Awareness of spiritual poverty (ICA)

This is the realization that one is incapable of doing with one's life what one senses one has been called upon to do. One sees that the task one has accepted is far beyond one's own capacity. St Francis of Assisi said that his body was like a donkey which continually did what it wished no matter how he beat it to get it to do his will.

In the ICA New Religious Mode in the arena of knowing one's disengagement (the life of poverty) the fourth formal aspect is the experience of spiritual denial or sacrificial offering. At the third phenomenological level, this occurs when one is able to so value the gift of life in God that nothing else is needed for one's fulfilment.