Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
We're continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality this morning and we're moving on from poverty to speak about another Franciscan means of sanctification in the salutation of the virtues St. Francis calls humility, the sister of poverty and the need to be humble, the need to make oneself small came out of him from his love of poverty which as we've hinted at before is the synthesis of all Franciscan asceticism. Humility is nothing more than an ideal deepening of poverty, of renouncing everything in order to arrive at God, of putting oneself at his service with everything that you have and with everything that you are.
This means stripping yourself of attachments to worldly goods i.e. poverty but also being stripped of the attachment to yourself which is humility. You divest yourself of these attachments with the goal of being able to see clearly the reality of your nothingness.
Blessed Giles of Assisi would say that you also do it to see every man as your superior and find yourself a subject and inferior to everyone. With humility he says man rises up against himself making himself vile not only interiorly in his own eyes but also externally in the eyes of others. Essentially he's saying that humility is the antidote to the poison of pride. Seraphic love which is the soul of Franciscan spirituality employs these two sisters poverty and humility. She employs them in the service of grace. Grace which helps mature us to perfection in Christ. It's for the love of Christ that you make yourself poor and humble and it's in love that this denial and detachment is accomplished otherwise it would crush you if you did that. Being poor and humble means nothing without being sustained by God's love, without being undergirded by his love and his virtues.
St. Francis in his meditations trembled with commotion at the humiliation of the word incarnate crying as an infant in Bethlehem. He understood the secret of humility. The secret is to lower oneself to condescend. In his youth Francis dreamed of climbing the social ladder from being the son of a merchant to becoming a knight but for the love of Jesus who wanted to descend to the point of becoming the last of men even Francis abased himself to the point of serving lepers, begging from door to door allowing himself to be mocked and considered a fool, a fool for Jesus Christ which is the only kind of foolishness that's actually worth living for. 
Also St. Clare who came from nobility, St. Clare left her family's palace in order to live in humility and in the most profound obscurity among the poor walls of the convent of San Damiano. The humiliations of the son of God were the school in which Francis and his followers enrolled themselves but their humility had its own specific and unmistakable note.   
Just as Franciscan poverty doesn't have in itself the shadow of disdain or contempt towards creatures, towards people or things but rather it looks on them with sympathy, respect and love with a disinterest in pure love because it lacks any type of desire of greed or desire to possess selfishly. So, too, Franciscan humility doesn't denigrate the person at all, doesn't degrade them, doesn't have anything to do of that dark and fanatical hatred of self which destroys without building up anything good. Franciscan humility is very profound. It goes to the roots of the proud and rebellious ego, but it's sweet and serene and it respects and loves the works of God, even and especially the work of God inside of me. His work to make me another Christ, another Jesus. Even the much criticized human ego or the I was created by God himself but the sin of Adam deformed it making it raise its head against its creator. Because of this each of us carries inside the unhealthy tendency to make ourselves the absolute center of everything and to become self-made people crushing those who oppose us in different ways, attributing to ourselves any merit and praise which belongs to God. Fallen man is proud, egotistical, ambitious.
The ego, this is the ego or the I that scripture calls the old man. It has to die in order to give birth to the new man who is born in Christ and is oriented towards Christ. Christ who is the divine I or ego who is the center of all created beings. My ego has to die not in a metaphysical or absolute sense but in a psychological and a relative sense. Not the I created by God but the false and deformed ego which is born from sin and dominates in each one of us and wants to affirm itself by suffocating the I or the ego which is a son of God. No true interiority, no ascension towards God, no union with him is possible for the proud soul. Virtues of the proud are a mask which hides their deformity. Sooner or later a ruinous fall awaits them like happened with Lucifer known as Satan. 
The Franciscan knows that from the elevation of one's head meaning one's ego come all the little and the great falls from the fall of Lucifer to Adam to the Pharisees and the scribes and the gospel to us down to our day. Blessed Giles adds and all the great goods that ever occur in this world all of them are preceded by the lowering of one's head as is proved by the most humble Virgin Mary, the repentant publican and the holy thief crucified with Jesus. St. Francis used to say who are you my most sweet Lord and who am I the most vile worm, your useless servant. God drew Francis to himself before the infinite greatness of God. Omnipotent Francis wasn't afraid although he saw his extreme misery and his littleness, his vileness, his nothingness and his despicableness since he was a sinner like the rest of us.
God is infinite but he's also my most sweet Lord as Francis would call him. Francis immersed himself in the truth and we know that humility is truth but he didn't become discouraged, he didn't lose himself or become frightened. It's because God is big and Francis is small and pitiful that actually Francis felt secure and peaceful in the hands of such a great Lord. The proud person is disturbed and full of fears because they want to do things themselves and they want things done their own way. The humble person's not that way because they entrust themselves to the merciful heavenly Father. The recognition of one's littleness is something in St. Francis that's so frequent, spontaneous, sincere and moving at the same time. 
Friar Maceo, one of his brothers, once asked Francis with a rough and impertinent simplicity, he said, why to you, why to you, why is the whole world running after you? You aren't beautiful to look at, you're not a person of great learning, you aren't nobility, why then does the whole world follow you? The response of St. Francis to that was very humble and wise. He knew that he wasn't beautiful, nor learned, nor noble. The marveling of his disciple didn't offend him or humiliate him, rather it actually caused him to rejoice in his spirit. He believed himself to be even more vile than Friar Maceo thought. I'm even worse than you think, he thought. 
Francis responded, quote, with great fervor of spirit, you want to know why after me? You really want to know why everyone is running after me? I have this from the all-holy eyes of God that see the good and the evil everywhere. For those blessed and all-holy eyes have not seen among sinners anyone more vile or insignificant than I am. And so in order to do that wonderful work which he intends to do, he didn't find on earth a viler creature, and therefore he chose me. Then he quotes St. Paul, for God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise. And God has chosen the base things of this world and the despised to bring to naught the noble and the great and the strong, so that all excellence and virtue may be from God and not from the creature. In order that no creature should glory before him, but let him who takes pride take pride in the Lord, that honor and glory may be only God's forever, unquote, said St. Francis.
And since Francis humiliated himself to such an extent, God raised him up higher than we can actually possibly imagine in this life. 
Let's ask Our Lady then for the grace today to see the beauty and the value and the virtue of humility. Let's also ask her for the grace to learn to lower ourselves more, to learn to detach ourselves from our selfishness and self-centeredness, so that God can raise us up in his own eyes and make us more like our humble Savior and our humble mother and our humble seraphic father, St. Francis.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.