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Franciscan Spirituality

1: What is spirituality?

The aim of this series of small articles is to offer some reflections on the spirituality of Saint Francis of Assisi. It is obvious that one saint differs from another as, for example, in the New Testament the personalities and styles of Saint Peter and Saint Paul differ markedly. We could say that they had different spiritualities. What then does the word spirituality mean? Spirituality is the way a person is attracted to the Lord and how he or she develops this attraction into a discipline of life. In St Paul it is clear that the dominant influence in his life was the vision he had on the Damascus Road. As he set out with his soldiers to persecute the Christians, the Lord appeared to him and said: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? [Acts 9:4]. Paul was overwhelmed by the thought that the Lord identifies himself with every Christian. To strike a Christian is to strike Christ. In his preaching and thinking Paul often came back to this thought. He developed a theology or spirituality based on his experience of Christians being the body of Christ and he said in 1 Corinthians 12:27: Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. Was there an experience in Francis' life that shaped how he would think of the Lord? There certainly was as is evident when we read his testament. Before he died the incident he recalled as shaping his life was his meeting with a leper. He described this incident before he died and in the following article we will see how this incident affected Francis.

2: Meeting with the leper

In his Testament Francis states that the sight of lepers made him feel sick. But one day, as he was riding outside the town of Assisi, he met a leper on the road. Face to face with the leper, Francis experienced a challenge of grace. He realized that how he reacted to the leper was how he reacted to Christ himself because in the leper he experienced the presence of the Lord Francis could easily have greeted the leper, perhaps given him money and wished him well without even getting off his horse. But Francis felt this was not enough. Instead he got off his horse and kissed the leper. In his Testament Francis said of this incident: 'What had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards I delayed a little and left the world'. To appreciate the significance of this incident we must remember that Francis was a young, educated citizen of Assisi. His father was a cloth merchant and with his father Francis had travelled to France to buy cloth. He was ambitious for glory and was popular with the youth of Assisi. We can presume that since his father was a cloth merchant Francis wore fine clothes. A leper was an exact opposite of Francis. A leper had no place in society, was not allowed to enter a town and his or her ambitions were completely thwarted by illness. Yet it was in a leper that Francis experienced the Lord and this experience became the dominant influence in his life. In the next article we can see how this experience became the basis of Francis' spirituality.

3: A spirituality of poverty

What thoughts went though Francis' mind as he remembered his meeting with the leper? Firstly, he felt a sharp embarrassment. In the leper he had experienced the presence of the Lord who is sinless, who is all perfect and is God. Yet in the leper the Lord appeared ugly, deformed and repulsive. Francis, on the other hand, was embarrassed that he, a sinful human being, was well dressed, highly regarded, popular and ambitious. Should he not then live and dress in a way that reflects more clearly how he felt before the leper? Later, Francis would say that we are what we are in the eyes of God and no more. In this way Francis began to translate his meeting with the leper into an ideal or spirituality of poverty. Secondly, he realized that since the Lord met him in the person of a leper, it was clear the Lord did not attach any importance to social status for its own sake. The leper had no social status and was not allowed to enter a town. Francis was a prominent young citizen of Assisi with an attractive future ahead of him. Francis began to feel that he should live as a person who is unimportant to society and so he gave up his position in society and took this second step towards a life of poverty. Thirdly, Francis had found where he would find true sweetness in life: 'What before had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body'. With St Paul, Francis learnt to regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord [Phil 3:8]. This was Francis' third step toward Lady Poverty.

4: Admonition 1: The Body of Christ

One way to know a person is to listen to the sort of advice he or she gives. Some people always seem to give sad advice pointing out what can go wrong. Others encourage us to be happy and look at what is bright in our lives. Saint Francis has left us twenty eight snippets of advice, known as Admonitions, so by looking at these we can see what sort of a person Francis was. It can be said first of all that he was a person who was concerned with the most important thing in life, namely, how to recognize Jesus. Francis said that when the apostles saw the Lord they saw a man like themselves and when we look at the Lord we see only sacred bread. But what the Apostles saw with their eyes was only part of the truth for the Person they saw was God. So when we look at the host during Mass we see only bread but we believe that we are looking at God. So Francis advises us: 'Let us, as we see bread and wine with our bodily eyes, see and firmly believe that they are His most holy Body and Blood living and true'. Francis left us twenty eight Admonitions like this. These Admonitions are not so much warnings as reminders and advice. It is hoped to be able to look at more of these snippets and so build up a picture of Francis. To know Francis is to know Franciscan spirituality because the aim of Franciscan spirituality is to look at life, prayer, creation, the Church and God in the way that Francis looked at these. So this writer hopes that in coming weeks more of these snippets of advice can be offered to you.

5: Reverence for priests

In the previous article I mentioned how Francis advised us to see the Lord as God in the bread of the host. But Francis also gives us advice by his actions as well as by his words. Not long before his death Francis wrote a last will or testament in which he spoke again about how he saw the Lord in the bread of the host. Francis realized that we have the Eucharist and the mass because we have priests who consecrate the host and offer mass. When Francis attended mass and looked at priests he concentrated on the presence of the Lord. He was not distracted by any sins he saw in priests because he was totally absorbed in looking for the Lord. Francis was not blind to any sins the priests might had committed. He said that when he sees any sin in them, he turns his attention to the Lord. He acted in his way 'because,' he said, 'in this world, I see nothing corporally of the most high Son of God except His most holy Body and Blood which they receive and they alone administer to others'. Today, it is all too easy for us to consider sin in priests. Sadly, the sins of some priests have received much attention in our newspapers and news programmes. This is sad and it is a severe test to our faith which, perhaps, is being tested more than was the faith of Francis. Can we say with Francis that while we are aware of the sins of priests we do not let these sins distract us from the presence of the Lord in the sacraments they give? Saint Francis did not want to live in an unreal world. He saw sin in priests but he did not let the sin blind him to the Lord present in the sacraments and in the mass. He acted in this same way with the Pope and Bishops to whom he gave obedience even when they did not understand what he felt the Lord was calling him to do. This example of Francis is a challenge to us.

6: Finding God in creation

Francis recognized the presence of Jesus in the sacrament of the Eucharist, in the mass, and he saw the role of priests in giving us this presence of the Lord. But he also found God and the Lord in other people, in the world and in animals. This is a significant element of Franciscan spirituality and it is the reason why Francis has been declared the patron saint of ecology, of the care of the earth. Francis met the Lord in a special way and personal way in the leper as he realized that how he reacted to the leper indicated how he reacted to the Lord. He found the sight of lepers quite sickening just as all people feel about embracing the cross of the Lord. But when Francis generously kissed the leper and so generously responded to Lord in the leper, he found that what had seemed bitter to him was turned into sweetness of soul and body for him. After this experience he began his religious vocation and retreated from his usual pattern of life. In a remarkable way he also found images of God in fire, water, the sun and the moon and in the whole world that God has given us. He also found a peace with wild animals. On one occasion Francis was able to talk to a wolf that had been attacking the people of the town of Gubbio. This showed that within his lifetime Francis had come close to becoming one with Christ. He was marked with the stigmata, the marks of the passion of our Lord to show that he had carried his cross to his Calvary; he showed that he had reached a state of peace in the kingdom of God. This peace was foretold long before by the prophet Isaiah, namely, that the lion would lie down with the calf in the kingdom of God [Isa 11:6].