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Minute Meditation – Love and Triumph

The stigmata Francis received in his final years revealed God’s pain within his pain. The stigmata reflected God’s empathy expanding Francis’s own empathy and circle of love to include all creation. Francis’s God is not aloof or apathetic. God is embedded in the pain and joy of the world. Our calling, as Francis and Clare discovered, is to identify the pain of the least of these as God’s pain. God experiences the pain and joy of creatures, which touch the heart of our immanent and intimate God. As Bonaventure writes, God is “totally submerged in the waters from the sole of the foot to the top of the head…. [God] appeared to you as your beloved cut through with wound upon wound in order to heal you.”

Gazing on the cross, as Clare counseled the royal Agnes of Prague, is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but a personal identification with God’s pain on the cross and in every moment of human misery. Clare’s gazing upon Jesus inspired her own solidarity with the pain of the world, and the divine and human empathy toward those who suffer also encompasses the joy of experiencing Christ’s resurrection, God’s loving triumph that brings healing to all creation and invites us to be messengers of hope to those who have been crushed by suffering and injustice.

—from the book Simplicity, Spirituality, Service: The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure by Bruce G. Epperly

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – God Loves Our Imperfections

God, to me, is a mystery, but in my better moments, I feel fairly sure that God loves us in the way I am trying to love my kids. That is to say, I think God looks at us and sees the beauty of who we are, and that beauty is not a result of our being perfect. It’s a result of our being a whole, unique mess—the good and the bad together. God delights in our discolored strands—at our wild imperfections. As a father myself, I am learning to do the same.

—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Faith Unpacked: Embracing Our Imperfections“ by David Dault, PhD

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Minute Meditation – Blessed Are the Meek

Francis came to view his whole life as a prayer. As we will discover in our reflections on Francis’s “Canticle of Creatures,” prayer joins us as healing partners with all creation. In a world where everything fits together seamlessly, every thought, word, and act can bring healing and beauty to the world. All creation praises its Creator. All things find their origin and completion in God’s love.

The meek are blessed precisely because they recognize their dependence on the generosity of God and creation, and out of their dependence, the humble commit themselves to be Christ to others, claiming their vocation as God’s companions in healing the earth. The privileged become blessed in prayerfully letting go of their sense of superiority and seeing themselves as united with humanity and all creation, sharing their possessions and working for a world in which everyone has a fair chance to enjoy the fruits of this good earth.

—from the book Simplicity, Spirituality, Service: The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure by Bruce G. Epperly

//Franciscan Media//

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Minute Meditation – Radical Honesty

St. Francis knew the Psalms by heart, and those who followed him quickly did so too. They learned the Bible’s other most famous prayers and could pray them as they walked from place to place, reflecting on what God had accomplished through them in their previous location and preparing for what God might be asking from them in the next place.

Francis was as much subject to self-doubt as any of us. His motives were purified in prayer; his ego became right-sized there. His prayer was both private and public; one without the other tends to lead the person praying into some type of illusion. Instead, prayer leads us into deeper and more radical honesty while enabling us to deal with the consequences of any newfound honesty.

—from the book Peace and Good: Through the Year with Francis of Assisi by Pat McCloskey, OFM

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Minute Meditation – Treasures of the Kingdom

In recognizing his vocation to live the Gospel, Francis of Assisi knew that he could no longer identify himself with the wealthy and powerful of his day; rather, he desired to live among the minores, the poor, marginalized, and powerless and those without a voice in society.

More than anything, Francis longed to live like Jesus Christ: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). For Francis and his brothers, minority was the one thing necessary for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. Living this way, Francis conformed himself to Christ who exchanged the richness of heaven for the poverty of the earth, in order that we, becoming like Christ, could be rich with the treasures of the Kingdom.

—from the book Franciscan Field Guide: People, Places, Practices, and Prayers by Rosemary Stets, OSF

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Minute Meditation – Undressing of the Heart

When Francis stripped himself naked at Santa Maria Maggiore, he was reaching for the heart of God. The undressing of his body was merely a symbolic gesture of the undressing of his heart. Most or all of us will never have reason to do what Francis did. Perhaps, though, we can hear in this holy place the call to have the courage to undress our hearts with another and to deepen that grand mystery of intimacy that leads us into the tender heart of God and the wonder of life with him.

—from the book In the Footsteps of Francis and Clare
by Roch Niemier, OFM

//Franciscan Media//