Franciscan Quote of the Day

The lives and writings of the Franciscan men and women in this volume demonstrate the adaptability of Francis’s vision across cultures and throughout history. Each entry underscores the poverty at the crystal center of Francis’s spirituality. If nothing material matters, then only the immaterial—the spirit living within each and every one of us—is what must be most revered and reverenced. Then and only then will the promise of Franciscan spirituality—universal brotherhood and peace—be recognized and received.

~ Regis Armstrong, The Franciscan Tradition (Spirituality in History)

Is an active prayer life important to proper formation as a Secular Franciscan? No, it is not important … it is critical! Without a purposeful and active prayer life the material used for formation becomes only a collection of trivia about St Francis of Assisi.  Being formed as a Secular Franciscan only happens when we put our heart and soul into progressing in Franciscan Spirituality, and this only can happen by willfully developing a serious prayer life.

~Secular Franciscan – E Journal

That is Francis’ formula for peace: You have to come out from behind your defenses and risk embracing what is seemingly repulsive and dangerous. Only then will there be peace, and only love can make it happen. For Francis peace is inseparable from peace of soul, and neither can be achieved without the risk of loving your supposed or real enemies.

~Murray Bodo, O.F.M. — The Way of St. Francis: The Challenge of Franciscan Spirituality for Everyone

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

In choosing “failure” from the outset, Francis frees himself from the enormous burden of the opinion of others. Beginning with his own father, he rejects knowing who he is only through others. He becomes a free man, a man whose identity comes from God.

~Murray Bodo, O.F.M. — The Way of St. Francis: The Challenge of Franciscan Spirituality for Everyone

Who we become in God is then his work and not our own success in conforming to some ideal. The self we become in true prayer is seldom the self we envisioned, but it is a new and marvelous self that God fashions out of the gradual redeeming of the false self we now acknowledge as the work of our own misguided idealism. We then know God in what he has done in us to enable us to discover our true face. And in that face only do we see the reflection of God as he really is.

~Murray Bodo, O.F.M. — The Way of St. Francis: The Challenge of Franciscan Spirituality for Everyone

We commune with God as we honestly are and not as we would like to be. The idealized self is always dying in prayer, because it cannot bear the truth. And if we let it die and pray from who we are becoming, then our image of God changes as we understand more clearly who we are.

~Murray Bodo, O.F.M. — The Way of St. Francis: The Challenge of Franciscan Spirituality for Everyone

It is when we attribute to ourselves and try to hold onto what is in reality God’s gift that we are of the flesh, appropriators who violate holy poverty.

~Murray Bodo, O.F.M. — The Way of St. Francis: The Challenge of Franciscan Spirituality for Everyone