The Poverty Of The Soul

Today I am going to talk about poverty. Yet the poverty that I speak about is not the apparent kind. You see, before you can begin to speak about any concept, we need a criterion. We need definitions. In speaking about poverty, we need to understand that there is external poverty and there is internal poverty. And one of them is far more dangerous than the other. Because while one form of poverty determines how we live temporarily, the other form determines how we live eternally. Today I will speak about the latter form. Internal poverty is the poverty of the soul. It describes the unmoved soul. The soul that has been created but has still failed to realize why. It is the soul that lives a purposeless life. The heart that beats but has already died. Because while this body cries and bleeds and feels pain from the material world, the soul is untouched by these things. There is only one thing that can cut or stab or impoverish the soul. There is only one thing that can kill it. To deprive it of its only one true need. To be close to its Originator, to be near God. Spiritual deprivation is the true impoverishment. True poverty is standing poor on the Day of Judgment. Despite this reality, we continue to live this life feeding our bodies but starving our souls. The sad irony of this focus is that the body that we tend to is only temporary while the soul that we neglect is eternal. When a body dies, we cry. But the death of the body is not true death. It's only the removing of a shell and the movement from one realm to a truer realm. We weep for the departing bodies but our hearts are unmoved by those bodies which are still alive but whose hearts and souls have already died. Because of the alienation from that which gives Life - God.

What impoverishes and kills the heart? 

It is allowing the heart to love anything as it should only love God. See, the heart was created with a very particular nature and for a very particular purpose. When you fail to use any created thing for the very purpose for which it was created, it breaks, it drowns, it starves, it dies...

The heart was created by and for God. The heart was created to know and love God. The heart was created to be given to God. To be filled, with God. The heart that is given to or filled by any other thing suffers the most painful impoverishment and death. 

The human heart is like a boat in the ocean of Dunya. The boat that allows the ocean's water to enter, breaks and then drowns. The human heart that allows this Dunya to enter, breaks and drowns and becomes owned...

Owned by this life, owned by our gadgets, our facebook, our jobs, the distractions, the fashion trends, the marketing tools, the money, the power, the status.

The heart that is owned by this life is a prisoner of the worst kind. The heart that is owned by any other master than the master of masters, it is the weakest of all slaves. That is true oppression, true death, true poverty.

By Ustadha Yasmin Mogahed