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Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation for Saturday, 24 June 2017 : "Franciscan Spirituality: Week 3 Summary"
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Image credit: La Franceschina (detail), c. 1474, Biblioteca Augusta, Perugia, Italy. artist unknown.
"Franciscan Spirituality: Week 3"
Summary: Sunday, June 18-Friday, June 23, 2017
The Franciscan philosopher and theologian Bonaventure teaches that to really see things, we must “consider all material things in their origin, their process, and their end.” Everything comes from God, exemplifies God, and then returns to God. (Sunday)
John Duns Scotus’ idea of the univocity of being gave us a foundation for understanding the sacredness of everything and our connection with everything. We are already connected to everything—inherently, objectively, metaphysically, ontologically, and theologically. (Monday)
Francis decided to live a life focused on alleviating the needs and the suffering of others instead of a life of self-advancement. Freedom for both Jesus and Francis was purely and simply freedom from the self which is precisely freedom for the world. (Tuesday)
“If each one of us practiced Gospel simplicity, voluntary poverty, and downward mobility, like Francis, we would share the world’s resources with one another, have nothing to fear from others, and live in peace with everyone.” [John Dear] (Wednesday)
True growth in holiness is a growth in willingness to love and be loved and a surrendering of willfulness, even holy willfulness (which is still “all about me”). (Thursday)
There is a universal accessibility, invitation, and inclusivity in an authentic Franciscan spirituality. It surpasses the boundaries of religion, culture, gender, ethnicity, era, class, or any measure of worthiness or education. (Friday)
"Practice: Moving toward the Margins"
Francis and Clare found freedom living “on the edge of the inside,” moving to the bottom where the outcasts, poor, and marginalized lived. They lived differently by emphasizing alternative values and not participating in Church and society’s systems. CAC Living School alumnus, Mark Longhurst, reflected on the powerfully transformative space of “margins” in a recent Oneing article:
The spiritual practice of befriending margins is uncomfortable, terrifying, and yet contains transformative power and beauty. . . . To pay attention to margins is to pay attention to how boundary lines are constructed in our world and lives—and then to cross those boundaries. The psyche draws boundaries around what it is willing to face, so exploring unconscious desires through shadow work is a way of welcoming the Holy Spirit to our inner margins. Christian traditions have often neglected, shamed, or marginalized the physical body’s wisdom. To begin conscious re-membering of our bodies, then, is essential for integral wholeness. Today, more people are awakening to the way social systems have marginalized society’s most vulnerable populations. Prioritizing insights, friendships, and leadership from people on the margins is a way of yielding to holistic political transformation.
For contemplatives to engage margins, especially contemplatives accustomed to the comfortable, majority center, will require the heart’s nimble resilience across social space. . . . Margins are nothing less than what Richard Rohr calls “liminal space.” From the Latin limen, threshold, in liminal space we dwell before, and sometimes dive through, a doorway of transformation. As Richard writes in Adam’s Return,
Liminality is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where people can begin to think and act in genuinely new ways. It is when we are betwixt and between, have left one room but not yet entered the next room, any hiatus between stages of life, jobs, loves, or relationships. It is that graced time when we are not certain or in control, when something genuinely new can happen. [1]
. . . The present moment may be asking us, now and always, to embrace the power and wisdom of the margins—or, as writer-activist Teresa Pasquale Mateus says, to “center the margins.” For white people coming from privileged backgrounds, this may mean non-defensive, open-hearted listening to the marginalized life experiences of black and brown Americans. Once hearts are cracked open, for example, to hear the horror of African American experiences, first of slavery and lynching, and now of incarceration, the war on drugs, and gun violence, it becomes a transformative human response to affirm with weeping, prayer, solidarity, and action that black lives matter. Once hearts are cracked open to hear and honor immigrant and refugee stories, our hearts become broken at America’s long legacy of turning away or disenfranchising those who differ from the white mold. And, once hearts are broken, it ceases to become an ideology for people of privilege to stand with the marginalized. Solidarity with the different is transformed into simply a natural human response of compassion, reflecting our inherent, yet fragmented, oneness.
Gateway to Silence: I am that which I am seeking.
References:
[1] Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004), 135.
Mark Longhurst, “Transformation at the Margins,” “Transformation,” Oneing, vol. 5, no. 1 (CAC: 2017), 103-106, 108.
For Further Study:
Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis (Sounds True: 2010), CD
Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014)
Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking (CAC: 2012), CD, MP3 download
The Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Friday, 23 June 2017 - Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation: "A Franciscan Revolution"
Center for Action and Contemplation
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Image credit: La Franceschina (detail), c. 1474, Biblioteca Augusta, Perugia, Italy. artist unknown.
"Franciscan Spirituality: Week 3"
"A Franciscan Revolution"
Friday, June 23, 2017
“. . . A man like St. Francis of Assisi, for instance. What does he really mean? . . . A complete break with the pattern of history. . . . A man born out of due time. A sudden, unexplained revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity. The work he began still continues. . . . But it is not the same. The revolution is over. The revolutionaries have become conformists. The little brothers of the Little Poor Man are rattling alms boxes in the railway square or dealing in real estate to the profit of the order. [. . .] Of course, that isn’t the whole story. They teach, they preach, they do the work of God as best they know, but it is no longer a revolution, and I think we need one now.” —Morris West [1]
I hope these meditations can help reignite the Franciscan revolution, for that is what it was—and will be again. We are extremely blessed to be living in the time of a pope who most beautifully exemplifies Franciscan life (even though he is officially a Jesuit), because it is so much harder to do in our time. Pope Francis shows us that the Franciscan vision is possible at every level and in every age. Not only did he take the name Francis, but he seems so eager to proclaim both the “foolishness” and the wisdom of the Gospel to every level of society. He has the passion, love, and urgency of St. Francis himself and has moved the papacy from the palace to the streets.
I hope these reflections will help us recognize one helpful truth: There is a universal accessibility, invitation, and inclusivity in an authentic Franciscan spirituality. It surpasses the boundaries of religion, culture, gender, ethnicity, era, class, or any measure of worthiness or education. Like the Incarnation itself, the Franciscan reading of the Gospel “brings everything together, in the heavens and on the earth, behind Christ who is leading the way and in whom we are all claimed as God’s own” (Ephesians 1:10-11).
This is not an elitist journey, not a separatist or clerical journey. It is not based in asceticism or superiority but in the elements that are universally available to all humans: nature, embodiment, solidarity with the necessary cycle of both life (“attachment”) and death (“detachment”), the democracy of love, and most especially with a God “who is very near to you, in your mouth, and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:14). This is what divine grace is—always given unawares and unearned and everywhere.
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Gateway to Silence: I am that which I am seeking.
References:
[1] Morris West, The Shoes of the Fisherman (William Morrow: 1963), 270. The ellipses without brackets are from original text.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 265-267.
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Center for Action and Contemplation
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