Murray Bodo, OFM

Francis answered God’s revelatory voice by saying he would happily embrace his sufferings and pain, knowing now for certain that they will be the pledge of entering God’s kingdom of painless, perfect interconnectedness between and among all created things. Francis knew this was true by means of a lifetime of learning how to live with all creatures, loving them and serving them, and giving God thanks for them. And now, two years before he will embrace Sister Death, God assures Francis and us that everything belongs to everything else, and everything belongs to God.

Francis was a man born of wealth, a leader who dreamed of knighthood and who went to war on a high steed only to be brought low to the earth in defeat and imprisonment that marked him with what has been the fate of countless soldiers and prisoners of war throughout the centuries.

St. Bonaventure said of his holy father Francis that he was a true teacher because he learned the truth of God’s revelation, gave his whole heart to what was being taught by Christ, and did not forget what he’d been taught because he put what he learned into practice. So, in the end, Francis’ teachings are concretized and made visible in his choices and in his practices, which are the result of hearing and living the truth given him by Christ.

The teachings of St. Francis enable us to imagine another future that gives us hope; for hope is the grace to imagine a future more positive, more loving, and more joyful than the world we now find ourselves in. As St. Francis used to say to his brothers, “Let us begin to do good, for up to now we have done nothing.”

— from the book Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from Saint Francis

The Franciscan mystic is the ordinary Christian mystic who is brother, sister, bride and mother of Christ by means of a fidelity, made possible by the Holy Spirit, in doing God’s will, in carrying Christ within and through love and a pure and sincere conscience and in giving birth to Christ by the charity of good works. In all of this is intimacy with God, and intimacy with God that results in charity is practical mysticism.

A simple map for living is why St. Francis is still listened to and followed today in our fractious and divided world. What he teaches, if lived out, brings joy, which is the result of union with God who lives with us and within all of creation. God lives in creation but is also apart from creation as its Creator who existed before the existence of the universe. St. Francis’s teachings, then, become both a theology and a way of living.