Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today we're going to continue looking at Franciscan spirituality and the goal of our spiritual life, which is mystical union with God. We spoke yesterday about how this is a goal that everyone is called to reach. Today we'll just continue on that subject.
A Franciscan soul wants, first of all and above all, to love God always more ardently, to unite itself to Him always more intimately. Everything else is just a means to reach that goal. That means we will detach ourselves from the things and the cares of this world, but we'll do it to be freer to give ourselves to God. Some of us even renounce human love to embrace the divine love that draws us and invites us.
The Franciscan soul will mortify their senses so that the body doesn't disturb the soul and so that the body will be docile to the soul's greater needs. To root out vices, to acquire virtues, the Franciscan soul won't trust too much in its own plans. Instead, it will have a healthy distrust of itself and a life-giving trust in the Lord. And when God permits that our plans crumble like a house of cards, we'll know how to humble ourselves with simplicity and without discouragement. And we'll know how to begin all over again with a heart that's more humble and with a more trusting love towards the Lord.
Love will inspire the Franciscan soul to detachment from everything, and from ourselves, as well, too. And that detachment will actually strengthen our love. Paradoxically, a spirit of detachment helps you to love more purely and more ardently than you would otherwise love. That includes your love of God, but also your love for others, too.
Love and absolute poverty are like two poles of the interior life of the Franciscan soul. But it's really love that gives life to the soul. Poverty takes away the obstacles to love. Love forms and fashions the soul to be truly God-like. This is the essence of the spiritual life—the walk towards union with God as Franciscan spirituality sees it.
St. Bonaventure is the enlightened and profound doctor of this life. And he draws from theological speculation but also from personal interior experience. However, it's really from the founder himself, from St. Francis of Assisi, that Franciscan spirituality derives its physiognomy. Physiognomy, sorry. I knew I was going to stumble with that word. It's a tough one.
St. Francis had a temperament that was fundamentally mystical, which means that by nature he tended not to abstract rationalism, but rather he tended to the concreteness of love. Grace found in him a ready and docile correspondence, an openness of soul that was generous and joyful. A continual attention towards God, to which nothing distracted him from that. The needs of the body, the body which he understood to be the cell of the soul, those needs didn't distract him. The events of life, in which he glimpsed the drama of divine providence, didn't distract him either. Creatures, in which he—a very sensitive soul—tangibly discovered the footprints and the fingerprints of his beloved in a continual call to him through creatures, those creatures didn't distract him or take him away from the Lord either.
This mystical spirit of Francis—a simple and universal mysticism, which was original and welcoming—is the spirit he transmitted as a sweet paternal heredity to his best children, always respecting the particular tendencies and characteristics of each of them. Because children aren't like cookie cutters made in a factory; each one is unique and needs to be understood and respected as such. The more you understand the uniqueness and the qualities of your children and appreciate and cultivate those, the more the children can blossom and become the persons God created them to be, as St. Francis did with his own sons.
Among the children of St. Francis, we find singular personalities and temperaments of mystics, if not like the founder, always, however, seraphic and deeply immersed in the experience of the Lord—the experience of the divine. From the simple and industrious Giles of Assisi, who wanted to die of contemplation, as his biographers say, to the learned St. Bonaventure, the prince of mystical theology, as Pope Leo XIII called him, to Jacopone da Todi, who sang of the Lord in his Lauds. He said, "Make me die of love."
Then you pass to St. Angela of Foligno, perhaps the most penetrating mystic that the Church has known. Then there's Blessed John of Fermo. Then there's James of Milan, author of The Stimulus of Divine Love. From there, we move to Hugo Panziera of Prato, Giovanni de Cauliibus de San Gimignano, the author of The Meditations on the Life of Christ. Then you go to St. Bernadine of Siena, St. Catherine of Bologna, Blessed Raymond Lull, who opened Catholic mysticism to Spain. And also we have Francisco de Osuna, who, with St. Peter of Alcantara, prepared the way for St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. So yes, the Carmelites are indebted to the Franciscans.
Then we have Venerable Mary of Agreda, St. Charles of Sezze, St. Leonard of Port Maurice, and thousands of others up to the present time. All of them contributed in their own way to develop a psychological, affective, luminous mysticism that was clear and concrete and resembled, each in their own way, the footsteps and the fingerprints of our Seraphic father, St. Francis of Assisi.
So let's ask Our Lady today for the grace to cultivate more deeply in our minds and in our hearts the features that make us truly Franciscan and therefore truly Christ-like.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.