Francis and Poverty for these two lovers
Take thou henceforward in my speech diffuse.
Their concord and their joyous semblances
The love, the wonder, and the sweet regard,
They made to be the cause of holy thoughts.
Francis and Poverty—these lovers seem strange indeed to twentieth-century eyes. An age when philanthropy strives for the abolition of poverty and invites enlightened self-interest to its aid cannot readily understand one who welcomed poverty as a blessed condition. “No man,” said a disciple of St. Francis, “was ever so covetous of wealth as he of poverty.”
We hear St. Francis discoursing with brother Leo concerning perfect bliss. It lies not in knowledge or power or even in the ability to convert the infidels to the Holy Faith. “When we shall come to St. Mary of the Angels dripping with rain and tormented with cold and hunger, and we shall knock at the door, and the porter shall say, ‘Who are ye?’ and we shall answer, ‘We are your brethren,’ and he shall say, ‘You lie, you are two knaves that go about deceiving the people and stealing from the poor’—if, when he leaves us in the cold and wet we shall patiently endure, and say within ourselves, ‘Perhaps the porter reads us aright,’ then, O brother Leo, thou mayest say, ‘Herein lies perfect bliss.’”
We hear the passionate prayer, “O Lord Jesus, point out to me the ways of poverty which were so dear to thee. O Jesus, who chosest to be poor, the favor I ask of thee is to give me the privilege of poverty and to be enriched by thy blessing.”
This was not the temper of ordinary asceticism. St. Francis was in temper more an Epicurean than a Stoic. He was a lover of pleasure and was not content with any kind of pleasure short of what he conceived to be the highest. The ascetic was interested primarily in the salvation of his own soul. Wealth and comfort were the temptations of the devil to cheat him of his future reward. The hermit accepted poverty as the hard road to Heaven; to St. Francis it was Heaven itself.
“Property is robbery,” he would have said, but not in the sense in which a modern communist would use the words. It is the robbery not of one’s neighbor but of one’s self. We take for granted that wealth is a good thing and poverty an evil. No, St. Francis would say, there is no good thing but what is good for the soul. It is good to be humble, sympathetic, and thankful. It is good to be conscious of God’s presence everywhere and to be close to the lowliest of his creatures. The means of this grace are nearer to the peasant than to the prince. There are some things that wealth buys. The rich man has his comforts, his sheltered home, his group of friends and dependents, his servants and his wide estates; his is the meekness that inherits the earth.