The Eucharist is the sacrament of poverty. Mother Teresa writes: The Eucharist and the poor are nothing more than the same love of God. The Eucharist is God impoverished, stripped of the trappings of divinity and made into a piece of bread. A piece of bread! The cheapest, simplest, most basic, most common, and yet most insignificant type of food. Not content to divest Himself of His power and become merely human, Christ humbled Himself even more and became a piece of bread to nourish humans. Can we truly understand what it means that Christ became bread?
If we can see Christ in a piece of bread, then why can we not see Him in the poor - who, after all, are at least human beings created in God's image! If we see that Christ humbled Himself to give Himself as nourishment to others, then why do we not follow His example and give our whole lives in nourishing other people?
When we receive the Eucharist we are receiving poverty. Even if we do not understand it, we are, in the act of eating Christ impoverished as a piece of bread, expressing solidarity with the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the mentally ill, the lonely, the elderly - all the poor who live their lives unrecognized as Christ among us, just as to faithless eyes the Eucharist appears only as a piece of bread.
Seeing with the eyes of faith means more than seeing Christ in a piece of bread. It also means seeing Christ in the most debased, the most filthy, the most impoverished, the ugliest of human conditions.
That is why Christ coupled the Last Supper with the washing of feet, something only the lowest of servants would do. Christ is calling us both to see Him in those who serve us, and He is calling us to imitate Him in His poverty. He is calling us to recognize that the poor are our servants and that we must let them serve us by serving them. Mother Teresa also writes that the poor have given her far more than she gives them. But she could only receive what they had to give by first giving herself to them.
What is beautiful about Mother Teresa is her recognition that spiritual poverty is worse than material poverty. By spiritual poverty she means: loneliness, a sense of worthlessness, a sense that you no longer have anything to offer the world. The great crime of material poverty is that it so often leads to spiritual poverty, especially when we live in a society that tells us the poor are mere "leeches," the mentally ill are to be feared and shunned, the homeless and unemployed are simply "lazy," and so on. We do not see the poor as people who have things to offer us. And so we ignore them, and we plunge them into spiritual poverty.
When Mother Teresa offered rice to a poor woman with eight children, the woman took half the rice and went to share it with another poor family who was hungry. Mother Teresa says: "I did not bring them more rice that night because I wanted them to experience the joy of loving and sharing." Mother Teresa recognized that it was vitally important to that poor woman to experience herself as someone who had something to offer someone else.
It is not your money that will save the poor. It is your love.
Mother Teresa is clear that love was not given to us to make us "feel good." Love, if it is true, is supposed to hurt. We are called to turn each act of love into an act of suffering service, and we are called to turn each act of suffering into an act of love.
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