Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality this morning and today we'll talk about how nature is an expression of Christ.
St. Francis himself arrived at the love of creatures and at interpreting their language and their actions.
He arrived at these things by means of Jesus Christ.
The creative cycle opens to God by means of Christ and it brings everything back to God by the mediation of Christ as well, the one mediator between God and man as St. Paul calls him in 1 Timothy 2:5.
Blessed Thomas of Celano, St. Francis' biographer, wrote that with a special love, Francis valued and loved those things in which he glimpsed a symbol of the Son of God, i.e. the things of nature, seeing Jesus in them.
The reason for such love stands in the fraternal alliance which unites created things and persons in the beginning, again from God by means of Christ, and also in the end, which is the glory of God in Christ and by means of him.
St. Francis loved all creatures created by the good God because he knew that both he and they had that same generating principle.
Both he and they came from the fruitful love of God through that mediation of Jesus.
St. Paul speaks in Colossians 1:16 of all things being created by means of Christ and in view of him.
We return to that Pauline principle which we speak often of, which is kind of like a banner of the Seraphic spirituality.
But here we look at it not so much from the position of Christ, who is the first one predestined to be the apex, the summit of all things, as we've talked about before, but now we'll look at it and the consequences for the created world that derive from this principle of St. Paul's.
Created things have to be seen in Christ and in dependence upon him because it's from him that they acquire their significance, and in him they have their life and consistency according to their particular richness and variety of expressions.
Jesus Christ, through whom the Father created the world, as we read in Hebrews 1:2, Jesus Christ is the origin of everything, the cause of every order, form, the type upon which every creature is modeled.
If it's true that only man is created in his image and likeness, it's also true that all the other created beings have in various measure and relation a remote likeness to Jesus because they participate in existence itself and in life itself and its various grades and manifestations which existence and life come from him.
Everything is a creature of God and even Jesus is a creature of God in his humanity.
From the Blessed Trinity, created beings were called into existence, but Christ, in his most holy humanity, is the first exemplar, he's the most beautiful work, the most perfect apex of creation.
Being God and man, he is both artist and masterpiece at the same time, joined in a single being.
As man, he's a creature, he's part of creation, the same nature as us, because his body stemmed from and rose from human birth by means of Our Lady, and all of creation is ennobled in an indescribable way because of that, because of the incarnation.
Through Christ, creation is made a participant, even if it's just in an indirect and remote way of the hypostatic union, which joins a created nature to the divine Word of God.
So the vital impulse for being doesn't come from below as it were, it comes from above instead.
From above, which makes the sea of created beings come forth out of nothing, and in this way the foundation and the meaning, or as the scholastics would say, the substantiality of being is from above, from the Lord, comes from God, by means of Christ, for whom creatures were made and in whom they acquire unity and dignity.
So the atom, the pebble, the plant, the animal, man, they're all tied together by a profound solidarity, by a true universal brotherhood.
Each one is constituted in its particular grade of being, but again, only in view of a higher power which surpasses it and has all its solidity, its place, and its function.
The whole cosmos is a hierarchy of finite beings, and each has the fullness of its own reality because it's inserted in the harmony of the universe itself, because it participates in perfections which are superior to it, meaning it participates in some small way in God's perfections.
The multiplicity of created beings forms a unity, a single and harmonious universe, not by simply adding one being to another, so not by just a mechanical juxtaposition, but because of a bond which comes from above, which substantiates and consolidates everything into a perfect and powerful and harmonious synthesis that tends to a single apex in which creatures are tied up with and to the supernatural.
The apex is Jesus Christ, who is the unity of the created and the uncreated world.
The world of creatures exists and subsists by means of Christ, by means of the force of the superior subsistence, and by the bond created with him, and by which every creature is indissolubly united to God according to the grade that it occupies in the scale of beings.
Let's ask Our Lady for the grace today to appreciate more and more the greatness of her Son, through whom and for whom all things were created, Colossians 1:16, and in whom all things live and move and have their being, says St. Paul, Acts 17:28.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.