Poor Therefore Rich

Followers of the way of Jesus Christ through two millennia have engaged in the joyful yet life-costing struggle of responding to the challenge of being transformed into his likeness. This further volume of Carthusian Novice Conferences offers the father-master’s words of instruction on poverty to the men who have been drawn to the Carthusian form of the Christian way.

As with all of us, ‘poverty’ operates on many levels, and one of the most remarkable qualities of these talks is that they range over the economic history as well as the more traditionally spiritual teaching of the Carthusian Order in its own struggle to seek Christ in simplicity and silence.

Like all Christians, the Carthusians find Jesus the great Exemplar of the poverty that is desirable and yet ‘costs not less than everything’; and once again we are reminded, with characteristic directness, of the source and fount of the desirable poverty – the total mutual self-giving of the Persons of the Holy Trinity.