Oct 4 - Bound to the Weakest - St Francis

 From my friend, Gerry Straub's journal:

October 4, 2023

Bound to the Weakest

Today we celebrate the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. The saint desired to pray continually, as

1 Thessalonians 5:17 recommends. Let us pray...

Blessed you are, Lord;

show me what you want me to do.

Lord, you have been our refuge

from generation to generation.

Lord, have mercy on me

-- I ask as I have asked before --

heal this soul that has sinned against you.

Teach me to do your will,

for you are my God.

In you is the source of all life;

in you is the light

whereby we shall see light.

Forever show your mercy

to them that have come to know you.

Amen.

(A fragment of the ancient church’s prayer, the Te Deum, specially translated by Fr. A. Hamman, a Dominican friar.)

Words to Ponder

Because he himself assumed his full share in this labor of transformation, along with the humblest and poorest of his fellow men, [St.] Francis [of Assisi] discovered an aspect of God very different from that current among the adherents of ecclesiastical principalities and holy wars. For him, God ceased to be the external, dominating, and Transcendent One, the Lord in a more-or-less feudal dress. To him, God appeared as mysteriously present in our history, bereft of all trappings of power, bound instead to what was weakest and most despised in man’s world. Francis rediscovered God’s humbleness, God’s humanity. Not merely as an object of devotion, but as a new principle on which to reconstruct society. He understood that if one acknowledges the God of the Gospel, then one can no longer be satisfied with just any form of social organization. This acknowledgment is bound to bring about a transformation in human relationships; it involves seeking and bringing into being true brotherhood, a brotherhood that excludes nobody. The God of the Gospel lets himself be seen through other men, where there are no more lords and no more subjects, where no one is kept out. The dawn of true brotherhood is the light in which God is truly found.

-Eloi Leclerc, OFM,

Francis of Assisi: Return to the Gospel

The Contemplative Journey to the Place Hidden in the Heart of God - Fr Donald Haggerty

The Contemplative Journey

“When I did not seek him with self-love, he gave ­himself to me without being sought” (Jacques Maritain). A place hidden in the heart of God awaits contemplatives as they renounce any desire for status or privilege with God and leave that ambition smoldering in ashes. This renunciation has a significant consequence in the ­inner realms of silent prayer. The effect is to hide the soul more easily from itself. We lose interest in self and have no need to gain anything for ourselves in prayer. Without a desire to seek anything for self or to advance in some manner in our own estimation, a poverty takes hold in us and becomes, as it were, an ordinary place for prayer…. We learn then more often to discard at the doorstep of prayer all traces of desire for an acquisition of any kind in prayer. All desire to possess something for ourselves fades and disappears. The desire for gratification and favor from God becomes unnecessary, cast away as unimportant, no longer pursued.

The internal poverty may in time offer us a different treasure. There is now a new attraction within our soul. We are beginning to know the drawing power of the divine presence in the poor emptiness of prayer. We do not perceive his presence in any experience we can carry away as a memory from prayer. It is confirmed more in the desires we take with us from silent prayer to intercede for others in spiritual need. It may be that the truest sign of favor from God is a hidden union with his divine thirst for souls. And this union we can indeed sense more and more every day.

Father Donald Haggerty

From the Magnificat. Father Haggerty, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is currently serving at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. / From Contemplative Enigmas: Insights and Aid on the Path to Deeper Prayer. © 2020, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, CA. www.ignatius.com. Used with permission.

In Fr Haggerty's book, Contemplative Enigmas he writes just prior to the reflection above:

Precisely when God seems most hidden, our attention is often thrown back painfully upon ourselves. In one sense, this tendency must be ruthlessly opposed.  In another sense, it must be treated gently, by a calm turning in the direction of Our Lord... with the conviction that he is always in our company. Despite every false thought of his absence, he is close to us, waiting always for our heart's next expression of longing, whether in word or in silence.

Reflections of poverty by Bishop Camisasca

"Poverty is born from the discovery that I am Another's: I exist because I am loved in an individual way by Another.... I am the work of Another, nothing is mine, because everything is given to me by HIM."

 "Poverty cannot exist unless it is fed by hope, that is to say, by the certainty that we have been given what really counts in life and that no one can take that away from us....  Poverty is freedom from things, and awareness that it is God who fulfills our desires." 

“Poverty, understood as the use of things according to their true purpose, is a virtue for building up, a virtue animated by the certainty that God’s promises are being fulfilled. Unless you are certain of having already received everything, in fact, you cannot have the freedom to use what you hold in your hands according to its ultimate purpose. You will be out for your own safety, you will tighten your grip on things, and so you will set the stage for your own destruction.”

“To be poor, then, is to use each thing according to its ultimate end, placing the expectation of one’s good, not in the possession of this or that thing, but in the realization of the Kingdom of God. When we do that, we use, appreciate, and love each thing without turning it into an idol. When they become idols, persons and things cease to be ours: they are like objects that irreparably break to pieces in our hands. In a correct relationship with things and with other people, we do not refuse them the esteem that is their due – for example, you do not deny the value of a person if you are friends with him. At the same time, however, one does not expect from them the fulfillment of one’s own life. It is in the Kingdom of God that things and persons find their proper place….”

“Through this stripping, however, an endless joy comes to birth. For when we live poverty, we discover that we are lacking nothing, since everything is given to us….”

“We are already in the definitive hour, the hour in which, after the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus, we human beings possess everything, but in a new way.” 

Source: Bishop Massimo Camisasca, Magnificat from his book, The Challenge of Fatherhood:

The Riches of Poverty - Fr Sullivan, O.P.

The Year of Consecrated Life: The Riches of Poverty                                                                              — Father James M. Sullivan, O P.

Both the Solemnities of Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart often fall among the thirty days of June. This liturgical lesson directs us in some ways to the vow of poverty, because evangelical poverty forms the basis of consecrated life in the Church, and this type of poverty opens up the consecrated person for the riches that await the faithful.

Pope Francis in his preaching for the Vigil of Pentecost on May 18, 2013, reminded those gathered with him: “A poor Church for the poor begins by reaching out to the flesh of Christ. If we reach out to the flesh of Christ, we begin to understand something, to understand what this poverty, the Lord’s poverty, actually is.”

Consecrated persons live the vow of poverty faithfully by not allowing any good thing of this world to fill them up. They live wanting more but never simply settling for what the world wants. They live reaching out to the flesh of Christ, always wanting more of him, in the Eucharist and in the love of his Sacred Heart.

Pope Saint John Paul II in his apostolic exhortation Vita Consecrata speaks of the need for evangelical poverty. Because we live amidst a “materialism which craves possessions,” we simply forget other people (#89). The vow of poverty reminds us of “the needs and sufferings of the weakest.” The vow of poverty reminds each of us how our lives could be transformed if we craved God as much as we craved that last possession we ordered online.

(Father James M. Sullivan, O.P., serves as director of the Institute for Continuing Theological Education at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.                                  Magnificat, June 2015, Page 413.