Franciscan Quote of the Day

The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.

~ Pope Francis via The Anchoress

It was my first introduction to the application of the Gospel to something besides myself. The first understanding that as a collective group, we’re complicit in people’s sufferings because of the decisions that our government’s making with our approval, our blessing almost, even if we don’t know it. We really sort of have to be more responsible to know what the government’s doing in our name.

~Dennis Apel in an interview with Heather King posted on her blog Shirt of Flame

Francis’s emphasis on poverty and non-possession was a prophetic rejection of the nascent capitalism of the late twelfth century symbolized by the success of his own father.

Lawrence S. Cunningham, Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel of Life

Here’s how you know your life in Christ is bearing fruit:

In spite of your own suffering, loneliness, and pain, you’re welcoming. You’re warm. You’re kind (or you’re at least shooting for those things, and not just toward the people who can “do” something for you, but everyone). You’re in immediate, intimate contact with a few active drunks, someone who’s headed into or has just emerged from a psych ward, an incarcerated felon or two, several porn addicts, a young girl who’s pregnant out of wedlock, several women who have had abortions and are in silent, excruciating mourning, at least one stripper, several people in desperately unhappy marriages, about to be evicted from their apartments, or dying, a minimum-wage worker or two, at least three people who are certifiably insane, at least one U.S. Army chaplain and one peace activist (even better if they’re both priests and the latter is in solitary confinement in a federal prison), several homeless people (the more the better) and a whole TON of gay people, transgender folks, and sex and love addicts of all stripes…

If that’s not part of your circle–in my case, that IS my circle–you’re not getting out enough. If you aren’t sharing your struggles and heart with that circle, at the very least in prayer, something is wrong. Because those are the people Christ hung out with. Because “those people” are us: the people, the only people, suffering, struggling humans. Because if we’re going to be inviting people to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience, we sure as hell better be inviting each other into our homes, our tables, our hemorrhaging, conflicted hearts.

If you’re afraid all that is going to “lower your standards,” you’re very much mistaken. There’s no lower standard than self-righteous fear.

Heather King, Shirt of Flame, The Homily I’d Give if I were a Priest

It was because Francis saw the humility and poverty of Christ, this pattern of living without grasping, so clearly expressed in the Eucharist that he had such a great veneration of it and urged his brothers to hold it in the same veneration. The Eucharist was, if you like, the symbol of so much of what he held to be at the heart of the Gospel. And the Eucharist lies at the heart of Franciscan spirituality still for the same reasons. It puts us in touch with the living Christ as nothing else can do. In the Eucharist we see expressed Christ’s pattern of living through dying, a pattern that we are also called to make our own. And as we do that we are following Christ after the example of St Francis in a particularly powerful way.

~Gordon Plumb, St. Francis of Assisi and Eucharistic Adoration

The Latin words sine proprio in the writings of Francis are usually translated poverty, but that is a quite inadequate translation of them. They refer, rather, to a way of living without grasping (and are thus far more about attitudes and values than about intrinsic wealth or the lack of it).

For Francis the Eucharist is a sign of the sine proprio of Christ – he holds nothing of himself back for himself, but pours himself out totally in saving and redeeming grace to us in the Sacrament. And yet the Sacrament is also the means by which we may return all that we are and have to Christ, appropriating nothing of it to ourselves.

~Gordon Plumb, St. Francis of Assisi and Eucharistic Adoration

Our obsession with money kills culture. It is the Ultimate Abstraction, a demon that seeks to devour every authentic act of human experience. Anything simply done has the capacity to be done not for itself, but for money.

If authenticity is marketed, sold and negated into fashion, culture is impossible. If the authentic actions of a community are deemed “trends” and manipulated to serve the pockets of the powers, they are stripped of their human value and cannot become all that we envy when we fly to poorer countries and take pictures of their dances, their markets, their food and their joy. What’s needed is a belief in things that can’t be sold.

~Marc Barnes, Money, Death of Culture

The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him. It is the only way we have of knowing and believing in our love. The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.

~Dorothy Day, The Mystery of the Poor

If the poor die of hunger, it is not because God does not care for them. Rather, it is because neither you nor I are generous enough. It is because we are not instruments of love in the hands of God. We do not recognize Christ when once again He appears to us in the hungry man, the lonely woman, in the child who is looking for a place to get warm.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta via Chris Dickson

But as Day, whom I’d long admired, well knew, true poverty is never, ever voluntary. Poverty consists precisely in all the ways you absolutely don’t want to be poor. Poverty consists in a long succession of events not going your way. Poverty consists in being stripped down to nothingness.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

He said: “If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.” That sentence is the clue to the whole policy that he pursued.

~G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi

In the little parlour of the Convent, Hercule Poirot told his story and restored the chalice to the Mother Superior.

She murmured: “Tell him we thank him and we will pray for him.”

Hercule Poirot said gently: “He needs your prayers.”

“Is he then an unhappy man?”

Poirot said: “So unhappy that he has forgotten what happiness means. So unhappy that he does not know he is unhappy.”

The nun said softly: “Ah, a rich man . . . ”

Hercule Poirot said nothing—for he knew there was nothing to say.

Agatha Christie, “The Apples of the Hesperides” via First Thoughts

Christ roams through our streets in the person of so many of the suffering poor, sick and dispossessed, and people thrown out of their miserable slums; Christ huddled under bridges, in the person of so many children who lack someone to call father, who have been deprived for many years without a mother’s kiss on their foreheads … Christ is without a home! Shouldn’t we want to give him one, those of us who have the joy of a comfortable home, plenty of good food, the means to educate and assure the future of our children? “What you do to the least of me, you do to me,” Jesus said.

~St. Alberto Hurtado, S.J.

As a Franciscan my home is everywhere, but also nowhere in this world. It’s a gospel challenge, but it’s also a gospel freedom.

~Brother Charles, “First Spanish Mass“.

We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.

~Tim Jackson, Prof. Of Sustainable Development, University of Surrey as quoted on the blog Wrestling with Angels…

What good am I if I’m like all the rest
If I just turn away, when I see how you’re dressed
If I shut myself off so I can’t hear you cry
What good am I?

What good am I if I say foolish things
And I laugh in the face of what sorrow brings
And I just turn my back while you silently die
What good am I?

~Bob Dylan, from “What Good Am I?“

This attitude of soul towards poverty is in truth the supreme test of the genuine Franciscan spirit whether in life or in art.

~Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C., “St. Francis and Poverty” from Franciscan Essays

He would tell his sons that she was the way of perfection, the pledge and earnest of eternal riches. No one was so greedy of gold as he of poverty; no one more careful in guarding a treasure than he in guarding this pearl of the Gospel.

~Thomas of Celano, The Second Life of St. Francis of Assisi

He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. And it is precisely the positive and passionate quality of this part of his personality that is a challenge to the modern mind in the whole problem of the pursuit of pleasure. There undeniably is the historical fact; and there attached to it is another moral fact almost as undeniable. It is certain that he held on this heroic or unnatural course from the moment when he went forth in his hair-shirt into the winter woods to the moment when he desired even in his death agony to lie bare upon the bare ground, to prove that he had and that he was nothing. And we can say, with almost as deep a certainty, that the stars which passed above that gaunt and wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once, in all their shining cycles round the world of labouring humanity, looked down upon a happy man.

~G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi

The man who is filled with the Holy Spirit speaks in different languages. These different languages are different ways of witnessing to Christ, such as humility, poverty, patience, and obedience; we speak in those languages when we reveal in ourselves these virtues to others.

~St. Anthony (via Beauty for Ashes)