Be poor to be truly rich

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

Chaplain

Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)

Talamban, Cebu City

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com

THIS is what Christ proposed to his disciples, and now to us. We need to be poor, to be detached from earthly things, so we can be filled with what truly enriches us. (cfr. Mk 10,28-31)

“Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come,” he said.

We have to understand these words well which at first sight can plunge us to disbelief, since we all know that we need brothers, sisters, parents, children, friends and everyone else in our life. We need houses and money and other material resources. God himself said that we have to love everyone, including our enemies.

He also wants us to “subdue the earth.” (cfr. Gen 1,28) We certainly need to be immersed in the things of the world if we want to subdue the earth. This can only mean that we have to deal with the things of the world, not to stay away from them.

What Christ’s words mean is that nothing and no one in the world, even those who are close to us, should replace our exclusive love for God that would actually give us the proper and inclusive love for everyone and everything in the world.

It’s when we fail to begin and end with God and to be with him in the whole course of life that we would put ourselves in danger, and of failing to gain God himself and everyone and everything in our life.

For us to live by this indication of Christ, we certainly need to continually rectify our intentions as we go through all our temporal and earthly affairs. We know how easily we can be trapped in the things of the world and forget the real way of dealing with them. 

We easily think that by forgetting God or putting him aside in our earthly affairs, and then giving our full attention to the technical aspects of our affairs, we would be achieving our true fulfillment, when in fact, it would be a real loss. Such an attitude toward our earthly affairs can only show that we are attached to the things of this world and that God is actually not important to us, he who is our “all in all,” as he should be.

How then should our attitude be toward the things of the world? It is to love them the way God loves them.

We have to embody that attitude articulated in the gospel of St. John: “For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believes in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting.” (Jn 3,16)

It’s a love that carries out what God, its creator, commanded our first parents to do: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it…” (Gen 1,28) “To subdue the earth” does not only mean to master and dominate it, or merely to make use and take advantage of it, although all these go into that divine command. In fact, we have to develop as much as possible the good potentials of the world.

Our worldly affairs should be motivated only by love for God, and with that love, we can love everybody and everything else properly! It’s that love which can gain us a hundredfold of what Christ promised us and of eternal life itself. This is how we can be poor to be truly rich.