Category: Meditations

Daily meditations to provide inspiration

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Minute Meditation – The Touch of Jesus

The touch of Jesus. How it burned! And how sweet the sensation of this love in its searing penetration. Francis lay upon the cold ground of his hut at St. Mary of the Angels and felt nothing but the touch of Jesus in his feet and hands and side.

He would die with the brothers witnessing the way a traveler with Jesus dies. Poor. Broken in body. Radiant in the light of the Spirit glowing from his eyes and from the marks of Jesus’ touch. And the peace of his departing would seal the genuineness of their own vocations as Lesser Brothers of the Lord.

To be real at the end. In that the brothers would be sure they were also authentically on the road with Jesus. They need only persevere as Francis had and Christ Himself would touch them with his perfect Peace.

He looked around the hut and prayed for everyone he saw dimly standing above him and for the Lady Clare and her sisters. The Dream was theirs, the Journey lay before them.

—from the book Francis: The Journey and the Dream
by Murray Bodo, OFM

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Bridges of Love

Compassion requires a depth of soul, a connectedness of soul to earth, an earthiness of person to person, and a flow of love from heart to heart. To evolve toward the fullness of Christ we must be able to love the weak, the unlovable, the fragile, and lame. The Body of Christ becomes one when we ourselves create bridges of love. The compassionate person walks across the bridge into the life of another saying along the way, “you are not alone, I am with you.”

—from the book Compassion: Living in the Spirit of St. Francis
by Ilia Delio, OSF

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Minute Meditation – Love Changes Us

Love changes the way we know things. Love is not blind affection or mere satisfaction. Rather, love is the highest good that seeks and desires the highest good in another. To love is to know the good in another without questioning the good of the other or trying to understand the good of the other. The wise person is one whose knowledge is shaped by love and who sees the world through the eyes of love. Such a person lives from a deeper center within. Rooted in the heart, the wise person is rooted in the world and sees the world in its truth and beauty.

One sees from the center of the beloved; thus one sees the world unafraid of the vision. The wise person is one who has the freedom to remain empty in the face of encounter and to allow the experience of encountering the new, whether a new person, creature or idea, to enter one’s life and change one’s capacity to love.

—from the book Compassion: Living in the Spirit of St. Francis
by Ilia Delio, OSF

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Minute Meditation – The Hiding Place for God’s Spirit

Our outer world and its inner significance must come together for there to be any wholeness—and holiness. The result is both deep joy and a resounding sense of coherent beauty. What was personified in the body of Jesus was a manifestation of this one universal truth: Matter is, and has always been, the hiding place for Spirit, forever offering itself to be discovered anew. Francis and Clare carried this mystery to its full and lovely conclusions. Or, more rightly, they were fully carried by it. They somehow knew that the beyond was not really beyond, but in the depths of here.

—from the book Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi
by Richard Rohr, OFM

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Ready to Make Things New

Francis of Assisi was a master of making room for the new and letting go of that which was tired or empty. As his first biographer said, “He was always new, always fresh, always beginning again.” Much of Francis’s genius was that he was ready for absolute “newness” from God, and therefore could also trust fresh and new attitudes in himself. His God was not tired, and so he was never tired. His God was not old, so Francis remained forever young.

—from the book Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi 

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Let God be God

Let God be the God of your life; let go of all the things you think you need to be or of the things you think you need to do. Stop trying to control your life and your destiny and allow yourself to be loved by God who accepts you as you are, in your truest self, and desires you as you are, with all your fragile limits. This God of compassionate love is closer to you than you are to yourself. God knows your pain and your sufferings: God is the compassionate One.

—from the book Compassion: Living in the Spirit of St. Francis
by Ilia Delio, OSF

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – A Journey of Decisions

In the long days and longer nights before the Dream came true, Francis wondered if the Journey he had set upon would really bring him to his destination. When he was a boy, every trip he took out beyond the walls of Assisi brought him to some place where he could say, “I’m here in this place; I have arrived.” But this Journey was different. It pointed to the very roots of Christ’s own life. Its end was somewhere in the real meaning of Jesus’ words. It was a trip backward to the literal gospel life and forward into the Kingdom and inward to the heart where dwelled the Trinity. And you could never say, “I have arrived.” It was a Journey of decisions as radical as the gospel itself. At every fork in the road, there was a narrow, difficult way and a wide, easy way to travel. And Francis was continually surprised with the paradoxical joy that the harder road would bring, time after time. Still, at every road the easier way attracted him with almost hypnotic persuasion.

—from the book Francis: The Journey and the Dream
by Murray Bodo, OFM, page

//Franciscan Media//