Franciscan Quote of the Day

Franciscan prayer is not an escape from the world but an entrance into it. We become conscious in prayer of how much the world is with us and we are in the world.

~Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

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

Those brothers to whom the Lord has given the grace of working may work faithfully and devotedly so that, while avoiding idleness, the enemy of the soul, they do not extinguish the Spirit of holy prayer and devotion to which all temporal things must contribute.

~St. Francis of Assisi, The Later Rule

The Good News of Jesus Christ, as the Franciscans understood it, is that we do not “go to God” as if God sat in the starry heavens awaiting our arrival; rather, God has “come to us” in the Incarnation. “The eternal God has humbly bent down,” Bonaventure wrote, “and lifted the dust of our nature into unity with his own person.” We move toward God because God has first moved toward us—this is the Franciscan path of prayer.

~Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer

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

No, no I never expected that there is a short-cut that bypasses the drudgery of human experience. I don’t want one, I want to drink to the chalice of my Lord. In my case (and isn’t this the common, ordinary state?) how non-glamorous, how ignoble this chalice! What does it amount to me with me? A sense of inner fragility and faintness which taps, knocks at the wall of my body too. I seem unable to face up to any pressure. I feel faced with an immense ‘trial’ utterly beyond myself, and yet when I look, where is the trial? What have I to suffer compared to so many people? I have good health, am surrounded with love, have everything I need, and yet life itself seems more than I can bear—the unutterable loneliness and emptiness, the mystery and obscurity. Yesterday, I heard of a poor woman enduring humiliating helplessness for ten years, and now, faced with new symptoms, her splendid spirit is breaking and she can take no more. Just one of millions similarly suffering from seemingly unbearable afflictions. And what relation has my life to hers? By comparison I have nothing to suffer. It is my hope that this ‘suffering’ of mine which is nameless, which really has no right to be called suffering, this inner ‘dissolution’ should be a way through which Jesus comes to others in grief and pain. I feel overwhelmed with everything: with the beauty of the world, with its terrible pain, with its evil and ugliness, the devilish brutality of man to man–with the word of God so mighty and so obscure. I could weep my eyes out with–I don’t know what! Oh, how fragile I am, without achievement; no human victory, no human beauty, only that which is he, who experienced in all its raw bitterness the human condition.

~Carmelite Ruth Burrows quoting a friend named Petra in Guidelines for Mystical Prayer via Heather King’s fantastic blog Shirt of Flame.

If you ever want to be holy, to know God, to live His will, then the number one thing that you are going to have to do is pray. PERIOD! Nothing else matters.

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

Every year God offers us this great season of humility as a chance to remember who we are as believers, reflect soberly on our actions and refocus ourselves on the source of our hope, the only real hope of a bloody and despairing world:  Jesus Christ.  We do this through prayer, silence, the sacrament of penance, seeking out and reconciling with those whom we’ve hurt, forgiving those who’ve hurt us, generosity to the poor, and fasting, not just from food, but from all those many things that distract us from the God who made and loves us.

~Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M.Cap., Preparing for the journey of Lent, 2013 via Catholic Philly

The invitation to follow Christ which Francis heard during Mass became for him a life-long commitment which would be translated into concrete gestures, like that of leaving behind him all things which would hinder him from being an itinerant disciple of the Lord. It was a question of seeing the celebration of Mass not only as a moment of  prayer or mystical union with the Lord, but also as an invitation to act, which is born out of the Word proclaimed and believed during the celebration of Mass. Here we find the novitas, the newness, of Saint Francis, who inaugurates a new way of religious life in the Church, namely that of the apostolica vivendi forma. It was a new way which was born during the celebration of Mass in a wayside chapel, and after listening to the explanation of the Gospel from the mouth of an impoverished priest of this world.

~Noel Muscat O.F.M., Look at the Humility of God: The Eucharist in the Writings and the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi via website of the Five Franciscan Martyrs Region

If you cannot go into the desert, you must nonetheless ‘make some desert’ in your life, every now and then leaving men and looking for solitude to restore, in prolonged silence and prayer, the stuff of your soul. This is the meaning of ‘desert’ in your spiritual life. One has to be courageous not to let oneself be carried along by the world’s march; one needs faith and willpower to go cross-current towards the Eucharist, to stop, to be silent, to worship.

~Carlo Carretto, Letters from the Desert via Gerry Straub’s Blog.

It really is a curse to be afflicted with pride. Because your chief sin is the very obstacle to understanding how much you require God’s aid. It’s a blockade. If my own opinion and way of viewing the world is always correct, if my own personal prayers are always superior to the prayers of the church, then how will I reorient myself to the reality that God is the authority of my life? I am not the authority on my life. I am not even the authority on my emotions. Could I even put into words what I’m feeling one minute to the next? Very few of the things that I will for myself are worthy of putting into words, much less a prayer. “Not my will, Thine.”

~Elizabeth Duffy

If our heart seeks God in prayer, then prayer becomes the life of the heart. It is where God renews our heart. Prayer is a personal encounter with God, the One Who made our heart, mends our heart, and expands our heart. This is how and where we get new hearts, or hearts that are ever new.

But first, we have to be willing to be led, and receive his presence.

~ Pat Gohn, Prayer: The Heart of the Matter

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

The Wandering: what’s happening in my life isn’t working for whatever reason — there is a pull, the hand of  God pointing me in something more.

The Leper: I’ve found something for which I’m looking — some type of encounter, prayer and/or ministry, has grabbed my heart and won’t let go.

Playing in Churches: I need to do something — I don’t know what, so let me start actually doing something.

All of a sudden: brothers and sisters.  Build churches long enough and I’ll eventually find myself involved in religious life — do not be afraid of this. The jump is a long way down — but never underestimate the gravity-defying power of grace.

Up to now, I’ve done nothing: reaching religious life is just a reminder of all the things I haven’t yet done.  Say your prayers, work hard, go to sleep.  Repeat.

via New Sandals: Revised Theses on Franciscan Discernment.

The person who thinks only of himself says only prayers of petition; the one who thinks of his neighbor says prayers of intercession; whoever thinks only of loving and serving God says prayers of abandonment to God’s will, and this is the prayer of the saints.

~Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (via BothAnd)

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

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

~C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

What is the use of prayer if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

~Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, via The Mercy Blog

Let us remember that the devil labors hard to disturb us at the time of meditation, in order to make us abandon it. Let him, then, who omits mental prayer on account of distractions be persuaded that he gives delight to the devil… let us, then, never give up meditation however great our distractions may be. St. Francis de Sales says that if, in mental prayer, we should do nothing else than continually banish distractions and temptations, the meditation would be very well made. Before him, St. Thomas taught that involuntary distractions do not take away the fruit of mental prayer.

~St. Alphonsus, The Great Means of Salvation and Perfection via Catholic Spiritual Direction