“St. Francis could let go when the right time came and engage in new ways of thinking and structures of relationship,” Sister Ilia Delio says. “I think Francis’ notion of poverty, as much as it was material, was more of an emphasis on living without possessing. People possess. We possess our ideas, our judgments, our opinions. We grip them and hold onto them with a tight grasp, not letting them go for anything. So, one thing for me is to become conscious of where I grasp and to make every effort to let go, to live sine proprio, without possessing. We are a consumer culture, and we simply don’t know what it means to live in the flow of letting go.”
—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Contemplating the Nature of the Universe“
by Stephen Copeland
