Praise to be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
The other day, in our series on Franciscan Spirituality, we talked about how the search for Christ, the search for Jesus must be a personal one.
It's a challenge that each of us is called to take on personally.
That search also needs to be passionate, and that's what we'll talk about today.
We much more easily find the Lord when forgetting ourselves.
We passionately search for him, search for Jesus, who's our true better half, if you want to think about it in those terms.
Jesus who says, he who loses his life for my sake will find it, Matthew 10:39.
It's wise, and it's good to give everything in order to gain everything.
The search of St. Francis for Christ was animated and lively, in part because that was his personality.
It was full of anxiety, but a good anxiety in the sense of full of eagerness and longing.
St. Francis' search was the search of a man with all his gifts of nature and grace.
It was the search of someone disposed to face every inconvenience and hardship, to offer himself up to the mocking and insults of the wise of the world, to even appear crazy, and to lose everything, friends, father, honor, wealth, to lose everything in order to find his beloved.
That's how passionate lovers really live.
That's how St. Francis himself lived.
He gave everything to gain everything.
One of St. Francis' followers would later say, God can't be found except by being truly in love with him.
God can't be found except by being truly in love with him.
That thought echoes the words we mentioned the other day, Prophet Jeremiah, Jeremiah 29, verses 13 and 14.
The Lord says, you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
I will be found by you, says the Lord.
So this is really our great challenge, to truly be in love with Christ.
Jesus said, when I'm lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself, John 12:32.
And he really has everything in him that should attract us to him.
The whole universe actually converges on him.
But it's not an attraction in which all things converge, and they lose their own individual identities and are annihilated in the divinity.
So it's not a Buddhist attraction we're talking about here.
Christ is an attraction of all, but also of the singular individual too.
Jesus has what we can call a supernatural sympathy for you in particular.
You of all people, believe it or not.
Me?
Yes, you.
Ciccarelli, in his reflections, defines sympathy. He says the word actually means to feel together.
He combines the Greek prefix sum, which means together, with the word pathos, which means feeling.
So sympathy is when two souls resonate together.
Sometimes we find that our souls, our spirits, really do resonate with someone else very well.
That's how David and Jonathan's relationship is described in the Old Testament.
In 1 Samuel 18, verse 1, we read that, quote, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.
I'm forgetting which, I forgot which the saints, which they are, but every year in the breviary we read about two saints, every year in the Office of Readings, how there were like two souls in one person, basically.
It's a beautiful thing when that actually happens.
But between us and another person, that spiritual resonation will always just be partial, really.
It'll never be to the point where there's a perfect fusion of souls, because we can never really understand another person in their very depths.
But that being said, in steps our Lord, Jesus, the supreme enchanter of the souls, he and he alone can perfectly draw someone to himself in the fullest sense of the word.
His soul is not only the most intelligent of all, but it's also the strongest will, the most beautiful, most perfect, most harmonious soul there is.
He's the most sympathetic soul of the whole human race.
Why?
Because he feels in himself the life of all the individuals in the world, from the first to the last.
And he knows the peculiarities of each person, too, their condition, circumstances, their stage in life.
He feels in his own life the life of everyone, and he tries to make his own life felt in us as well, in every moment of our lives, too.
Jesus is the most heroic soul that there is, and he has the most perfect sympathy for us as well.
He really is the soul of our soul.
When you think about it.
So every person that lives by means of this supernatural sympathy, everyone in a real and in a mystical sense revolves around the soul of Christ, Christ who alone draws everyone to himself.
So with him we can make our thoughts, our desires, our affections, our sorrows, our activity, we can make all of it accord and be in harmony with him.
And that's what he desires, actually.
He desires it actually a heck of a lot more than we desire it, believe it or not.
And this fusion of souls with Jesus is exactly what happened with St. Francis.
Francis' soul was naturally courteous, he had a lively intelligence, he had a sensitivity that could perceive and welcome the most delicate shades of sympathy.
As soon as the Holy Spirit attracted him to himself, the Spirit invited Francis to withdraw from the chaos of the world and to search for the hidden treasure, which is Christ.
And Francis immediately began to enter into communion with the Lord, who, as the legend of the Three Companions states, Francis, quote, studied in order to welcome him into his inmost self, in order to reach a perfect supernatural synthesization.
St. Francis was one of Jesus' greatest students, basically.
He studied his beloved like few Christians have ever done.
Through faith and love, he penetrated into the mystery of Christ, he abandoned the old man Adam, and immersed in God's grace, Francis shined in the light of Christ, in the love of Christ, and in the works of Christ as well.
In the light of Jesus, which comforted, sustained, and gave joy to Francis, St. Francis entered fully into the mystery of Christ, and he found his true self there at the same time.
It's actually the destiny of all of us, believe it or not, to enter fully into the mystery of Jesus Christ and to find our true selves in Christ.
And honestly, that's the only real problem that we have, the problem of discovering Jesus in his divine and human reality, meeting him, entering fully into his life, into his heart.
That's our number one and essentially only problem, really.
Again, discovering Jesus, we find our true selves, and we live in the measure that we've fully entered into that mystery, fully into the divine and human heart of our Savior.
So let's ask Our Lady for the great grace to be able to do that.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.