in the way taught by the first beatitude: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ In itself, poverty, the state of a slave, is no passport to the kingdom of heaven; the slave can be deprived not only of earthly goods but also of heavenly goods; such poverty can be more overwhelming than simple deprivation of what we need for earthly life. St John Chrysostom says that the poor man is not so much he who does not possess, but he who wants what he does not possess.
Poverty is not rooted in what we have or have not, but in the degree to which we long for what is out of reach. When we think of our human condition we can discover quite easily that we are utterly poor and destitute because whatever we possess is never ours, however rich and wealthy we seem to be. When we try to grasp anything we discover quite soon that it has gone. Our being is rooted in nothing except the sovereign creative word of God who called us out of total, radical absence into his presence.
The life and health that we possess we cannot keep, and not only health but so many of our psychosomatic qualities: a man of great intelligence, because a minute vessel has burst in his head, becomes senile and is finished intellectually. In the realm of our feelings, for some accountable or unaccountable reason, say ‘flu or tiredness, we cannot at the right moment, and at will, feel the sympathy for someone which we wish so much to feel, or we go to church and we are of stone. This is the basic poverty, but does it make us the children of the kingdom? It does not, because if at every moment of our life we feel in a state of misery, that all things escape us, if we are aware only of the fact that we do not possess them, it does not make us the joyful children of a kingdom of divine love, but the miserable victims of a situation over which we have no power and which we hate.
This brings us back to the words ‘poor in spirit’ ; the poverty that opens the kingdom of heaven lies in the knowledge that if nothing that is mine is really mine, then everything that is mine is a gift of love, divine or human love, and that makes things quite different. If we realise that we have no being in ourselves, and yet we exist, we can say that there is a sustained unceasing act of divine love. If we see that whatever we have, we can in no wise compel to be ours, then everything is divine love, concretely expressed at every single moment; and then poverty is the root of perfect joy because all we have proves love. We should never attempt to appropriate things to ourselves because to call something ‘ours’, and not a constant gift of God, means less and not more.
If it is mine, it is alien to the relationship of mutual love; if it is his and I possess it from day to day, from split second to split second, it is a continuously renewed act of divine love. Then we come to the joyful thought: ‘Thanks be to God, it is not mine; if it were mine, it would mean possession, but alas without love.’ The relationship to which this thought brings us is what the gospel calls the kingdom of God. Only those belong to the kingdom who receive all things from the king in the relationship of mutual love and who do not want to be rich, because to be rich means to be dispossessed of love while possessed of things. The moment when we discover God within the situation and that all things are God’s and everything is of God, then we begin to enter this divine kingdom and acquire freedom.
It was only when the Jews, guided and enlightened by Moses, realised that their state of enslavement had something to do with God, and was not simply a man-made situation, it was only when they turned to God, when they re-established a relationship which is that of the kingdom, that something could happen; and that is true for all of us, because it is only when we realise that we are slaves, when we realise that we are destitute, but when we also realise that this happens within the divine wisdom and that all things are within the divine power, that we can turn to Him and say, ‘Deliver us from the evil one.’
~Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer
