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As Bonaventure writes, God is “totally submerged in the waters from the sole of the foot to the top of the head…. [God] appeared to you as your beloved cut through with wound upon wound in order to heal you.”
The first Franciscans believed that God was in the world, actively shaping human experience, and inspiring birds’ songs and wolves’ howls.
If Christian faith is to be meaningful to twenty-first-century individuals and play a positive role in healing the earth and its peoples, Christians must choose the way of loving relatedness.
God feels the pain of an injured baby bird, fallen out of its nest, and the loneliness of a pet mourning the death of its human companion.
At the heart of Francis’s and Clare’s biblical vision was the Sermon on the Mount, and most especially the Beatitudes.
Ephesians 5:18–19 counsels us “to be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another [in] psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and playing to the Lord in your hearts.”
Francis and Clare of Assisi prized holy simplicity or put another way, spiritual poverty. They pruned away everything that stood between them and God.
