Love can only lead to poverty

At a time when spiritual leaders were teaching believers to collect, count, and carefully record their good deeds, [St. Therese de Lisieux] firmly rejected that sort of accounting: I count nothing. I simply do everything out of love--and if I then stand empty-handed and utterly poor in the ranks of those who collected, counted, and recorded their merits, isn't that, after all, the poverty that Christ speaks about in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the poor?

-Tomas Halik, Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us, pg. 33