Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi

by Richard Rohr

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) wrote, “Life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward.”

The greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection. Please meditate on that.

God can save sincere people of faith inside of any system or religion, if only they can be patient, trusting, and compassionate in the presence of human misery or failure, especially their own. This is life’s essential journey. These trustful ones have surrendered to Christ, very often without needing to use the precise word “Christ” at all (Matthew 7:21). It is the doing, not the saying, that matters.

“You are who you are in the eyes of God, nothing more and nothing less,”

The three dangerous and ever-present Ps of power, prestige, and possessions were of no interest to either Francis or Clare. They both walked confidently, freely, and happily in the other direction. There was no “imitative rivalry” in either of them, which René Girard (1923–2015) declared is the basis of most human conflict and violence.

Check it out for yourself. Organized religion has paid much more attention to some things that Jesus never once mentioned (birth control, abortion, and sexual orientation) and totally ignores other things that he stated with utter clarity (“Go, sell what you have and give it to the poor” [Matthew 19:21]). I am not trying to be negative, rebellious, or clever, but rather to name the elephant in the living room that we have all agreed not to notice.

One of the most helpful pieces of advice I ever got from Francis is in the seventh chapter of our Rule, where he tells us not to be upset because of the sins or mistakes of others “because such anger or annoyance will make it difficult to be charitable.”9 His analysis is that simple, that hard, and that true, and it puts the onus all back on us. I have had to reread that quote many times.