Franciscan Quote of the Day

We will know God to the extent that we are set free from ourselves.

~Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI via Little Portion Hermitage.

The most certain way of obtaining any grace from God is holy indifference and a complete resignation to His most holy will.

~St Joseph of Cupertino, O.F.M. Conv.

The mission that Jesus gives us to make disciples of all nations involves risk, labor, and maybe even discomfort. But the mission is not good because it’s hard; it’s hard because it’s good, and we are not! We need Jesus to pull us out of our internal reveries, our selfishness, our self-referentiality; and we need to allow ourselves to be drawn, to be transformed by the beauty of his face. And then we are free to meet our fellow men, as they are and where they are. And that encounter, too, may change us.

Br. Gabriel Torretta, O.P., Pope Francis and Egotistic Adoration

God will be loved as God; that is to say, with fear, without reserve, in preference to all creatures, and without exception. He will not accept a divided heart, for unless the creature be loved in and for Him, it is like offering Him what the creature has left.

~St. Bernard of Corleone, O.F.M. Cap.

When we decide that we want to live life God’s way instead of our way, we are going to have to give up our way and trust that God’s way is better. I have often quoted my spiritual director, who has said to me repeatedly that the theme song of those in hell is, “I did it my way.”

~Fr. Larry Richards, Surrender! The Life Changing Power of Doing God’s Will

There are no real personalities apart from God. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most ‘natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerers have been; how gloriously different are the saints. But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality; but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him…Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

~C.S. Lewis via Little Portion Hermitage.

If we exalt money, status, or sex above the Word of God, we are living in idolatry. Every time we inwardly submit to the strongholds of fear, bitterness, and pride, we are bowing to the rulers of darkness. Each of these idols must be smashed, splintered, and obliterated from the landscape of our hearts.

~ Francis Frangipane via Flowing Faith

The state of spacious heart openness is known in spiritual traditions as surrender. Not what you usually think about when you hear the word “surrender,” is it? We usually equate the word with capitulation and consider it a sign of weakness. But surrender, spiritually understood, has nothing to do with outer capitulation, with rolling over and playing dead. It has to do with keeping the right alignment inwardly that allows you to stay in the flow of your deeper sustaining wisdom—to “feel the force,” in those legendary words from the first Star Wars movie. In that state of openness you then decide what you’re going to do about the outer situation. whatever you do, whether you acquiesce or vigorously resist, your actions will be clear. 

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus via The Mercy Blog

A subjective quest for emotional fulfillment subverts Christian worship by focusing on how worship makes a person feel, and by encouraging worship schemes that arise from individual self-expression rather than the lived history of the people of God down through the ages. “Man fully alive” is at the heart of that most baneful of cultural deviations, the circus act known as “the contemporary worship service.”

~ Patrick Henry Reardon, “The Man Alive” (Touchstone Archives).

If you are what you are meant to be, you will set the world on fire.

~St. Catherine of Siena

Day in and day out, both when convenient and inconvenient, in good times and in bad – the Professed Secular Franciscan is to place him/herself at God’s disposal.

~Fr. Richard Trezza, O.F.M., For Up to Now: Foundation Topics for Initial Formation, “Profession and the Secular Franciscan: Theological and Liturgical Foundations”

As I was reminded by a wise religious sister of the Servants of God’s Presence, the sisters of Heart’s Home, there is a difference between action and activism. A true action is one done through, with, in, and for God—one that is filled with meaning, purpose, and God’s grace. Activism on the other hand is the temptation to do things just to do them, to do things for myself so that I’ll feel competent, important, in control. How easy it is to cross that line! Even the truest, purest action is plagued by the human tendency to fall into activism.

~Katherine Infantine, First Thoughts | A First Things Blog

City of Man and the City of God intermingle. We have obligations to each. But our final home and our real citizenship are not in this world. Politics is important, but it’s never the main focus or purpose of a Christian life. If we do not know and love Jesus Christ, and commit our lives to him, and act on what we claim to believe, everything else is empty.

~Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America

As if to take St. Paul’s reflection to heart, Francis identified human foolishness, what appeared to be stupid in the eyes of the world, to be acceptable and perhaps unavoidable if one was to really follow Christ. Love of enemies, forgiveness of sins, embracing the poor, and shirking the lure of personal gain all appear counterintuitive to those who are concerned with things described in the language of the possible. Yet, Francis was not so interested in what at first appeared logical and sensible; he instead made it his business to follow the Gospel, which is expressed in the poetic language of the Kingdom of God where the first will be last, where the sinful will be forgiven, and where the dead will be raised.

~Francis of Assisi and the Future of Faith by Daniel Horan OFM

At every moment God’s will produces what is needful for the task in hand, and the simple soul, instructed by faith, finds everything as it should be and wants neither more nor less than what it has.

~Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence

I wonder whether, when the desire for Christ burns bright enough and hard enough, loneliness isn’t the inevitable ash. I wonder whether to follow a Savior who subverts all power systems—social, political, economic, even familial—does not lead us into a kind of necessary and terrible exile.

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

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving You.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, You, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love —a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek—
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now You have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything You are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless You as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

via Ragamuffin Ramblings…

He may say (what means very little) that St. Francis was in advance of his age. He may say (what is quite true) that St. Francis anticipated all that is most liberal and sympathetic in the modern mood; the love of nature; the love of animals; the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual dangers of prosperity and even of property.

~G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

Christ did not appoint professors, but followers. If Christianity … is not reduplicated in the life of the person expounding it, then he does not expound Christianity, for Christianity is a message about living and can only be expounded by being realized in men’s lives.

~Soren Kierkegaard,via OH……….. FRANCESCO

This movement from the immature, fretful craving to have things the way we want them, to the way that is patient, cheerful, nonobtrusive, and oriented toward others, is a true death: the death of our egos, the death of our identities as people who respond—can only respond—a certain way. Grace is needed, to be sure, but preparing the ground for continuing grace requires prayer, meditation, and consenting to the long, hard work of pruning our will in such a way that we are open to maturity.

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