The Poverty We Bring to God

When there is nothing left to offer but our need

“Blessed the man whose help comes from you,

who has set his heart on climbing to you.”

— Psalm 83, as reflected upon by St. Bruno

There comes a moment when a man discovers that he has very little to bring before God.

Perhaps this is one of the hidden mercies of the spiritual life.

For years we imagine that we will come to Him bearing something worthy of the journey: fidelity, prayer, sacrifice, knowledge, virtue, perhaps even the fruits of a life spent trying to serve Him. We gather these things almost without knowing it. They become part of the story we tell ourselves about who we are before God.

And then there are seasons in which the Lord permits us to arrive before Him empty-handed.

St. Bruno, commenting upon the psalmist’s longing for the courts of the Lord, makes a remarkably simple observation:

No one can climb by himself.

The heart may desire God. It may have “set its heart on climbing.” It may ache for the heavenly Jerusalem until, in the words of the psalm, the soul itself grows weak with longing.

But longing cannot carry itself to its object.

We need to be carried.

There is a poverty deeper than possessing little. It is the poverty of discovering that even our desire for God cannot save us. We cannot manufacture purity of heart. We cannot force ourselves into peace. We cannot construct the road into the Kingdom. We cannot make ourselves holy by intensity of desire.

We can only desire Him.

And perhaps at certain moments that is precisely what remains.

God, I have nothing to give You except that I still want You.

There is a strange freedom in such a confession.

The Desert Fathers understood this poverty. Their great renunciations were never intended to make them impressive before God. They went into the desert precisely to discover how utterly dependent the human heart is upon mercy. Strip away possessions, reputation, distraction, accomplishment, even the consolations of prayer, and eventually a man encounters something he had perhaps spent his entire life avoiding:

his need.

Not theoretical need.

Not theological need.

His own helplessness before God.

And there, strangely enough, prayer becomes very simple.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Nothing needs to be added.

The Name contains everything the poor man lacks.

St. Bruno calls this present life the valley of tears. Yet he does not describe the valley as a place abandoned by God. It is precisely there that God gives His help. The mountain is reached not because we finally become strong enough to climb it, but because grace descends into the valley.

This changes the meaning of our poverty.

What if the things that appear to diminish us are not merely losses?

What if the exhaustion that makes prayer simple, the circumstances that make great plans impossible, the obscurity in which no one sees what is being offered, the surrender of identities we once thought indispensable, and even the painful discovery that we cannot determine the shape of our own future—all of these become places where the soul learns what St. Bruno knew:

“Blessed the man whose help comes from You.”

Not blessed is the man who has solved his life.

Not blessed is the man who has secured his future.

Not blessed is the man who has successfully constructed the path by which he will reach God.

Blessed is the man whose help comes from God.

There is an enormous difference.

The first must continually preserve what he has built.

The second may become poor enough simply to receive.

Perhaps this is why the saints speak so often about becoming little. Poverty creates within us a capacity for gift. Empty hands are capable of receiving what clenched hands cannot.

And what God desires to give is not merely assistance.

He gives Himself.

St. Bruno ends his reflection with the astonishing promise of the Christian life: God will be all in all.

This is the destination toward which the heart has been climbing all along.

Not achievement.

Not spiritual distinction.

Not even some perfected version of ourselves.

God.

Only God.

And perhaps the deepest purification of desire occurs when everything surrounding that desire begins to fall away. We thought we were seeking a particular form of life, a place, a vocation, a work, a recognizable holiness. Slowly the Lord asks whether beneath all of these things there is something simpler.

Do you want Me?

And the poor man answers:

Yes.

Perhaps trembling.

Perhaps exhausted.

Perhaps with nothing whatsoever to show for himself.

But yes.

Then poverty itself becomes an offering.

I cannot give You the strength I do not possess.

I cannot give You a future I cannot see.

I cannot give You holiness as though it were mine to manufacture.

I cannot even promise that tomorrow I will have the strength that I have today.

But I can come before You now.

I can give You my poverty.

I can give You my longing.

I can give You the heart that still whispers Your Name.

And if even that longing is Your gift, then I give back to You what You first placed within me.

Perhaps this is what it means to pass “from strength to strength.” It may not always mean becoming visibly stronger. Sometimes the strength into which God leads us is the strength of having nothing left upon which to depend except Him.

Then the valley of tears secretly becomes the beginning of Zion.

For the soul discovers that the One for whom it was searching at the end of the ascent has already descended into its poverty.

The poor man looks into his empty hands.

And discovers that they are not empty after all.

They are waiting.

And the riches for which they wait are inexhaustible:

the mercy of God,

the Name of Jesus,

and the love that will one day be all in all.