NOTES for Heb 10:34

One of the most important principles of a Christian's spiritual life is called non-possessiveness in the language of the Eastern monastic tradition. The Western tradition calls non-possessiveness poverty and limits it by reducing it to a certain material condition. However, if poverty is understood as Isaiah of Jerusalem, for example, understood it, then it could quite well also be called non-possessiveness.

Incidentally, Isaiah's fate can serve as an illustration of the author's words, although this prophet lived eight centuries before the coming of the Savior: being an aristocrat and a wealthy man, he called himself poor, and at the end of his life, during persecutions, he really lost everything. There are even not very clear reports that the prophet ended his life as a martyr. This sense of oneself as poor regardless of the size of one's own property is what is called non-possessiveness. In such a spiritual state, the loss of this very property is indeed not perceived as a catastrophe.

A person then truly understands that the main thing for him is not property, or at least not the property he has on earth. And this is not some refusal, self-limitation, poverty for the sake of freedom, or anything similar. It is simply life in the Kingdom as such. In a reality that is arranged differently from our untransformed world. And for a person precisely this reality becomes true and absolute. Of course, in such a case a person does not necessarily have to lose everything: monastic practice, whether in the East or in the West, merely externalizes what can remain internal.

The issue is precisely one's attitude toward one's own property. When it is perceived not as a more or less inseparable part of one's beloved self, but as an instrument given by God for carrying out tasks set by God. An instrument that one does not own, but uses. And if even this instrument is taken from you, and God does not intervene, then His plan does not involve intervention. Perhaps these instruments will no longer be needed. Or God has prepared others. In any case, He knows better. And His servants need not worry: it is His world and His plan.