‘I know how to be poor and I know how to be rich too’
‘I know how to be poor and I know how to be rich too. I have been through my initiation and now I am ready for anything anywhere, full stomach or empty stomach, poverty or plenty. There is nothing I cannot master with the help of one who gives me strength. All the same, it was good of you to share with me in my hardships and in return my God will fulfil all your needs…’ (A reading from the letter of St Paul to the Philippians.)
I don’t believe that any of our readers ever thought they might approach this soapbox and hear scripture being preached, but there you have it. Our opening paragraph is part of a St Paul’s letter, copied from last Sunday’s Mass leaflet. It is one of those profound but simple messages that can resonate with a lot of us. In fact, if Paul hadn’t signed the letter, I would have thought it was someone writing about me. The rich bit, I hasten to add, as it applies to me, means having enough of what you need!
Now, I ain’t no Saint Paul (as a Trump voter might put it) and I do know that Paul’s pen produces mostly Hebraism scripts; but be that as it may, last Sunday’s few lines struck a chord with me. This is a guy who wouldn’t normally recall the Mass reading as far as the chapel gate.
So let us take this one at face value and in a literal sense. ‘I know how to be poor’ – box ticked. ‘And I know how to be rich too’ – another box ticked. (My ‘rich’ is in relation to my ‘poor’.)
My great friend Phillip Conroy always maintains that our generation lived through the best time ever, starting with nothing and working our way to be rich. This is what St Paul means by, ‘I have been through my initiation and now I am ready for anything anywhere, full stomach or empty stomach, poverty or plenty. There is nothing I cannot manage with the help of the One that gives me strength.’
This is where we get the resilience from, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ – and I tell you again dear reader, if Paul hadn’t signed his name to that letter, half the country would be convinced it was written about me.
But there’s more – the really nice bit. ‘All the same, it was good of you to share with me in my hardships.’ To me, that is beautiful and embodies the goodness of all the people who have helped me through tough times – not only recently, but since I was a child. Throughout my lifetime, when I hit a hardship I couldn’t handle on my own, there were always good people at hand to dig me out of a hole, or help carry a load.
Then the last lines of St Paul’s letter offers payback to all those unselfish people who are willing to ‘share another’s hardship’. ‘In return, God will fulfil all your needs through Jesus, as lavishly as only God can.’ Again, that shows that the goodness of God is dished out through the goodness of people. With all the despair, doom and gloom being broadcast these days, we just have to believe that it is the good that will prevail.
One day a school professor held up a sheet of paper with a black dot on the centre of the page and asked his class to write about what they saw.
Afterwards, the professor addressed the students. ‘I am not going to mark you on this, but it is a lesson that no one among you should ever forget. Each one of you, some with commendable imagination, wrote about the black dot, but not one of you wrote about the inviting bright wide open space of opportunity to do something good with the rest of the page. Remember this throughout your life. The black dot symbolises a bad person or troublesome situation. Forget about the black dot and focus on all the potential for goodness around it and around you!’
That is life. Too often we give too much airtime to the handful of bad people… the black dot who wish nothing for us but hardship. We see the black dot and miss the positive white sheet, the people St Paul talks about who ‘are good to share with me in my hardships’.
My Granduncle Dinny once gave my father this piece of advice, ‘don’t fall out with anyone you know that hates you enough to want to do you serious harm!’. These are the professor’s black dots – the hardships, the rest is all about St Paul’s majority of good people who ‘help when hardships come’.
Don’t Forget
The difficulties of life should make us better, not bitter.