The Bible makes it clear: we must be poor in spirit. Poverty of this sort, the true poverty which can be found in the lives of some who are poor and also in some who are prosperous, doesn’t dictate some sort of extreme asceticism, voluntary or forced upon us. Our Lord Jesus Christ lived in a state of poverty which apparently allowed good food and good drink — at least for His followers though He might not have had much to drink Himself.
I suspect a certain poverty, allied to a humble spirit, is necessary for true family life, for true community life of any sort. In that sort of a spirit, the individual is more likely to realize he’s an individual in a strongly qualified way. In particular, all members of a well-ordered extended family, including even the patriarch and matriarch, will recognize their dependencies upon each other and may well become comfortable with those dependencies.
If we would be poor in spirit, we must recognize our dependency upon God, upon our fellow human beings, and also upon the non-human creatures and trees and soil of our environments. We also must be willing to pour out what we have for those who are dependent upon us and also for those who need to be dependent upon us.
A modern individual can’t be poor in spirit because he’s raised to seek independence of an impossible and undesirable sort. He tries to be free of dependencies upon other flesh-and-blood human beings. This forces him to accumulate wealth in ways that are harmful to him and to human communities. Instead of being dependent upon relatives and friends and neighbors, instead of accepting the accumulated goods from past generations and adding to those goods for future generations, he’ll accumulate retirement accounts and other fungible investments. He’ll seek, by his votes and other political means, to obtain promises of government benefits. These efforts won’t truly free him from dependencies. He’ll merely become a center of desires dependent upon various corporate and governmental agencies. In Biblical terms, he’ll become dependent upon the Principalities and Powers of the world. Rather than a humble dependent creature, he’ll become a slave to worldly institutions. He certainly won’t be a free-standing human being because that’s an impossible creature.