Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Continuing our reflections on the soul of Franciscan spirituality today, we'll highlight something that's always very important to keep in mind.
Even though we are finite and limited creatures, there's a desire in us to reach some type of excellence, some type of perfection.
Perfectionists probably know that better than anyone else.
There's a desire that we have to reach our goals and our own personal happiness, too.
In truth, our life's goal, our point of arrival, is God Himself.
God who is infinite perfection.
You want to put it in sports terms, the goal is union with God, the goalkeeper is Christ.
We have an innate thirst for God, even if it's a blind thirst in a lot of people.
Blind in the sense that they're searching for Him, even if they don't consciously know that it's He whom they're searching for.
Once we know, once we realize that we were made for God, we need to know the way to get there, we need to know how to get to Him.
The way, of course, is through the goalkeeper, through Jesus Christ, who says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.
John 14, verse 6.
So Jesus is our way of perfection, but what's the essential element that brings us to that ultimate goal?
What's the seed, as it were, that we have to develop in this life, which will fully flourish in eternity in paradise?
What is it? What do I have to put my heart and soul into?
Is it in multiplying devotions? Is it in mortifications, penances, self-denial?
Is it in growing in knowledge of the truth?
Is poverty a true means of perfection, as the so-called spiritual Franciscans preached in the early history of our order?
Authentic Christian spirituality, and in particular Franciscan spirituality, doesn't see the essence of perfection in any of these things.
All of these things are means to the end.
They help us to reach perfection, but they aren't perfection itself.
Prayer is a means for union with God.
Mortification and poverty are means to give us a spirit of liberty from external things, and to help us have dominion over our body and over our senses.
Self-denial is a means to help the will of God conquer our pride.
Greater knowledge of the truth is good.
It's a means to adhere to the truth with greater awareness.
Good works and apostolic works are means to reach union with God by fulfilling His will.
But again, as important and necessary as all these things are, they aren't the essential thing.
In the words of St. Bonaventure, the one thing necessary for perfection is ad ere deo in Latin, which is to adhere to God, meaning to love Him, essentially.
Jesus said it in today's Gospel, John 15, verse 9, Remain or abide in My love.
The first and greatest commandment is to love.
Love the Lord with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, all your mind, Luke 10, 27.
The second greatest commandment is a lot like the first, to love.
To love your neighbor as yourself, Jesus says in Matthew 22, verse 39.
So it's not possible for everyone to dive deep into the divine mysteries with their intelligence or to do great mortifications or to multiply devotions and prayers or to give away everything they have or to do great works.
But everyone, rich or poor, smart or not so smart, healthy or sick, young or old, everyone can love.
Everyone can do that.
What does the apostle say? He says, If I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophecies, prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I'm nothing.
If I give away all I have, if I deliver my body to be burned but have not love, I gain nothing.
1 Corinthians 13, verses 1 through 3.
And he says that love is the bond of perfection.
We read that in Colossians 3, verse 14.
That's what the Franciscan school has always aspired to.
A couple of examples of this.
St. Anthony of Padua in his sermons says explicitly that perfection consists in loving God and loving our neighbor.
Franciscan mystic David Augsburg calls love the mother and the wet nurse, the measure and form of perfection, he says.
St. Bonaventure defines charity as the beauty of the soul and the source of all the active virtues.
Charity is the one, he says, who gives birth to all the contemplative virtues in our incorporation into Christ.
And it's the operative habit of the soul, the form which perfects the will, he says.
And Scotus, Blessed John Scotus, for his part, says that the whole interior life has charity as its center, which he identifies with grace, as we've talked about before.
He also identifies charity with the gift of wisdom, which is the formal principle of contemplation.
And St. Bernardine of Siena says that the soul conforms itself to God, how? Through charity.
The Franciscan identification of grace with charity gives a completeness and efficacy to the fundamental Christian conception of charity being the essence of perfection.
In reality, we are what we are, supernaturally speaking, only by virtue of God's grace, meaning only in terms of the charity that is within us.
By the grace of God, I am what I am, says the Apostle, 1 Corinthians 15, 10.
So we can't measure perfection by the external works or practices that someone does.
It's only by the supernatural love with which we do those things that God measures the perfection of our soul.
The response of an adopted child to their father in heaven needs to be the response of love, a filial love which responds to that paternal love of God in Jesus Christ and leads to loving our neighbor for love of God.
And at the end of life, it'll be the level of grace slash charity, which we've reached down here, which will fix our position in heaven and establish our level of glory in paradise.
To reach the level of charity that God has preordained for us is to reach our true perfection.
This is why St. Francis, at the end of his first rule, exhorts the brothers to love.
He says, with all our hearts and all our souls, all our minds and all our strength, all our power and all our understanding, with every faculty and every effort, with every affection and all our emotions, with every wish and desire, we should love our Lord and God, who's given and gives us everything, body and soul and our life.
It was he who created and redeemed us, and of his mercy alone, he will save us, says St. Francis.
So let's ask Our Lady for the grace to make love our aim as we go forward in our spiritual journey.
Praise be Jesus and Mary. Now and forever.
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