Aug. 16, 2011 Tuesday: 20th Week in Ordinary Time (A)
Spirit of ownership or poverty in the Spirit?
Seek for nothing, desiring to enter, for love of Jesus, upon detachment, emptiness and poverty in everything in this world. You will never have to do with necessities greater than those to which you made your heart yield itself: for the poor in spirit are most happy and joyful in a state of privation, and he who has set his heart on nothing finds satisfaction everywhere. The poor in spirit (Mt 5,3) give generously all they have and their pleasure consists in being thus deprived of everything for God's sake and out of love to their neighbor... Not only do temporal goods the delights and tastes of the sense hinder and thwart the way of God, but spiritual delights and consolations also, if sought for or clung to eagerly, disturb the way of virtue.
-St. John of the Cross
Spiritual maxims, nos. 352, 355,356, 364; 1693 edition (trans. David Lewis)
Seek for nothing, desiring to enter, for love of Jesus, upon detachment, emptiness and poverty in everything in this world. You will never have to do with necessities greater than those to which you made your heart yield itself: for the poor in spirit are most happy and joyful in a state of privation, and he who has set his heart on nothing finds satisfaction everywhere. The poor in spirit (Mt 5,3) give generously all they have and their pleasure consists in being thus deprived of everything for God's sake and out of love to their neighbor... Not only do temporal goods the delights and tastes of the sense hinder and thwart the way of God, but spiritual delights and consolations also, if sought for or clung to eagerly, disturb the way of virtue.
-St. John of the Cross
Spiritual maxims, nos. 352, 355,356, 364; 1693 edition (trans. David Lewis)
