In the Editorial of the journal Uni-Versum (experiences, discussions and researches oriented to the future of the humanity) is written: "In today's cultural desert flattened by the mercantilist and functionalist single-thought some life-giving presence, that can contrast with the dominant materialistic and nihilistic drift appear increasingly urgent "(n.2/2010).  In this new era, marked by a global economic crisis that is literally strangling many people, it generates more and more the unfathomable imbalance between poor and rich countries. The economicistic perverse mechanism of this imbalance is becoming more devastating. A reporter, noting the situation, wrote recently: "Even the State is a conglomeration of all-out defense, of institutional quibbles, interest more or less obvious, all served on the injustice spread on the crucified reason" (Vincenzo Andraous)
 Facing with these very realistic denunciations, we might be tempted to give up. We are sad at heart, and we’re thinking: if the situation is so serious, what can we do consacrated women, but to pray?

A risk and a challenge

 Certainly the basic bet is still the need of intercession: urgent and irreplaceable. However, in a rapidly-changing world, in these sweeping drifts: individuals, families, social groups, peoples… we can not quite pull us apart, prevent us from being caused; but, in more or less long time, we would are totally destroyed, erased from the history. Conversely, if we accept the challenge of this historic hour, we could be, by the grace of God, those living presences described above.

 Ramon Panikkar, the thinker who died a few months ago and a symbol of a possible synthesis between European and Eastern culture in the present, speaks of an absolutely urgency need. This is to carry out, as soon as possible, a demonetization of today's culture so that the money will stop being the supreme (more or less recognizable) emperor of the life. On the other hand, there are not as dormant certain items so classified by the General Director of FAO: "There is a real risk of a global food crisis." Here, it is time to open the third eye, the interior life, which alone embraces the comprehensive view of reality. So, far from going into a depression, we take a strong appeal, a promise of light that never ceases to be given to all the Christians, but especially to us who have professed a vow of poverty: "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven "(Mt 5:3).

 So far from being a reminder of just painted ascetic austerity, in spite of everything, or rather through everything that is happening, the call to the Gospel’s beatitude of poverty explodes strongly present.

 Inside the socio-cultural horizon bled dry by such mismanagement of assets, it is a promise that colures of positive a possible future shaped by those who believe and live the Gospel’s promises. The first is to believe not just in words but doing actions that Jesus has won, overcoming the world. Jesus is the Word of the incarnate God, who proposes to us so, with his being, his way of living and of saying, his way of relating to the Father, to men, the rich and the poor, the just and the criminal .

To disobey the market

 More than ever, Christ’s presence of love in the midst of our day is the guide and model in current social emergencies and those that come to us, today and always, by our vow of poverty.

 "The Lord Jesus Christ, being rich, became poor for us, that we through his poverty might become rich" (2 Cor 8:9). Jesus is the blessed poor, that is happy in his condition, that it must be said, is not poverty or depravity, degradation, brutalization. The young carpenter of Nazareth, in the laboratory of Joseph, is a craftsman: the poor, yes, but inclined to a manual creativity, intent on a job for poor, but not humanly impoverished by looking only for profit working- mechanisms.

 The poverty of Jesus in Nazareth and then in his itinerant life coincides with the true, deep, very human freedom, born from the property’s expropriation, the accumulation’s denial, by the essentiality of needs and wants all ordered to that one necessary that is the Kingdom of Love. Perhaps some among us religious women, may ask with more acuteness: these business, social climbing, alienation, how can concern us so protected in our convents?

 Francesco Gesualdi, founder and leader of “Centro Nuovo Modello di Sviluppo” (Center of the Development’s New Model) followed by other eminent personalities, writes: "Today we basically are doing only one thing: we obey blindly to the market, to the techno-economic fury that rules the world. We work more, faster, more anxiously. For what? Even asking this question it is a miracle, because there is not time to ask ourselves."

 Is it not a problem for us too this situation? Is it not reflected, even not in all, in some of our religious houses? Here, here's the rub.

The hidden woodworm

 "Blessed are the poor in spirit." For those of us who have taken a vow of poverty, just to manage a life that is truly spiritual, it is important to face the reality of today: what is happening and could happen.

 The danger exists for us too. Like certain worms that gnaw secretly everything. Do not you realize that they dug holes and tunnels and empty; one day that tool, that cupboard, that object is literally eroded, eviscerated, to be thrown away.

 The worm is the acquiescence with comfortable, indeed wanting more and more. See how this little tool is functional, see how practical it is! And I could use this gadget, and such yet, so pretty! ... I am sure that some benefactor is ready to buy it, on the occasion of my Name Day he gives me it with all his heart. What's wrong?

 The evil is not outside but inside. Imagine a beautiful and well painted house, surrounded by pine and beech trees. But if you enter, you notice that the walls corroded from moisture are collapsing; we are uncomfortable inside. No, the evil is not in our very tidy life, organized by specific times, not even in the efficiency with which the educational and apostolic work is done, but really in the accumulation of things to do and to have. The evil is not in what we do, but in time it takes to run, to produce, and to do and to overdo it.

 Why don’t I gift me more time to pray? More time to relate well with myself, with the sisters, with the others, more time to realize that the buds of the trees have their green protective hair until yesterday reddish? Why don’t I learn something of new also from the lizard blissfully motionless in the spring’s sunshine?

A free heart

 "Blessed are the poor in spirit," Jesus says. It is first of all to clear just the spirit of the needs caused by the large superstore everywhere promoted by the hype. Becoming aware is the first and important attitude.

 I realize that, although that sister or that lay collaborators have get several pairs of shoes, I'm fine with what I have. How good is to taste freedom and lightness because I did not give in the little desire to buy that bag of more or that originality of low price and fine appearance that could liven up my desk!

 I will not dwell in the casuistry, and deliberately I stay on the edge of the forest of desires that, increased by today's society, literally swells my unconscious and then pretends to lay down the law to my decisions in relation to many things.

 I want t remember to me and to the reader how it is important to invoke the Holy Spirit himself to introduce us to where the bliss of poverty becomes more demanding but certainly brighter than ever.

 Do not demand that the others are noticing the good we do, to give up what, at times, teases us in the community discourse; on the contrary to make great account of what builds us up, to be joyful with who does or shows it, but never to appropriate to it.

 To ask for the grace (only because it obtains) running on the road of the fleeting days in the clear heart and in the clean mind of all that prevents us to the love to be sovereign in us.

 Good things, cheap and excellent, success, usefulness, favorable events, and appealing promises: it all makes sense, but it is as the flower of the grass that soon dries and dies. Why we want what dies? Only the love is opposed to the death. The love is life. "All that I understand -Tolstoy said- I understand it because I love. Everything is, everything exists only because I love. Everything is united only by love. The love is God and to die means that I, a particle of love, return to the eternal source”.

 Here, in a world that seeks new ways to survive the disaster of consumerism and all its pernicious consequences, the bliss of poverty we are offered today as a way of salvation, a scenery of freedom.

 To throw away all the formalities, the crust, the superficiality of appearance as poor without the long-continued commitment wanting to be in depth by the grace of God, that's what we will discover today, as perhaps never it was, the poverty in spirit: that he made Jesus blessed on earth and that will also free and blessed us to follow him, free of his freedom. To love.

 And in the final, a little and hilarious episode. When I was teaching Latin, I happened to have in the hands the elaborate of a student, translating from the Latin and being clumsy with the various meanings of sumptus, translated: Menenio Agrippa died so poor that his body is not even found to bury it.

Maria Pia Giudici fma    San Biagio del Sacro Speco C. P. 106 00028 Subiaco (Roma)