So I am the chaplain on call here at Georgetown university hospital and I can’t sleep. The call room we have is a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare and it seems every time I am getting to sleep my pager goes off, and here is the catch… its dealing with stuff I feel woefully inadequate to deal with. I am good working with the poor, and with young people, but I am really ill equipped in many ways to handle death and dying. Some of it is my meticulous nature, some of it is a real and deep desire not to look foolish, but most of it is really wanting to help and feeling my complete and utter poverty of spirit to do so.
Poverty of spirit, it manifests itself in me both as a real need to rely on Christ and as my own inability to do this kind of work outside of his grace and his love for me. Metz was right to say that poverty of spirit is the foundation for the rest of the beatitudes. Sometimes too I think it might be precisely being in that moment of having no idea what to do that we actually end up doing the right thing, perhaps even in spite of ourselves. The gospel says that Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, even though he would raise him from the dead a few minutes later, something about that experience left even Christ himself in his full humanity stand before death and feel what every human feels in front of it, confusion, frustration, anger, and sadness. The letter to the Hebrews says that we have a high priest who bears all of our iniquities, and so I suppose he bears this too. All of that also leads to the moment of realizing just how dependant upon the Father each of us is, a moment in which the sharing of life between Christ and the Father made Lazarus come out of the tomb. Without this moment of poverty of spirit we can never really live in that connection.
So its 2:40am and I will with the psalmist await the dawn, knowing that in the dark sometimes we are left only with our poverty of spirit.
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