Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi

by Richard Rohr

“No one told me what I ought to do,” and then, at the very end of his life, he says, “I have done what was mine to do, now you must do yours.”

This is a quite rare pattern in the history of formal religion, which is too often a love affair with small and comfortable traditions. Each of these game-changing people had the courage and the clarity to sort out what was perennial wisdom from what was unreal, passing, merely cultural, or even destructive, which is exactly how Jesus describes the way “a disciple of the kingdom” behaves.

Yet they slowly and fully earned the trust and admiration of their contemporaries, even though they were formally breaking most of the cultural and even ecclesiastical rules.

“Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart.”

he somehow also knew that it was the half-knowing organized Church that passed this shared mystery on to him and preserved it for future generations. He had the humility and patience to know that whatever is true is always a shared truth, and only institutions, for all their weaknesses, make this widely

Precisely because both Jesus and Francis were “conservatives,” in the true sense of the term, they conserved what was worth conserving—the core, the transformative life of the Gospel—and did not let accidentals get in the way, which are the very things false conservatives usually idolize.

Great saints are both courageous and creative; they are “yes, and” or non-dual thinkers who never get trapped in the small world of “either-or” except in the ways of love and courage, where they are indeed all or nothing.

It is ironic that you must go to the edge to find the center.

Only there were they able to live at the edges of their own lives too, not grasping at the superficial or protecting the surfaces of things, but falling into the core and center of their own souls and their own experiences.

Most of organized religion, without meaning to, has actually discouraged us from taking the mystical path by telling us almost exclusively to trust outer authority, Scripture, tradition, or various kinds of experts (what I call the “containers”)—instead of telling us the value and importance of inner experience itself (which is the “content”).

In the Franciscan worldview, separation from the world is the monastic temptation, asceticism is the temptation of the desert fathers and mothers, moralism or celibacy is the Catholic temptation, intellectualizing is the seminary temptation, privatized piety and inerrant belief is the Protestant temptation, and the most common temptation for all of us is to use belonging to the right group and practicing its proper rituals as a substitute for any personal or life-changing encounter with the Divine.

There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our blindness and lack of reverence.

Franciscan spirituality boldly puts a big exclamation point behind Jesus’s words that “The last will be first and the first will be last!” and Paul’s “When I am weak I am strong!” Upside-downness is at the heart of our message, always prompting us to look more deeply and broadly. This opens up our eyes to recognize God’s self-giving at the far edges where most of us cannot or will not see God, such as other religions, any who are defined as outsider or sinner, and even to the far edge of our seeing, toward those who are against us—our so-called enemies.

Francis wanted us to stay close to the cracks in the social fabric, and not to ensconce ourselves at the safe, even churchy, center.

“spirituality,” in itself and apart from others, without service and concrete love, often leads people to immense ego inflation and delusion. Wanting to be thought holy, special, right, safe, or on higher moral ground has a deep narcissistic appeal to the human ego. These false motivations are, ironically, the surest ways to actually avoid God—all the while using much God talk and ritualized behavior.

all-too-common reliance on mere outer authority, which so often creates very passive or very rebellious “believers” in all religions.

A spiritual leader who lacks basic human compassion has almost no power to change other people, because people intuitively know he or she does not represent the Divine or Big Truth. Such leaders have to rely upon role, laws, and enforcement powers to effect any change in others. Such change does not go deep, nor does it last. In fact, it is not really change at all.

Unless a bishop, teacher, or minister has on some level walked through suffering, failure, or humiliation, his or her words will tend to be fine but superficial, OK but harmless, heard by the ears but unable to touch the soul.

Whoever is paying our bills, and giving us security and status, determines what we can and cannot say, or even what we can or cannot think.

Self-serving institutions that give us our security, status, or identity are almost always considered “too big to fail” and are invariably beyond any honest critique for the vast majority of people.36 And thus corruption grows. The way of radical Christianity is simply to stay outside of such systems to begin with, so they cannot control your breadth of thinking, feeling, loving, and living out universal justice.

If you imagine you are better, holier, higher, more important to God than others, it is a very short step to justified arrogance or violence toward those others. In fact, it is almost inevitable. And this is why so many say that the history of low-level religion and the history of violence are the same history.

