Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?” Hebrews 13:5-6
“Don’t forget it: he has most who needs least. Don’t create needs for yourself… Detach yourself from the goods of the world. Love and practice poverty of spirit: be content with what enables you to live a simple and sober life. Otherwise, you will never be an apostle… Rather than in not having, true poverty consists in being detached, in voluntarily renouncing one’s dominion over things. That is why there are poor who are really rich. And vice-versa.”
Josemaría Escrivá (1902-1975) in The Way (Opus Dei, 1950) 29:630-632.
In From Strength to Strength, Arthur C. Brooks suggests in general terms that people in the West people seek satisfaction in having more and people in the East try to find meaning in having less.
Yet, there’s a midpoint between the two. It’s not so much that having more or less is bad, because God made creation and declared it good for our enjoyment. The key in the middle is to avoid attachment to anything but Christ.
This is where Josemaría Escrivá speaks with precision that echoes the early church. He calls us to detach from the things of this world. It does not mean we can’t enjoy them. It means we enjoy them without becoming enslaved by them.
To keep ourselves from the love of money and be content is to say with confidence that we need nothing but the Lord who is our helper to navigate the uncertainties of life. What about you? Are you attached to anything?
Sit with the Lord. Apart from Him, is there anything that you feel like you have to have to get through life? to feel secure? Identify that thing or things. Ask God to teach you to enjoy it without becoming enslaved to it.
In the words of Escrivá, if you can’t live detached from things, you can never be an apostle. That simply means you can never testify that Christ is all you need, until you have put yourself in the position where Christ is all you have.
With gratitude to God, I can testify that in 2011, during my wife’s cancer journey after we had stored up all our worldly wealth in heaven, we learned by experience that the Lord was all we needed. He helped us and supplied our needs. So we trust him with complete confidence.
The one who learns to attach to the Lord and nothing else will undoubtedly follow in the steps of Jesus and suffer, will experience contentment and gratitude, and will never be disappointed or forsaken. And he or she will have the testimony of an apostle.