God with Us in Pain and Joy

The stigmata Francis received in his final years revealed God’s pain within his pain. The stigmata reflected God’s empathy expanding Francis’s own empathy and circle of love to include all creation. Francis’s God is not aloof or apathetic. God is embedded in the pain and joy of the world. Our calling, as Francis and Clare discovered, is to identify the pain of the least of these—the worm crushed by an errant footstep, the soldier wounded in battle, the leper scorned on the road—as God’s pain. God experiences the pain and joy of creatures, which touch the heart of our immanent and intimate God. 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.”

—from the book Simplicity, Spirituality, Service:The Timeless Wisdom of Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure
by Bruce G. Epperly