…wealth and cleverness were nothing to God — no one is too unimportant to be His friend.
~Dorothy Sayers from “The Man Born to Be King”
No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look Down on others, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas.
Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.
~ Oscar Romero
No one wants to admit to being needy. It is, after all, allowing someone else to have strength and power to deliver what one is desperate for.
Relinquishing that control is painful but it is more painful to be so poor that one is hungry without food, thirsty without drink, ill without medicine, cold without shelter, alone without God.
When we are well fed and hydrated, healed, clothed and safe in our homes, it is difficult to be considered “needy”. Yet most of us are ultimately bereft and spiritually impoverished; we need God even when we can’t admit our emptiness, or we turn away when He offers Himself up to us.
Despite the wealth with which we surround ourselves every day, our need is still overwhelmingly great; we stand empty and ready to be filled with his abundant and lavish gift of Himself.
Helpless and hungry, lowly, afraid
Wrapped in the chill of midwinter;
Comes now among us, born into poverty’s embrace,
new life for the world
Who is this who lives with the lowly,
Sharing their sorrows, knowing their hunger?
This is Christ, revealed to the world
In the eyes of a child, a child of the poor
Who is the stranger here in our midst,
Looking for shelter among us?
Who is the outcast? Who do we see amid the poor,
the children of God?
Who is this who lives with the lowly,
Sharing their sorrows, knowing their hunger?
This is Christ, revealed to the world
In the eyes of a child, a child of the poor
Bring all the thirst, all who seek peace;
Bring those with nothing to offer.
Strengthen the feeble,
Say to the frightened heart: “Fear not: here is your God!” Who is this who lives with the lowly,
Sharing their sorrows, knowing their hunger?
This is Christ, revealed to the world
In the eyes of a child, a child of the poor
~Scott Soper (1994) “A Child of the Poor”
Barnstorming 