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

Francois Fenelon, in his book Christian Perfection, wrote: “It is a wise self-love, which wants to get out of the intoxication of outside things.” Before I can free myself from the lure of material things, I have to become more sensitive to the things of the spirit, which will diminish my chances of being dazzled by superficial allurements. More important than a new car or the fastest computer will be the latest revelation from God on how I can better love my neighbor while at the same time deflecting my own self-centered greed. Through simplicity we learn that self-denial paradoxically leads to true self-fulfillment. Simplicity allows us to hold the interests of others above out self-interest. Real simplicity is true freedom. The constant drumbeat of materialism will no longer be deafening. We will desire less, and be happy with less.

Gerry Straub, “Holy Simplicity”, Gerry Straub’s Blog

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.

In a country in which the vast majority of people believe in God, it amazes me how we have been so seduced by the power of entertainment that we no longer have the will to simply turn it off. Day in and day out we are drenched by a torrent of words. Words, words, words…but little silence for the Word to reside. We must be still in order to move into a greater union with Christ. We must give Christ our time regularly, day in, day out, coming before Him just as we are, wounded and weak. Without silence there is a deep level of our being which is not contributing to our wholeness. We are incomplete without the fruit of silence and solitude. But withdrawal from the endless possibilities for stimulation modern life offers is painful. It takes faith and hope to give God time.

Gerry Straub, “Glorifying Banality”, Gerry Straub’s Blog

I’m lucky as a Franciscan to do my Lent in a hermitage every other year. During that time, I am cut off from the news, and I’m struck on my return how I haven’t missed anything, how nothing at all was necessary to know.

~Richard Rohr, Lever and a Place to Stand: The Contemplative Stance, the Active Prayer

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).

The distracted mind is running wild with things of the world: fame, fortune, passion, possessive love, alcohol and drugs, sex, riches, and out-of-control emotions. Out of this distraction, craving and desire emerge, and the mind is disturbed. The mind is attracted by what it sees, giving birth to cravings, and subsequently the desire to satisfy those cravings. Slowly, the forces of earth become stronger than the forces of Heaven. Yet, out of our worldly desire and craving, stress and anxiety emerge, and the peace of heaven is hidden. This may all sound over-simplistic, yet out of this notion arises the understanding the saints had of the importance of detachment.

~Gerry Straub, Unplugging My Television

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

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces ‘nice’ people, not heroes.

~Dr. Peter Kreeft, via Little Portion Hermitage

The world calls for and expects from us simplicity of life, the spirit of prayer, charity towards all, especially towards the lowly and the poor, obedience and humility… Without this mark of holiness, our word will have difficulty in touching the heart of modern man. It risks being vain and sterile.

~Pope Paul VI via Little Portion Hermitage

But on the earthly plane the ascension into paradise seems to begin in just such homely acts as putting on a good face and pretending to enjoy the Christmas candy. Someone breaks a lunch date to which we’d been looking forward for weeks. Instead of showing we’re hurt, we can say, “I’d so still love to see you! When can we reschedule?” A friend inadvertently upstages our birthday party with the announcement of her pregnancy: we take a bit of a back seat and rejoice for her with the rest of the guests. That’s not dishonesty; that’s maturity. That’s refraining from making every little thing about us. That’s caring about the spiritual well-being of the other. That’s wearing the world like a loose garment.

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

A certain amazed, astonished, joyful wonder is the spiritual climate of Christmas. We are amazed to see that the birth of Jesus Christ reverses everything that our insecure and acquisitive minds think power and mightiness should mean. The Word of God, through whom all things are created, is born as one of us, born to plain parents, born away from home, born into a people and a place that were considered important by no known criterion of human civilization.

But Christmas is not only astonishing because it is an amazing and even scandalous revelation of God; Christmas also invites us to wonder because it reveals who we really are, what creation really is.

~ a minor friar: Reek of Stupefaction.

The health of our interior life rests upon our attentiveness. We need to be able to truly pay attention in order to hear the wordless voice of God that is continually drawing us into Oneness. To be attentive, we need to be awake and alert to the boundless grace of the present moment, the eternal now. Our lives have become so splintered, divided among so many responsibilities, so many demands upon our time, that most of us feel frazzled and fatigued. So much of modern technology, designed to make things easier for us, has in fact increased the things that tug for our attention. The internet, cell phones, lap-top computers, Blackberries, i-Pods, i-Pads, and the ever-expanding world of cable television all squeeze every ounce of stillness and silence out of life. Life has become a blur, a whirling dervish of enticements and anxieties. Entering into our interior life, where we can encounter the love and mercy of God, is becoming increasingly more difficult.

~Gerry Straub via his blog.

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

He was penniless, he was parentless, he was to all appearance without a trade or a plan or a hope in the world; and as he went under the frosty trees, he burst suddenly into song.

~G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi

“When I came to you,” writes St. Paul to the Corinthians, “I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Stay a while. Do not hurry by the cross on your way to Easter joy, for we know the risen Lord only through Christ and him crucified. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity. The only joy to be trusted is the joy on the far side of a broken heart; the only life to be trusted is the life on the far side of death. Stay a while, with Christ and him crucified.

~Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Life does not simply pass. It goes on into something more beautiful or more terrible, to salvation or to eternal loss. Life’s purpose and our attitude toward it must be defined by this conviction if we are believers.

~Fr. Benedict Groeschel, Arise From Darkness

But let no one suppose it possible to form true Christian virtues, and to serve God as he ought, unless he is ready in good earnest to do violence to his own inclinations, and to endure the pain of giving up all the things which pleased him, both great and small, and to which he had clung with earthly affection.

~Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat

To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.

~Hermann Hesse (via The Hammock Papers)

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“.