The Nobility of Poverty

The  Nobility of Poverty

There was a time in my life where I was an omnivorous reader.  I read The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney.  I must have been about ten or twelve years old, and it was not my regular fare, like Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle, or Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.  But Margaret Sidney had a style that made me wish to be poor like the children in the story.

When I told this to my mother, she must have looked at me and written it off as a childish fantasy.  It wasn’t like St. Francis did with the creche, made children appreciate poverty.  Margaret Sidney saw the romance of poverty, the nobility of it, what Christ did by example.

I thank God for those lessons, for not all of my friends grew up in abundance.  They had tough childhoods, and Margaret Sidney made me appreciate the variety of backgrounds of people I know.  Now a parsimonious childhood is no longer romantic.