Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi

by Richard Rohr

The compassionate holding of essential meaninglessness or tragedy, as Jesus does in hanging on the cross, is the final and triumphant resolution of all the dualisms and dichotomies

Only God’s Spirit-with-us can fully forgive, accept, and allow reality to be what it is.

In practical terms, this means that we all must learn to offer life a foundational yes before we offer our critical no. If we start with no, it is almost impossible to ever get back to a full yes.

contemplative mind, the wisdom way, the nondual mystic thus has no need to either play the victim or create

victims.

farm, you are God’s building…. God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Corinthians 3:9, 17). Such inherent dignity only sharpens and grounds our use of our God-given mind.

“The soul itself is an image of God, to which God is so present that the soul can actually grasp God, and ‘is capable of possessing God and of being a partaker in God.’”10 With that we can move forward. In fact, we can move far and wide and confidently forward.

revolutionary thinking for most Christians, although it is the very “marrow of the Gospel,”4 to use Francis’ own phrase, because he knew what many educators have now proven—that humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living. The lecture method changes very few people at any deep or long-lasting level. It normally does not touch the unconscious, where all our hurts and motives lie hidden and disguised.

How can Franciscanism be an alternative and still be called orthodox? But “heterodoxy” is precisely a third something in between orthodoxy and

History has shown that a rather large percentage of Christians never get to the practical implications of their beliefs. “Why aren’t you doing what you say you believe?” the prophet invariably asks.

John the Baptist, Jesus himself, and Paul were all

outrageously disobedient to their own contemporary religious authorities. How can we miss that?

Nevertheless, it is not wise to fight any large institution or cultural consensus directly because you will seldom win, and you will often become negative and oppositional in the process—and sometimes proud as well. Every reaction elicits an equal and opposite reaction, as the law of physics tells us. We are better when we just do what we know we must do and then be willing to pay the price if we are wrong or accused of being wrong.

Francis’ and Clare’s approach has been called a “performative spirituality,” which means that things are only found to be true in the doing of them.

After the printing press, words became more important than actual experience.

the mainstream thought. In that clear sense, Franciscanism has invariably been heterodox, but we usually kept that quiet, knew its wisdom from the inside, and went about our business.

real or tested unless we somehow live close to the disadvantaged (the method), who remind us about what is important.

Good Franciscan spirituality always seeks to maintain three freedoms all at once:

Freedom is not a bad word in Franciscan spirituality, as long as

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the “integration of the negative.”

some therapists call this pattern “embracing our shadow,” which makes it into a “golden shadow” in its gifts to us. Such surrendering of superiority, or even a need for such superiority, is central to any authentic enlightenment. Without it,

think that honesty about ourselves and all of reality is the way that God made grace totally free and universally available, because we all find our lives eventually dragged into opposition, problems, “the negative” (sin, failure, betrayal, gossip, fear, hurt, disease, etc.), and

especially the ultimate negation: death itself. Good spirituality should utterly prepare us for that instead of teaching us high-level denial or pretense.

he tells us not to be upset because of the sins or mistakes of others “because such anger or annoyance will

“If you are guided by the Spirit, you are not under the law” (Galatians 5:18). I know such a line must be scary because it feels as if there are no guidelines now (I would be called a heretic if I wrote this without quoting Paul). Until we discover the “little way,” we almost all try to gain moral high ground by obeying laws and thinking we are thus spiritually advanced. Yet,

Thérèse wrote, “It is enough to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself, like a child, into God’s arms.”15

We will practically experience this as a growth in willingness and a surrendering of willfulness. This is another aspect of incorporating the negative, which then ends up not being negative at all but just a positive appreciation for what is.

Francis cannot be written off as a merely soft and sweet figure. Looking clearly at his actual life and practice shows how he was deliberately and consciously undercutting the entire honor/shame system on which so much of culture, violence, false self-esteem, and even many of the

ministrations of church totally depend.17 Doing anything and everything purely for God is certainly the most purifying plan for happiness I can imagine. It changes the entire nature of human interaction and eliminates most conflict.

originally integrating the feminine element into a very patriarchal and overly masculinized Roman Church, also into a somewhat harsh male spirituality of the desert, and even into an overscheduled spirituality in the monasteries.

on my observation and study, in these general ways.4 The feminine principle has greater interest in the inner; the soul; the formless, deeper feeling; intuition; connections; harmony; beauty; and relationality in general. It is more identified with lunar subtlety and not the over-differentiating light of the masculine sun god or the literalism and linearity of the left brain. Not all women fully identify with the feminine principle, of course, and some men do, but these descriptors give you a sense of what I mean by the feminine. Carl Jung (1875–1961) called it a more “diffused awareness,” both for good and for ill.

Leonardo Boff’s St. Francis: A Model for Human Liberation.

We might call Sartre and much Western philosophy “excarnational,” whereas Francis was fully and happily incarnational through his falling in love with Jesus and all of creation. (Psychologically speaking, for a heterosexual male to fall in ecstatic love with Jesus, he must be in touch with his feminine soul.)

Incarnation is not a “liberal” idea, but one mirrored in the whole universe.6 Note the simplicity and utter clarity of the way the Jewish Jesus uses common metaphors like red sky, donkey in a ditch, lily in the field, and hen and chicks, as well as parabolic storytelling, to make major theological points.

How did we lose such commonsense wisdom? It is sad indeed that this teaching about intuition and timing has not been more studied and honored so that our people were allowed to feel their way toward God. It seems we have too often favored the mind over the heart, the rational over the intuitive, or, if you will, the masculine over the feminine.

This preference for control over relationship ends up making dominative power the primary response to most problems of life, as we saw, for example, in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the conquest of the Americas, Christian support for almost all wars, and clergy sexual abuse (and the bishops’ response to it). This seems to be what happens in every culture when the feminine principle is not introduced, honored, and incorporated. The only known example of Jesus’ use of dominative power is against the religious and economic

structure of the Temple itself, when he symbolically “cleanses” it (see Matthew 21:12–13),

which itself reveals his preference for people and animals over structures, most especially self-...

By patriarchy (“the rule of the fathers”), I mean when any group or individual operates in

Eating was a social event that included and created community for both Jesus and Francis, and there is no indication it was ever a reward for good behavior or an attempt to give a group its separate or superior identity.

Fromm wrote of matriarchy as more characteristic of humble and unpretentious people. It

building on the foundational metaphors that we were created in both the image and the likeness of God (Genesis 1:26).

a pantheist (“all things are God—and I am too”),

to find inner quiet or emotional freedom from themselves.

A SPIRITUALITY FOR ALL Clare

little child.”

The only difference today is that there are people like you reading this kind of a book and hopefully allowing it to stir your heart, awaken your mind, and give firm steps to your feet. This is not just the higher consciousness of Francis of Assisi; it is actually conscience itself.

He is probably an exemplary Franciscan mystic because he so effectively pulled his brilliant head down into his fiery heart, and he integrated contemplation with an extremely active life, as we see in one of his more oft-quoted verses, all the more amazing because he was such an intellectual:

He started very simply: “Unless we are able to view things in terms of how they originate, how they are to return to their end, and how God shines forth in them, we will not be able to understand.”4 For Bonaventure, the perfection of God and God’s creation is quite simply a full circle, and, to be perfect, the circle must and will complete itself. He knew that Alpha and Omega are finally the same, and the linchpin holding it all in unity is the Christ Mystery,

or the essential unity of matter and spirit, humanity and divinity.