When you voluntarily agree to live simply, you do not need to get into the frenzy of work for the sake of salary or the ability to buy nonessentials or raise your social standing. You enjoy the freedom of not climbing. You might climb for others, but not just for yourself.

When you agree to live simply, you have time for spiritual and corporal works of mercy because you have renegotiated in your mind and heart your very understanding of time and its purposes. Time is not money anymore, despite the common aphorism! Time is life itself.

“He’s wild, you know!”

Gospel freedom is always a risk, and only the mature can handle it well.

You have surely wondered why some people understand spiritual things in a much more compelling way than the rest of us do. They believe the same doctrines that we do, but their faith is alive and changes both their minds and their hearts in obvious ways. Many of us think we get the “what” of a doctrine, but it does not radically change us or inspire others.

we needed “to give people reasons for spiritual joy”61 and not just quote commandments to them.

do. To be a Christian is to objectively know that we share the same identity that Jesus enjoyed as both human and divine, which is what it means to “follow” him. I, in fact, believe that this is the whole point of the Gospel and the Incarnation! (Read John 14 and 15 in their entirety, lest you think I am overstating my position, or study the early Fathers of the Eastern Church, who got this much more clearly than the Western Church.)

this mostly feels like taking my “self,” my ego—both its hurts and its importance, which are largely manufactured by my mind—less seriously day by day.

“Is it not written in your own law, ‘You are gods’?” (John 10:34). Don’t accuse me of heresy here; Jesus said that!

contemplation gives us an inner capacity to live with paradoxes and contradictions. It is a quantum leap forward in our tolerance for ambiguity, mystery, and paradox.

For Paul, the deepest level of meaning is ironically the deep, grace-activated acceptance of a certain meaninglessness! We are able to leave room for God to fill in the gaps, and even trust that God will! This new leap of logic is often called faith.

Paul knows that some will insist on law to maintain their view of order (“Jews” or “conservatives”), while others will try to use intellect to create some kind of order and meaning to their universe (“Greeks” or “liberals”). But he insists that neither of them can finally succeed, because they do not have the ability to “incorporate the negative,” which is always there.

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

Paradox held and overcome is the beginning of training in non-dual thinking or contemplation, as opposed to paradox denied, which forces us to choose only one part of any mysterious truth. Such a choice will be false because we usually choose the one that serves our small purposes.

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.

Mind you, this is a Catholic.

This is not to defeat or lessen human effort or intelligence, for its effect is exactly the opposite; the goal of the Gospel is to elevate us to full participation in the divine,

The early Franciscan friars and “Poor Clares” wanted to be Gospel practitioners instead of merely “word police,” “inspectors,” or “museum curators” as Pope Francis calls some clergy. Both Francis and Clare offered their rules as a forma vitae, or “form of life,” to use their own words. They saw orthopraxy (“correct practice”) as a necessary parallel, and maybe even precedent, to mere verbal orthodoxy (“correct teaching”) and not an optional add-on or a possible implication.

They found a way to be both very traditional and very revolutionary at the same time by emphasizing practice over theory.

paying attention to different things (nature, the poor, humility, itinerancy, the outsider, mendicancy, mission instead of shoring up the home base, and the Gospels “without gloss,” as Francis put it).

But Franciscans do not usually fight bishops or diocesan clergy; we are simply concerned with different things.

Heresy had come to be seen as merely disobedience to authority, which might well be heresy, but often is not.

Disobedience is only the primary sin when your primary concern is the maintaining of authority.

John the Baptist, Jesus himself, and Paul were all outrageously “disobedient” to their own contemporary religious authorities. How can we miss that?

But you can only see what you are told to pay attention to.

The sad result was that obedience and group loyalty became the primary virtues instead of love or compassion to the outsider.

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.

The centerpiece of those who live an alternative orthodoxy is that they must learn the rules so well that they know how to break them properly—which, of course, is not really to break them at all.

This is not disobedience but, in fact, obedience to the essence of the Gospel itself. It just looks like disobedience to novices, Catholic fundamentalists, and bishops.

the ultimate establishment figure to take a very disestablishment name!

What would be the equivalent for our prophet?