. . . . .

To walk in a total poverty is not very easy. You see, we always have this desire to succeed, a nostalgia against this lack. We dream, imagine, it could be different. Our own will is that we will have our own perfect hermitage with no one who bothers us, and with only the books that we like, and the perfect temperature in our rooms, and mosquitoes who obey us. But the ultimate freedom--and this is divine pedagogy--is a substantial poverty; it is absence. We always run the risk of attaching love to a conditioning, of linking love to this or that gesture, of attributing presence, consolation, charisma. It is more comfortable to look at Resurrection, at Pentecost (which are beautiful).

notes from M.-D. Philippe on Ascension.

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