Praise be Jesus and Mary, with our series on Franciscan spirituality, we began looking at the soul of Franciscan spirituality in our last reflection, we'll continue to do that today.
Some saints and some spiritual schools see God first and foremost as truth, truth with the capital T. Others see God's primary attribute as his justice, still other schools put God's omnipotence or his providence at center stage.
Saint Francis' understanding and experience of God is first of all that he is love, as the beloved apostle tells us in 1 John 4, 16.
In his praises of God, a Seraphic father sings, he sings, You, Lord, our love.
You are three in one, Lord God of gods.
You are good, all good, the highest good, Lord God living and true.
You are love, charity.
You are wisdom.
You are humility.
You are patience.
You are beauty.
You are meekness.
You are security.
You are inner peace.
You are joy.
You are our hope and our joy.
Even just in that, in the praises of God, we see how Saint Francis focused not on himself, he focused on the Lord, right?
It's one of the reasons why he was so joyful.
If you want to be miserable, focus on yourself all the time.
Perfect recipe for misery.
But we see that with Saint Francis, from the love that the God of love had placed in his heart, he was then loved to focus on and to serenade that love who is God at the same time.
And when in his rule he wants to especially recommend something to his brothers, he uses a unique expression.
Saint Francis says, I beg you for the love which is God to do this or do that.
I beg you for the love which is God, he says.
Francis' sons, particularly Saint Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, follow this Caritas intuition of their founder.
They gravitate in their theology towards Plato and Saint Augustine, more so than towards Aristotle.
Plato and Augustine who think of God more in terms of the highest good than in terms of the supreme being.
Both are true.
God is the highest or supreme good, as Plato would say.
He is the supreme being, as Aristotle would affirm.
But understanding God as the highest good more easily helps you to understand him as A love which gives life to all creatures.
After all, what's the highest good that we know of if it's not love itself?
Goodness implies love.
The concept of being doesn't necessarily or implicitly indicate or point to love.
Duns Scotus takes Saint John's affirmation that God is love and he justifies it theologically, saying that God is formally loved not only in his operation but even in his being.
God wills and he loves in an ordered way and since the good that he loves is, first of all, his own very being himself, that's the first good that he loves, and the love with which he loves is his own will, therefore God is his own love.
As a side note, just know that in God his will is identical with his being because God's perfectly simple, for those of us who remember.
We talked about the attributes of God a long time ago.
We talked about the simplicity of God.
Everything in God is one.
Saint Bonaventure says that the action which is proper to love is to give, actually to give all of oneself, to put your whole heart into something is how we might say it actually So in God who's infinite love, this giving of oneself reaches the highest perfection.
The Father gives himself entirely, so he gives all of his divine being to the Son.
The Son gives all of himself to the Father and the reciprocal gift of their love is another divine person.
It's the Holy Spirit.
So we see in the nature of God that he is love and that love even implies a plurality of persons.
So love implies a family.
There's a clear analogy here then with marriage and with the family.
Since marriage was created by God, you'd expect it to have God's fingerprints in some way, right?
And it does.
The two spouses in marriage become one.
Their oneness naturally produces another person, a child.
Jesus says in the Gospel of St. John that he and the Father are one.
He says that in John 10.30.
Their oneness produces or rather it spirates, is the technical theological term, it spirates another person from all eternity, the person of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is called the uncreated gift and it's with the Holy Spirit and through the Holy Spirit that the divine love becomes fertile outside of God.
That happens in creation.
Divine love extends outside of God into creation, but it becomes fruitful especially in two places.
One, the womb of Our Lady, of course, who's the spouse of the Holy Spirit.
Two, divine love becomes fruitful in our sanctification as well too.
Very important place for all of us.
Let's just look at creation itself as a work of love.
One of the characteristics of love is that it is diffusive, meaning it tends to spread or pour itself out, extend outside of itself.
God's love, not extra, so outside of himself, causes him to freely create and in his creation his creatures have a resemblance of him.
They resemble him in their being, in their life, and in love.
Franciscan theologians see in all creatures that living dynamic process of change which comes from God and is dependent on him.
And they see the cause of all things as coming from God's goodness, which is nothing more than a manifestation of the divine will.
God creates time, He creates space and matter and spiritual beings.
Why does He do that?
Because He wills to do so, and He wills to do so because He loves.
Before coming into existence, everything is in the mind of God.
St. Bonaventure tells us that the intrinsic possibility of the being of creatures is founded on divine wisdom.
Divine power makes them possible to come into existence, but it's only the divine will and out of love that we're actually created and that we really exist.
Where there's a will, there's a way.
And where there's a divine will, the way is the way of love.
That's the reason and the way that God created everything.
St. Bonaventure would also say that God's divine will makes an appeal to His wisdom and power in order to create, and it's His will that decides between what can exist and what will exist.
And saying God's will, when we say that, essentially it's the same thing as saying God's love.
When we say something is God's will, we're really saying that this or that happened or didn't happen because it was or wasn't part of God's loving plan for us.
God's will is synonymous with God's love.
God doesn't create out of necessity because He doesn't need anything.
He lacks nothing.
God creates freely out of love.
Love is the cause, the root, and the goal of every divine activity.
So it's love that gets the trajectory of the universe going, and it's love that sustains it.
Love is like the lifeblood of the universe, if you want to think about it that way.
So love, as we said in the last reflection, is circular by nature, and then it comes from God as its source, and it returns to Him, bringing all creation with it.
Lastly, for today, as far as people are concerned, since we have the fingerprint of God's love in our souls, God's able to draw us to Him.
He puts us in motion to Himself.
He gives us grace, which is charity, and it's through that grace that we can actually love Him.
Even just looking or searching for God, even when someone's just beginning to look or search for God, that's already a sign of God's love working inside of them.
St. Augustine and St. Bernard would say that to love God means already to have Him in your heart, too.
When that's the case, when we have God's love, which is His grace, inside of us, we still need to learn to discipline and direct that longing that's inside of us.
We need to work on intentionally directing our love to its source, who is God.
We have to do that.
We need to know that God is the true object of our love, and not permit ourselves to be deviated by embracing counterfeits, false loves, or things which appear to be love, but in reality, they really aren't.
We have to be careful about that.
St. Francis, again, in his praises of God, sings, So that we love you with all our heart, always thinking of you with all our soul, desiring you with all our mind, directing to you all of our intentions, and seeking your glory in all things, with all of our strength, giving all of our strength and bodily and spiritual senses in homage to your love and to none other, says the Seraphic Father.
So love, which has its home or its seat in our will, love is what unifies all our human faculties and makes them converge on that one target, which is the God of love, revealed in Jesus Christ.
So let's ask our lady, then, for the grace to direct that love that's in our hearts to the right place, to the source of all good, to the source of all love, who is the Lord our God.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.