Several years ago one of my Dominican brothers, Jorge, was coordinating a missionary experience with young people in peasant villages in southern Mexico. Each morning Jorge would walk from one family’s house, where he slept each night, to the house of another family where he ate his breakfast. On the first several mornings Jorge noticed a hut, a short distance from the path, where an elderly man, very poor, would sit reading from a Bible that was open on his lap. Jorge greeted the man each day, “Good morning, Señor,” to which the old man would respond, “Buenos días.” This exchange went on for several days. One morning Jorge decided to stop and talk a bit with the old man, since up till now he had greeted him only from a distance. So he made his way down the small path leading to the elderly man’s hut and greeted him: “Good morning;my name is Brother Jorge. How are you today?” The old man looked up with his old eyes full of wisdom. “Buenos días, Padre,” he answered. “My name is Ramón.” Jorge continued, “Don Ramón, I see you read the Bible every morning. What scripture are you reading this morning?” Don Ramón looked up at Jorge from his little wooden stool, paused, and answered, “Well, you see, Padre, the truth is, I do not know how to read.” Jorge was completely caught off guard. “But Don Ramón, every morning that I have passed by I have seen you sitting here with your Bible open on your lap. I don’t understand.” Don Ramón responded, “Yes, Padre, you are right. Every morning I sit here and I ask God to give me a Word that will guide me through the day. And then I wait. And you know what, Padre? Every morning God gives me a Word. To this day, God has never failed me.”

Don Ramón is a man who, in the eyes of the world, does not have much to show for his long life: no big house, no diplomas on the wall or money in the bank.  He does not even know how to read the Bible that he owns. One of God’s anawim, Don Ramón has nothing really — nothing, that is, but God alone.

For those of us who are trying to be faithful disciples of Jesus, a story like this can be unsettling, but hopefully it is an unsettling that invites us to take a real look at our own lives. Most of us have one or more degrees in higher education; we read and write and preach. Don Ramón stands before us like a mirror, inviting us to take a good look at our spiritual lives. Though he did not know how to read the Bible, he certainly had learned how to live his daily life immersed in the Word of God.  Somehow he knew that to eat the bread of the Word every day required more than intellectual knowledge; it required a total trust and dependence on God. The very poverty that could have become a liability in his life had actually become his teacher. Don Ramón’s life of hardship had taught him to listen to God’s Word with the ears of a true disciple. The prophet Isaiah speaks of this daily discipline of listening to God:

It seems to me that to listen as a disciple requires that kind of poverty to which Jesus calls us in the beatitudes.  It was Jesus, after all, who once said in his most famous sermon, “Blessed are you who are poor; the kingdom of God is yours.” (Lk 6:20) What does it mean to be poor in this gospel sense? We certainly do not want to glorify the poverty that keeps a majority of our world living in subhuman slavery. The fact that even today, in the twenty-first century, much of the world remains illiterate or poorly educated is nothing to be proud of. What, then, is this poverty that prepares us for the reign of God? What is it that gave Ramón a taste of God’s faithful love in a way that cannot easily be measured by worldly standards?

In Luke’s version of the first beatitude (cited above), Jesus directly blesses those who are poor, those who, like Don Ramón, stand empty-handed, waiting for the bread of God’s faithful love. Matthew’s Gospel, as we know, places the sermon in a different light. The Latin American Bible translates the first beatitude in Matthew’s Gospel this way: “Blessed are those who have the spirit of the poor; theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I find this translation very insightful, if for no other reason than that it gets us beyond the erroneous reading of Jesus’ words as a kind of feeling sorry for those whose spiritual lives are in ruins. Jesus certainly did not go around blessing those who had no interest either in the things of God or in love for God’s people. What makes Matthew’s version of the beatitudes so important, though, is that it communicates Jesus’ blessing to those who, though not necessarily economically or socially poor, choose to embrace the poor, that is, to “have the spirit of the poor.”

Don Ramón’s poverty and illiteracy are not spiritual values in and of themselves. They are clearly the result of social sin and political neglect. At the same time, though, we cannot help but recognize that Don Ramón was able to turn a situation of sin and injustice into an opportunity for grace, and in this way his poverty becomes a gospel witness for us. His contemplative listening for the Word is the fruit of his paschal discipleship, his experience of Christ’s risen life blossoming from the dead stump of the cross. He embodies Jesus’ blessing of God’s beloved poor.

In his book Addiction and Grace, Gerald May sheds light on this paradox with profound wisdom. Though his world is very different from Don Ramón’s,May helps us find words to speak of that poverty which opens us up to the blessedness of God’s kingdom.

We need to recognize that the incompleteness within us…does not make us unacceptable in God’s eyes. Far from it; our incompleteness is the empty side of our longing for God and for love. It is what draws us toward God and one another. If we do not fill our minds with guilt and self-recriminations, we will recognize our incompleteness as a kind of spaciousness into which we can welcome the flow of grace. We can think of our inadequacies as terrible defects, if we want, and hate ourselves. But we can also think of them affirmatively, as doorways through which the power of grace can enter our lives.…Through the spaciousness will come some homeward call, some invitation to transformation.…There is love in it and hope…[and] a small breeze of freedom.

Don Ramón certainly knew the experience of emptiness and incompleteness. He knew what it was like to be overlooked by a world that is more concerned with increasing the speed of life than with noticing those left on the side of the road in a cloud of dust. But Don Ramón also knew the grace that flows through the doorway of true spiritual poverty. In fact, it seems that he had come to love the spacious silence, the daily waiting upon the inflow of grace, the bread of God’s Word that is given freely to the hungry heart. “Blessed are you who are poor; the kingdom of God is yours.”

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was fond of saying that “the poor are very great people.” She was right; they have much to teach us. We must not tire of working for a world that is free of poverty and injustice. At the same time, though, could it be that we have become so attached to our ever-so-important work of “freeing the poor” that we have missed that blessed freedom that comes with embracing the spirit of the poor?

When Jesus sent the Twelve out on mission, he did so with what today seems like a rather strict set of admonitions: “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food. Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave.” (Mt 10:7–11)

Could it be that Jesus’ challenge to travel lightly when we set off on mission is really an invitation to live the gratuitousness of life in the spirit of the beatitudes, in “the spirit of the poor”? Maybe he is secretly seducing us into an experience of that spaciousness of which Gerald May speaks, that breeze of freedom that surprises our inner poverty with the gifts of love and hope. It sounds very much like another one of Jesus’ teachings: “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Lk 18:17) Don Ramón certainly knew what it was like to receive the daily bread of God’s Word like a little child.

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount turned the world upside down. In it he blessed those who are really poor, and invited the rest of us to make their spirit our own. Don Ramón allowed his poverty to become a doorway for grace to enter into his life. As a preacher, I cannot but be challenged by the poverty of his contemplative silence, and so once again I hear the call to simplify my life, to sit down with the Bible opened on my lap, and to wait for God to give me a Word. “Blessed are those who have the spirit of the poor; theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”