Sharing our poverty

Why do we hide our poverty? Our loneliness, our weakness, our sadness, our emptiness? Why do we put on a smile for the world if our heart is not truly smiling? Of course, there is a time and a place to reveal our poverty, but in my experience we too often hide it. And we have learned to hide it well.

Revealing our poverty--showing others our incompleteness--makes us vulnerable. But it also opens us to love. And it gives others a chance to love. How many people are dying to love and be loved? Whether or not we realize it, we all yearn to love deeply, to love unto the end. But we distract ourselves with our work and study and entertainment. And then, when we do realize that deep need within ourselves to love, when we realize that ultimate meaning is not found in our work, or our study, or our endless distractions, we feel desolate, because there is no one to love. Everyone else is to busy working at a million trivial things to allow themselves to receive the one thing necessary: to be loved. And each day, a little closer to death, that ultimate mark of our finitude, the ultimate reminder that love alone matters, that only love survives beyond this passing world.

What a world we live in! And yet, are we perhaps to busy to love or be loved? Do we give others a chance to love us? Perhaps we think it selfish to want to be loved. Or perhaps we are afraid to show others our brokenness, our unfulfilled desires, our yearning for belonging. But what a gift it is to show others that we are not complete! It is a gift we give them, the opportunity to love. How many people are yearning to love, but are afraid to reach out in love, because they are afraid of being rejected, ignored, or misunderstood?

And so it is a gift we give others when we show them our need to be loved. It is a gift because it opens to them a pathway which will lead them to their own happiness. This poverty of mine, this loneliness of yours...it is a gift, because when my poverty meets yours--there I can love, there I can empty myself of myself to fill myself with loving you.

Let us be more willing to show our poverty. Think to yourself, What is that poverty for me? Where is there loneliness in me...where is there a deeper desire to be loved and understood? Let us share that need with others, first of all with our Lord, our Lady, and our guardian angel. They will fill us. They will give us the necessary courage to share our poverty with others.