Category: Franciscan Friars

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Honest Humble Prayer

Honest Humble Prayer

I have learned that the plan of God is much more exciting than anything I ever could have fashioned for myself. The impulse to become like the people we admire can become a great hindrance to our spiritual life. Our vocation, or state of life, should form our life of prayer and spiritual practices. “Pray as you are” is a straightforward way to remember this. I am not a hermit, a monastic, or even a mendicant friar. I am a secular priest.

So, please, pray as you are and not as you wish or think you should. Always be faithful to your state of life. In the seemingly mundane, ordinary circumstances of your life, the most extraordinary and unexpected thing can happen: You become a saint!

—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Let Us Pray: Pray As You Are“
by Fr. Gary Caster

Franciscan Media: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/minute-meditations/honest-humble-prayer/

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Wait in Silence

Wait in Silence

I have found that if someone is going to work hard at being immersed in God, the effort should not be just in the praying itself but in becoming yourself a place of prayer. This place of prayer, so carefully prepared, sometimes by extensive work, is where we can just be. Be silent. Be alone. Be at peace with our solitude. So, to learn to pray, we, like St. Francis, need to find our own sacred place of solitude and silence. Then, once we’ve come to that oasis, we need only enter and wait in silence.

We often don’t really know what we’re waiting for, but we trust that something will come; and when it does, it will be a surprise, both in when it comes and what it is.

—from the book God’s Love Song: The Vision of Francis and Clare
by Murray Bodo, OFM, and Susan Saint Sing

Franciscan Media: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/

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Walk Without Fear

Walk Without Fear

Fear is crippling. It has prevented me from doing so many things. I once heard a friend adamantly say, “I refuse to walk in fear!” Wow, how I admired that statement! What if I could do that? Not just say it? Walk without fear. I have a sense that Francis learned how to do that, to become that person. It is a grace I have yet to be given—or to receive. I fear at times that

I have populated my world with thinly clothed memories of life. Absent of real people. My saints’ pictures and Sacred Hearts decorate my room. Would that they would spring to life and speak as the San Damiano cross did.

—from the book God’s Love Song: The Vision of Francis and Clare
by Murray Bodo, OFM, and Susan Saint Sing

Franciscan Media: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/

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The Beauty of the Beatitudes

The Beauty of the Beatitudes

As Christians, the beauty of the beatitudes is that they remind us that this world is not our home. What we have in this life does not define our worth, nor does it represent anything that is lasting. The reason that Jesus says that those who are truly blessed are those who suffer (poverty, mourning, and the like) is not because he wants us to suffer; it’s because he wants us to realize that nothing in this world can ever fully satisfy. Only he can.

And so, even though suffering may appear at first to be without benefit, if it helps us depend more on God, grow in empathy, and focus us on what really matters, how can it be anything but a blessing?

—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Acting on the Beatitudes“
by Casey Cole, OFM

Franciscan Media: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/

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God Wants Our Truest Selves

God Wants Our Truest Selves

Jesus does not want masks. He does not want projections of our superficial selves that bear no resemblance to who we really are. When he calls us to follow after him, he does not want the person we wish we were or the person we pretend to be. No, when he calls us, he wants the person he created, the person we are becoming in his love, our truest selves.

If we want to follow after him, we must strip ourselves of everything that is superficial, inauthentic, forced, or pretend. We need to let go of all those partial and superficial selves. They just get in the way.

—from the book Let Go: Seven Stumbling Blocks to Christian Discipleship
by Casey Cole, OFM

Franciscan Media: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/

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God is Wild

God Is Wild

The prophets were a wild bunch. They had to be because they were the spokespeople of a wild God, a God who didn’t care much about temples and offerings but who cared a lot about the way people were treated and the opening of the human heart.  We tend to think the prophets were fortunetellers predicting the Christian future, but they were much more. They named the ever-present illusions and self-deceptions. They were non-clergy with a radical message from a God seeking intimacy, and for all their efforts, they largely got persecution and death, down to the last of the prophets, John the Baptist.

Nice religion is always threatened by the “glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). Suddenly, God is in charge instead of our explanations of things. I love to remind people that the word “nice” is never found in the Bible. God is not nice, it seems; God is wild.

—from the book From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality
by Richard Rohr

//Franciscan Media – 4/2/2024//

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How to Live “The Little Way”

Ever been discouraged by the great saints of the Church? Does all that arduous fasting, all those hours of uninterrupted prayer feel completely out of reach and unattainable? St Therese of Lisieux could relate, and so was born her “Little Way”.

Fr Columba shares his insights into her “Little Way” and how we can live it daily.