Franciscan Quote of the Day

We Secular Franciscans have to make ourselves available, like Francis, every time the Church calls, every time there is something, anything, to “repair.” There are reconciliations to promote, sufferings to alleviate, solitudes to fill, despair to console, marginalization to fight, material and spiritual poverties to heal, respect for life and for nature, youth to love and to accompany, places to catechize, liturgies to animate, and Christian communities to support in anything they might need, etc. These are the places where Secular Franciscans need to be found! There are no limits!

~Benedetto Lino, OFS (adapted by Bob Fitzsimmons, OFS), “The Vocation, Charism and Mission of Secular Franciscans” (Chapter 10 of The National Formation Manual, For Up to Now (FUN))

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil your ministry.

~Second Letter of St. Paul to St. Timothy 4:3-5

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.

To dare to believe that we are truly loved, not for anything we have accomplished, earned, produced, learned, achieved, or sacrificed for, but simply for existing is a reality that can hardly be borne. We want that love more than anything; we search for that love all our lives. Yet we’re somehow not able, not equipped to see it, perhaps, except by prolonged, sustained suffering—and uniting our suffering to Christ’s. Thérèse did seem to be able to experience herself as fully loved—because she loved so much herself—and in the end that was perhaps her greatest gift: to God, to us.

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

The late, great John Cardinal OConnor of New York once told a suffering woman, “Christ could have saved the world by His miracles, but He chose to save the world by His suffering.”

~Leila Miller, Little Catholic Bubble.

“Christ, poor and crucified”, victor over death and risen, the greatest manifestation of the love of God for humanity, is the “book” in which the brothers and sisters, in imitation of Francis, learn the purpose and the way of living, loving, and suffering. They discover in Him the value of contradictions for the sake of justice and the meaning of the difficulties and the crosses of daily life. With Him they can accept the will of the Father even under the most difficult circumstances and live the Franciscan spirit of peace, rejecting every doctrine contrary to human dignity.

~Article 10, General Constitution of the Secular Franciscan Order

To choose violence is not to cut off the possibility of suffering, in other words, but rather to cut off the possibility of good. It’s to forestall the transformation that always comes about when we refrain from violence, for Christ’s sake, when violence would be expedient. Christianity has never, ever claimed to be expedient. Christianity has never remotely claimed to be about results, efficiency, numbers, worldly success. Hitler was efficient. The death camps got results. Christianity is about the one lost sheep.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame

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.

If you really want to love Jesus, first learn to suffer, because suffering teaches you to love.

~St. Gemma Galgani

To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.

~Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz