Are you poor?  If you are living in the West, you are, relative to the rest of the planet, probably not.  Although you may be living from paycheck to paycheck, you likely have sufficient food and a reliable roof over your head.  In having these things, you have much more than billions of our fellow human beings.
     And even if you are not living in the West, you probably have sufficiency.  That is, you have enough with which to live.  Happily, according to most studies, the number of people living in extreme poverty has dramatically declined in the last ten years.  Despite what we may read, progress is being made in lifting people out of abject poverty.
     It's a wonderful and beautiful thing.  I write today about a different type of poverty, a different take on being poor.  It is being poor in spirit.  In our race to share technology with the rest of the planet, we often forget that although we do ourselves and our fellow humans a tremendous favor in doing so, we ought not to forget the greatest poverty of all:  a poverty of soul.
     The founders of the great religions of the world recognized this acutely.  They didn't encourage us to become materially rich; they rather encouraged us to become spiritually full and philosophically complete.  They knew that, in the biggest possible picture, this was far more important, indeed, infinitely more important than how much technology we have or how much money we have in our bank account.
     As Jesus asked us in his telling of the parable of the rich landowner (see the twelfth chapter of the gospel of Luke), "What good does it do you if you gain the world, but lose your soul?"