CYCLE
THIRTY-ONE
1. It is easy for people to regard as 'cheap'
that man who does not buy or dress expensively.
But there is an immense difference between failing to come up to a
position of economic wealth because one has tried to and failed or, alternatively,
because one identifies, in due female fashion, with a political or a scientific
bent more than an economic one, and living, on the other hand, beyond it in
what amounts to a religious vocation.
2. Such a man is only 'cheap', or recognizably
poor, because of his commitment to wisdom and unwillingness, in consequence, to
allow the folly of economic gain to play a leading roll in his life.
3. The pursuit of
economic gain does not interest him, since he is content to 'get by on a
shoestring' in order to have as much time as possible in which to cultivate
wisdom in relation to being. Money for
him is not the be-all-and-end-all that it becomes for those less
spiritually-inclined people whom he identifies with sinful folly.
4. He despises their lifestyle, because it can
only exist in relation to heathenistic criteria, in
which politics and science also have major rolls to play, with triangular
implications. He realizes, when
ignorantly denigrated by such people, how different he is and how difficult it
can sometimes be being wise in a world which gives every encouragement to
fools. For his 'Kingdom' is not of this
world, and he knows, too, that, in Christ's words, it is easier for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the '
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