Spiritual poverty and temporal provisionality: twin characteristics of precarity. The one suggests radical vulnerability because of interior destitution, the other radical vulnerability because of a necessarily incomplete present and uncertain future. Yet Jesus claims that whoever experiences them is truly blessed, and Dorothy Day calls them graces worth praying for.

The subversive message that Jesus brings is twofold: poverty and provisionality allow us to be more fully, and ought to be embraced rather than feared; and God is truly found in the midst of the poor and the provisional.

Kerry Walters, Jacob's Hip