Franciscan Media

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives.

Every vocation is a vocation to sacrifice and to joy. It is a call to the knowledge of God, to the recognition of God as our Father, to joy in the understanding of His mercy.

Many sheep do not recognize the presence of the Good Shepherd in the Church today and insist on wandering off on their own, expecting to enjoy the false freedom of living independently. They allow themselves to be deaf to the voice of the Shepherd. Soon, without realizing it, they grow weak without the nourishing food in the Shepherd’s pasture and grow thirsty as they drift farther away from the springs of living water in the Spirit.

Pause for a moment and look around you. Simply thank God for all the gifts that you have right now, all the gifts saved from the wreck of life: the lamp that illumines this page, the chair that gives you comfort, the home that provides shelter. That’s a good exercise of stewardship.

Thank God for the sun and stars in the sky, for the support of friends, for the opportunities of a new day, for the ability to laugh and cry. A disciple receives everything with gratitude. It is prayer that helps keep the heart grateful and filled with joy.

It’s not the darkness itself that we must understand. It’s the force behind the darkness and within the darkness … the force moving through life that we must know. This is the great passage: to see deep into our own nature by meeting its reflection in everything around us. To swim with something very big. To allow the Universe to love us and to love deeply in return … to allow this story to trace itself through the chapters of our life. To live within the miracle.

John Paul acknowledges that everyone suffers, and suffering is an evil because it diminishes physical and psychological well-being. It can also be spiritually destructive, leading as it does to doubt the existence of God. Why would a good and loving God allow pain in his world? It’s a question as old as Job.

Saint Francis spent almost half of his life on and in the mountains, and the other half he spent on the road entering and leaving cities. As Jesus walked up the mountain to pray, then descended and moved among the people, so did Francis and the early brothers, discovering, contemplating, and sanctifying new places, as they continued to walk beyond their own history, as do we if we learn to walk into and out of our own Assisi as pilgrims.

Is it possible to describe Pope Francis in a single word? I will try to suggest one: the pope of patience. Young people, he recognizes, rightly feel the need to change the world. But, very quickly, as they grow up, they discover that this objective is unattainable if they are in a hurry. It can only be done with patience. This is something that parents know well when they understand that, beyond giving a model of life to their children, they must just learn to wait until the child makes his or her own life and, if need be, his or her own mistakes.