26th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C, Sep 28, 2025)
‘I wish you to be a friend of the poor, but I would rather you were poor yourself. The former is the stage of the proficient, the latter of the perfect. By friendship with the poor we consort with kings, but by love of poverty we become kings ourselves. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the poor, and kings have the power to make their friends happy when they wish. “Make friends of the mammon of iniquity, that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.” You see how great is the dignity of holy poverty. It does not seek patronage for itself, but it is able to extend it to those who need it. What sort of thing is this that, without the help of angels or men, simply by trusting in divine grace, is able to penetrate of itself to the vision of glory, to reach the summits of existence, to scale the very heights of all splendor?
Now I want you to consider without any self-deception how material things are keeping you from all this. Alas, it is but smoke, here now and then gone, which blocks your way to everlasting joy, which clouds the brightness of the light eternal, which cheats you of true knowledge, which robs you of great nobility! Why do you prefer to such glory the mere grass which is here to-day and on the fire to-morrow, the flesh and all its false glamour? For “the flesh is but grass, and the glory of it but grass in flower.” If you are wise, if you have any heart, if your eyes are at all open to the light, cease trying to chase what, when you do attain, is nothing but tribulation. Blessed is the man who does not go after such things, for they are only a burden; they soil the man who sets his heart upon them, and in their passing they cause untold suffering. Is it not better honorably to spurn them than sorrowfully to lose them? Is it not better to give them up for the love of Christ than to lose them in death? Death is a robber in ambush from whose clutches you cannot save either yourself or your goods. Nor can you protect yourself against him, for he comes as a thief in the night. You have brought nothing into the world and assuredly you will take nothing out. You sleep your sleep and lo! in the morning your hands are empty. But you know all this. I must not waste time in teaching you what you know already, I will do better to pray that you may be granted the grace to act according to the knowledge that has already been given you.’
– St. Bernard, Letter 104