Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Continuing our reflections on Franciscan spirituality by starting the last section in Father Ciccarelli’s book that we've been sharing, the last part of our reflections, we will be speaking about the fruits of living a life a la Franciscana, meaning according to the Franciscan way. In the spiritual life, when the soul tends to mystical union with God in its incorporation to Christ through grace and the soul works in charity trying to mirror Christ in poverty, humility, suffering through this supernatural climate, the soul matures and bears wonderful fruit. The four Franciscan fruits which Father Ciccarelli discusses and which we'll talk about in these last reflections are interior freedom, holy simplicity, perfect joy, and the works of the apostolate.
And just like every spiritual fruit, even though these mature from the fertile union between heaven and earth, between the human will, our will, wedded to divine grace, to God's grace, to carry the analogy a little further, the more or less perfect level of maturation and the exquisiteness of the fruits are in relation to the heavenly calories absorbed, Father Ciccarelli says, so the divine grace with which we received and corresponded to, and it's also conditioned on our familiar cultural spiritual climate, the nature of the soil in our own soul, to borrow from our Lord's parable in Matthew 13. So the mode and the intensity of correspondence differs with each person, with each soul. Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:41, "Star differs from star in glory." Every soul has personal accents, and its fruits have a particular flavor, you could say, but every Franciscan soul produces these fruits with the characteristic notes that distinguish it from the others in the marvelous garden that we call Christian spirituality.
So the first fruit that we'll just look briefly at today is interior liberty or interior freedom. Liberty is the condition and the prerogative of the children of God. It comes from the faculty of the will; it develops and grows through the exercise and the fight of the conquest for the highest good that the will is striving for, and in this way, it matures to perfection. Man yearns to be truly free; he's intolerant of any imposition or anything that would tie him down, but he believes falsely that his liberty can come from outside of himself, that it consists of being free from any external constriction and not being hampered by any law because he thinks freedom means following and indulging in all of his instincts. In thinking that way, we don't recognize that living this way turns us into slaves, actually, slaves of our passions which harass us, slaves to the instincts that tyrannize us to the point of making us almost like the brute beasts, slaves to our peers to whom human respect ties us and to whom we feel the need to conform.
And yet, for those who have ears to hear, the Gospel speaks clearly. Jesus says, "The truth will set you free" (John 8:32). We’ll find true liberty when all of our being adheres to the truth, meaning that we have, will have re-established in us the genuine true primitive essence, the relations of our spirit with God as it was in the beginning and will have refashioned that primitive order established by God broken by sin. Sin falsified these relations and made us slaves as Jesus Himself even said, He said, "The one who sins is a slave to sin" (John 8:34). The Gospel points the way to this liberation when it highlights the volition of power that each of us have, the power to choose. If you want to enter life, Jesus says, "Keep the commandments" (Matthew 19:17), or "If you want to be perfect, go sell what you have and possess and give it to the poor and then come follow Me" (Matthew 19:21). The Gospel is also honest about the fight that we'll have to sustain in order to arrive at this true liberty. Jesus Himself says, "The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11:12).
So it's through hard fighting that we come to be masters of ourselves and, therefore, truly free and subject only to God. When we arrive at mastering ourselves, at placing our will totally at the service of God to offer it to Him, it's then that we find true freedom, it's then that all the world is at our feet because God is with us. So let's ask our Lady for the grace to find that true freedom of spirit that she and the Lord both want us to have.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.