There are many kinds of poverty. Poverty that is a gift from God, poverty chosen or accepted in a spirit of love, is a great good. For St Francis, Poverty was a lover, a spouse and a queen. The allegorical legend, Sacrum Commercium ("Francis and His Lady Poverty"), written in 1227, describes his meeting with her in terms that recall the Song of Songs.

Poverty becomes another name for Wisdom (Sophia), and through her eyes we see the Fall in Eden as a loss of that spirit of poverty that clothed Adam in Paradise. The frescoes in the crypt of the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi depict the "little poor man" paradoxically dressed in cloth of gold after his wedding to Lady Poverty. Poverty in this sense is akin to humility and to detachment, the refusal to "lay up treasures on earth", the patient waiting on God that St Thérèse describes as her "little way", the way of spiritual childhood.

Poverty imposed by human selfishness, on the other hand, is an evil that we must do our best to eradicate: the physical poverty of deprivation, the spiritual poverty of the one who oppresses or refuses help. The compassion of the good Samaritan, the giving of alms and the other corporal works of mercy have always been required of the Christian - that is, of the one who aspires to live in the spirit of charity. Of that, more will be said below. Poverty of that sort will always exist, and will always cry out for a response.

Those who spend too much of their lives behind a desk, or interfacing with a computer, are challenged by any encounter with grinding poverty, with real deprivation, oppression, disease or despair. We are challenged by people like Mother Teresa (who picked up the dying from the streets of Calcutta), or Jean Vanier (who started L’Arche by taking the handicapped into his own home). Or by Mark and Louise Zwick, whose apostolate in the southern United States is still not well enough known.

God may call any of us, at any time, to deeds of heroic virtue. But whether heroic or ordinary, each of us is given a unique path. We may follow others for part of the way, but only Jesus himself can lead us to where he wants us to be. He may ask us to throw our possessions away, as St Francis did, or to build them up for the use of others.

He may ask us to serve the community of the family, or give us a new kind of family in the slums. When he calls us, we learn the true meaning of human freedom. Once the call is heard, we may still refuse - but that freedom begins to look pale and wan in the daylight of another freedom: the freedom to do what God wants of us, the freedom to become what he wants us to be.

In a very real sense, human freedom is not merely about freedom of choice. We have no choice, if we are to be true to ourselves. St Thomas More was not, in that sense, "free" to obey Henry VIII instead of his conscience and the Pope. He was "compelled" by his true self, and in recognizing and obeying that compulsion he was freer than the men who simply gave way to the king. A man who can stand his ground is freer than a man who can only drift with the breeze.

The Spiritual Poverty of our Civilization

There is a particular kind of poverty that afflicts our culture, and to which this Christmas may draw our attention. It is a poverty of imagination, a narrowness of soul. So many minds are polluted to the point of saturation by manufactured images of violence and sexuality.

So many buildings, public spaces and artefacts speak to us only of money and the desire for comfort, the need for entertainment and the fear of silence, the devaluation of the truly human things. The poor who have no other wealth can no longer feast even on the riches of beauty; their souls are fed on the stones of ugliness. Those lucky enough to be in employment are set against each other like rats, and the businesses that pay their wages no longer expect from them any pride in their work or sense of responsibility, but only greed.

"The Church has an absolute duty to open herself to the poor," writes Cardinal Jean Daniélou in Prayer as a Political Problem. But, he adds, "This can be done only by creating conditions which make Christianity possible for the poor." In our increasingly technological civilization, "everything serves to turn men away from their spiritual calling". This is where the arts should come into their own, for man feels himself lost in a world with no centre. "The constitution of a sacred cosmos is one of art’s essential tasks and could be said to be a never-ending one.

From this point of view, those who opposed Galileo were in the right of it within their own frame of reference. Their universe was true enough. Their mistake lay in thinking that their universe was also the universe of science. It was not this, but a representation of the sacral universe and of man’s place therein.

It is not possible - nor would Daniélou have argued that it is - to supply what is lacking to our civilization by art alone. Yet Daniélou speaks eloquently of the importance of Christian cosmology and of beauty, in a way reminiscent of his friend Hans Urs von Balthasar, for with these things we reach to the heart of the problem. "Rilke was not mistaken when he identified as one the sphere of the angels and the sphere of all that is beautiful," he goes on. "‘For the beautiful is nothing but the first degree of the terrible.’

The world of beauty is the world of intermediary hierarchies which are irradiated with the glory that cascades down from the Trinity even into the formless opacity of matter. The beautiful is the world of forms between that which is above form, being the sphere of God, and that which has no form at all, being mere matter. The modern world shuts out that intermediate order. It recognizes nothing between scientific thinking and mystical possession, and in so doing denies completely the sphere which it is the function of art to reconstitute by giving back to the universe its depths."