You cannot bring home the frontier

The Pope on frontiers, also from the interview. This is a good gloss on what I've tried to get at earlier in the Pope's thought as it relates to the periphery (which in his earlier thought he seems to refer to as the frontier). [See the tag periphery below for earlier posts on the topic.]

"When I insist on the frontier, I am referring in a particular way to the need for those who work in the world of culture to be inserted into the context in which they operate and on which they reflect. There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”

And he links the frontier/periphery, again, with the poor: 

“When it comes to social issues, it is one thing to have a meeting to study the problem of drugs in a slum neighborhood and quite another thing to go there, live there and understand the problem from the inside and study it. There is a brilliant letter by Father Arrupe to the Centers for Social Research and Action on poverty, in which he says clearly that one cannot speak of poverty if one does not experience poverty, with a direct connection to the places in which there is poverty. The word insertion is dangerous because some religious have taken it as a fad, and disasters have occurred because of a lack of discernment. But it is truly important.

Types of poverty

Here is a matrix I put together on the relationship between different types of poverty (if you're reading this on a computer, you can click the image to enlarge it):

A note on terms. I'm presenting wealth and poverty under two aspects, the objective and the subjective. We could say that one's objective poverty/wealth is measured by the size of one's bank account. It refers to a measurable object outside of the subject (viz., material goods). Subjective poverty/wealth is measured by one's relationship with others and with God, who is the ultimate source of our happiness and meaning. It refers to a relationship intrinsic to the subject.

Obviously there's nothing wrong, in itself, with buying purses.
But there is a type of spiritual poverty that seeks to replace God with things.

According to this chart, the poorest of the poor would be those who are spiritually and materially poor. Ranking the other types of poverty is more difficult and depends in part on your hierarchy of values. Is spiritual or material well-being more important to you?

Consider this thought experiment--to be spiritually rich and materially poor or spiritually poor and materially rich--which would you choose? The question quickly reveals our hierarchy of values. To be fair, there are an infinite number of nuances and qualifications that make answering that question difficult, if not impossible. But if we simplify the choice to this--would you rather be rich without God or poor with God?--I think we can agree that the ideal Christian would choose poverty with God over wealth without God. Thus we have Christ on the Cross.

Mother Teresa often spoke about the difference between spiritual and material poverty, and how people in both situations could be called the poorest of the poor. She also observed that spiritual poverty is much deeper and more painful than material poverty (so there's a good case to be made that the person who is spiritually rich and materially poor is better off than the person who is spiritually poor and materially rich, though this requires an eschatological perspective. "Blessed are the poor...").

In her talks, she often associated material poverty with the developing world and spiritual poverty with the developed world. It would, of course, be dangerous to reify this distinction. Mother Teresa knew that the materially poor also exist in the developed world, just as the spiritually poor exist in the developing world. But it is generally true that development and material contentment can threaten us with a spiritual malaise. Development is good (obviously), as is the material world (obviously), but when we inordinately desire our material good over our spiritual good, sin lurks nearby.

Radical poverty

The Gospel for today, from Luke (9:1-6), contains a fascinating passage in which Jesus instructs his apostles, whom he is sending on mission, to take with them no staff, no money, no wallet, no bread--and no second tunic! I think that would make washing clothes rather tricky.

Why the instruction to radical poverty? It seems exaggerated and unnecessary, perhaps even dangerous by modern standards (and I'm sure it seemed like all of those things to the apostles). So what was the point? I think it has to do with the power that Christ gives them, "over all the devils, and to cure diseases" (Lk 8:1). I think it also has to do with the nature of their mission: "to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick" (Lk 8:2). In order to receive the power of Christ, "who though he was by nature God...emptied himself, taking the nature of a slave" (Phil 2:6-7). To enter into the power of Christ is to become weak, as St. Paul knew: "for when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Cor 12:10). Just as Christ's strength depends on his being entirely from the Father, we gain our strength from being entirely from Christ--living entirely in Christ and according to the form of Christ's life.

Christ asks that the apostles empty themselves of their attachments, to adopt a radical poverty, for the same purpose that he came into the world: to love man--"to love one another: that as I have loved you, you also love one another" (Jn 13:34). Radical poverty is for the sake of radical charity, as witnessed to by the purpose of the apostles' mission: to liberate man from material (disease) and spiritual evil (demons). In the MC charism, poverty [perfect emptiness] exists for the sake of our fourth vow, charity [wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor]. We empt ourselves of ourselves to fill ourselves with God's love. In emptying ourselves, we become weak in the eyes of the world, but such emptying gives us a great spiritual strength.

What are we attached to? Just as Jesus asked the apostles to leave behind even their staffs, so, too, he asks us to leave behind our staffs--those things that we lean upon for comfort and security to which we are inordinately attached. Perhaps it is my ego, my sensuality, my love of small comforts. Let's ask our lord for the grace to give these up, for the sake of living a more radical charity. 

Loneliness

Mother Teresa on loneliness: there is a hunger for love, a hunger for God!  

"The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God."

Am I starving for love without even knowing it? If I am not a saint in heaven, the answer must be Yes. The holier we become, the more we realize how destitute, how hungry we are, hungry for the eternal love. 

So let me seek out the Bread of Life, the bread of love. There I can hear Christ say "I Thirst!" For you! He thirsts to give you life, to give you love! 

The poorest of the poor

Pope Francis' notion of peripheries deeply resonates with Mother Teresa's vision of the poorest of the poor. Mother Teresa saw a twofold poverty in the world: material poverty and spiritual poverty. Yes, there are those who hunger for bread, shelter, health, safety. But there are also those who hunger for dignity, who thirst for love, who desire the shelter of a compassionate heart.

Joining Pope Francis's insights with Mother Teresa's, we could say that we find the poorest of the poor at the peripheries. The poor dwell at the peripheries. Pope Francis gives us the address for finding the poorest of the poor. Mother Teresa shows us the faces of those who live there.

Of course, there are peripheral zones within us all, regions of the heart that are dark, alone, cold--yearning to love and be loved. We are all the poorest of the poor, though we often fail to recognize our own poverty and therefore remain unable to recognize and alleviate the poverty of others. We must first recognize our own brokenness before we can heal the broken souls of our friends, family, colleagues, and the materially poor around us.