Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi

by Richard Rohr

Notes

As Søren Kierkegaard said, “We live life forward, but we understand it backward.”

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. They then ended up looking quite “progressive,” radical, and even dangerous to the status quo. This is, of course, the constant and consistent biblical pattern, from Abraham to Moses, to Jeremiah, to Job, to John the Baptist, to Mary and Joseph. With courage and wisdom great seers invariably end up saying something exactly like Jesus did: “The law says, and I also say…” (Matthew 5:20–48).

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.

The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

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 is no secret moral command for knowing or pleasing God, or what some call “salvation,” beyond becoming a loving person in mind, heart, body, and soul yourself. Then you will see what you need to see.

Our job as humans is to make admiration of others and adoration of God fully conscious and deliberate.

You either are baptized “into his death” and “resurrection” (Romans 6:3; Philippians 3:10–12), or Christianity is largely a mere belonging system, not a transformational system that will change the world.

humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.

It often seems that where Jesus is truly dualistic, we refuse to be, and where Jesus was very unclear or never spoke, we have arrived at absolutely certain conclusions!

Conservative Catholics love to think that the Church is semper eadem, “always the same.” A true knowledge of history shows that is not at all the case, and, in fact, quite the opposite.

Probably Francis’s entire attitude toward enemies, and therefore toward Islam, is best summarized in chapter twenty-two of his first Rule, which some scholars now think was his closing address to the chapter of friars before he left for Egypt, since he thought he would probably never return. He may have thought it would be his final testament to them. It surely sums up his own attitude, which frankly is at a very high level of non-dual consciousness. And, as with Jesus himself, most of us either-or thinkers might just glaze over this quote in disbelief, doubting that anyone could really say it and mean it: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. Our Lord Jesus Christ himself, in whose footsteps we must follow, called the man who betrayed him his friend, and gave himself up of his own accord to his executioners. Therefore, our friends are those who for no reason cause us trouble and suffering, shame or injury, pain or torture, even martyrdom or death. It is these we must love, and love very much, because they give us eternal life.

Josef Pieper, a Thomist scholar himself, rightly said that “The proper habitat for truth is human relationships.”

If Scotus’s understanding of the “how” and meaning of redemption (his “atonement theory”) had been taught, we would have had a much more positive understanding of Jesus, and even more of God the Father. Christian people have paid a huge price for what theologians after Anselm called “substitutionary atonement theory”: the idea that, before God could love his creation, God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for a sin-drenched humanity. Please think about the impossible, shackled, and even petty God that such a theory implies and

We were “chosen in Christ before the world was made,” as Paul says in Ephesians (1:4). Sin or problems could not be the motive for divine incarnation, but only perfect love!

Basically when you lose the understanding of God’s perfect and absolute freedom and eagerness to love, which Scotus insisted on, humanity is relegated to the world of counting!

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.

Alfred North Whitehead, however, put it somewhat unkindly: “Modern religion has tended to degenerate into a decent formula whereby people can embellish an otherwise comfortable

Mature religion serves as a conveyor belt for the evolution of human consciousness. Immature religion actually stalls us at very low levels of well-disguised egocentricity, by fooling us into thinking we are more moral, holy, or evolved than we really are.

Literalism is a well-hidden form of rationalism, and a severe limit on God’s possibilities and freedom for creative action.

Immature Christianity is primarily responsible for the vast agnosticism we now see in the Western world