Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi

by Richard Rohr

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 biblical prophets, by definition, were seers and seekers of Eternal Mystery, which always seems dangerously new and heretical to old eyes and any current preoccupations with security. The prophets lived on the edge of the inside of Judaism. John the Baptist later does the same with Temple Judaism, and Paul then sharply disagrees with Peter and the new Christian establishment in Jerusalem (Galatians 2:1–14).

A celibate hermit can have a totally dualistic mind4 and live a tortured inner life—and thus torture others too. A busy journalist or housewife with a non-dual heart and mind can enlighten other individuals, their family, and all they touch, without talking “religiously” at all. Think Nelson Mandela, Mary Oliver, or Wendell Berry.

as Augustine loved to say, “In the end there will only be Christ loving himself.”

For those who have learned how to see—and adore—everything is “spiritual,” which ironically and eventually leads to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer courageously called “religionless Christianity.”

Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and an occasion for God, and is thus at the heart of religion. The Center is everywhere.

Small souls are incapable of knowing a great God, and great souls are never satisfied with a small or stingy God. You have to become conscious yourself, and then all things will be beautiful.

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.

As Henri Nouwen rightly said, the only authentic healers are always wounded healers.

the false self does not surrender without a fight to its death.3 If suffering is “whenever we are not in control” (which is my definition), then you see why some form of suffering is absolutely necessary to teach us how to live beyond the illusion of control and to give that control back to God. Then we become usable instruments, because we can share our power with God’s power (Romans 8:28).

When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world—and do not spend our lives running from necessary suffering—we will encounter various forms of “crucifixion.” Many say pain is physical discomfort, but suffering comes from our resistance, denial, and sense of injustice or wrongness about that pain.

Pain is the rent we pay for being human, it seems, but suffering is usually optional. The cross was Jesus’s voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering as an act of total solidarity with all of the pain of the world.