In the book, The Religious life according to St. Augustine, Sage AA presented to the readers the two dangers that can be found in paragraphs 5 and 6. First is the danger of pride that the rich might feel towards himself, who had surrendered all possessions and the second is the danger of envy that the poor might feel, who had nothing to surrender materially. As a cliché would say “sometime, Pride lurks in good works” If not properly reminded by these dangers, what community life would be like if there were to find both rich and poor, the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, the privileged and the not so privileged. Envy and jealousy, as well as pride, would quickly take over and dominate. From the expositions on Psalm 131,5, I quote “Because of these possessions there exist individualism, egoism, jealousy, competition, avarice, quarrels, and fights… Do we quarrel over the things we hold in common?” In short my dear brothers, material possessions are the very source of division. Maybe this is the reason why Augustine wrote this reminder on the spirit of poverty at the very first chapter of the Rule. In case you forgot, Augustine said, “Those who owned something in the world should be cheerful in wanting to share it in common once they have entered the monastery.” “But they who owned nothing should not look for those things in the monastery that they were unable to have in the world.”
In addition, van Bavel in his “The Basic Inspiration of Religious Life also supports the assertion of these dangers by saying that Augustine did not only speak exclusively to material goods. The heart is involved as well, because anyone who is materially poor can be consumed by greed. And someone who is materially rich can have the attitude toward life of a poor person.
The positive signs are emphasized here by St. Augustine mainly “cheerfulness in giving” on the part of the rich and the absence of a desire to acquire things on the part of the poor.
As a whole Augustine made a very profound message to his community with regards to the actions and attitudes of his brothers. But that was a hundred of years ago. According to some friars, this practice has been an obsolete according to them if only we are to strictly observe them. But they also say the act may be obsolete but the spirituality of the precepts is still present. Theodore Tack was able to extract the spirituality of these Paragraphs that it is still useful. In if Augustine were Alive, he wrote four concepts that are addressed to the problems of our time, namely, alienation, solidarity helplessness and dependence. Just to elaborate one, our dependence to the technology has unconsciously destroying our relationship to God. Individualism, egoism, jealousy, envy, quarrels and fights are disclosing which are affecting our relationship between each other. (I’ll leave it to you to think of what are those things that I’m referring to). To deal this kind of problem, allow me to quote from the Constitutions 29, “…to practice poverty is through a sense of responsibility and love that comes both from the individual and from the community. And of course, let us not forget to ask from the source of our vocation, who has been guiding us in our journey all this time, GOD.
To end this annotation, let me quote from the Ratio Institutionis, which puts it: This vow means more than receiving goods from the community. It includes also a creative attitude towards material goods and their management: care for the goods of the community, their distribution, personal stewardship and responsibility for goods entrusted to the individual. (RI, 35)
