Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi

by Richard Rohr

The visible world is an active doorway to the invisible world, and the invisible world is much larger than the visible.

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.

Creation is one giant symphony of mutual sympathy.

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. This teaching is so central that we made it the title of this book: we all must be very eager to love—every day.

In Franciscan mysticism, there is no distinction between sacred and profane. All of the world is sacred,

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.” (Don’t be scared by that!) By that he meant many people, even in his time of the 1930s, were moving beyond the scaffolding of religion to the underlying and deeper Christian experience itself.

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.

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.

The entire world is indeed sacramental and mediates the message, and yet it is hidden in such a way that only the humble and honest—and suffering—will find it.

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

Solidarity with the suffering of the world and even with the suffering of God is Francis’s starting place, and not any kind of search for private moral perfection. This keeps the contemplative journey from mere introversion, sweet piety, private salvation, or any antisocial or privatized message, whereby I imagine that I can come to God by myself apart from union with everything else.

The great irony of faith is that authentic God experience does indeed make you know you are quite special, favorite, and chosen—but you realize others are too! That is the giveaway that your experience is authentic, although it might take a while to get there.

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

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.

Integrity is often a willingness to hold the dark side of things instead of reacting against them, denying them, or projecting our anxiety elsewhere.

Jesus’s solidarity with suffering on the cross is actually an acceptance of a certain meaninglessness in the universe, its nonsensical tragic nature, a black hole that seems constantly to show itself to sensitive souls. To accept some degree of meaninglessness is our final and full act of faith that God is still good and still in control.

The final and full gift of meaning is ironically the incorporation of “no meaning” and not knowing.

To pray and actually mean “thy Kingdom come,” we must also be able to say “my kingdoms go.”

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. If you eliminate such manufactured and desired superiority, religion can finally become nonviolent in thought, word, and deed.

Fasting, detachment, and simplicity were the original words for non-addiction in the spiritual traditions.

Francis told us that we needed “to give people reasons for spiritual joy”

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 realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own. Afterward, we know in a different way, although we have to keep relearning this truth over and over again (which is probably the point of daily prayer). But it demands a major dying of our small self, our ego, and maybe that is why so few go there.

As Jesus clearly puts it, one “self” must die for another “Self” to be born; that message is quite explicit in all four Gospels (Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; Matthew 16:25; John 12:24). In the practical order, this mostly feels like taking my “self,” my ego—both its hurts and its importance, which are largely manufactured by my mind...