Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi

by Richard Rohr

“I do not want to hear any mention of the rule of St. Augustine, of St. Bernard, or of St. Benedict. The Lord has told me that he wanted to make a new fool of me.”7

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.

Yes, and

These two dropouts from thirteenth-century Assisi society found a place of structural freedom, and then inside of that also found personal, mental, and emotional freedom, although I am not sure which came first.

I call it the laboratory of contemplative practice, which rewires our inner life and actually confirms in the soul a kind of “emotional sobriety”43 plus an inner sense of divine union so we can do the needed works of justice with both peace and enduring passion.

in any of my thirteen formational years.

What Does this mean?

Scholars who have done a day-by-day study of Francis’s earliest biographies have concluded that he lived a very small part of his year in actual community.

This was shocking to those of us trained exclusively in what had become monastic community!

This was the subject of my bachelor’s t...

I am at home, and I do not need to prove myself to anybody, nor do I need to be “right,” nor do you have to agree with me.

And I must say it again: this is something you can only fall into and receive—and nothing that you can achieve, which utterly humiliates the ego, the willful, and all overachievers.

(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.)