By A Franciscan Friar –
Francisco Bernardone was not born a saint (in the common understanding of that word), that is, as one who went often to church and who lived a life of heroic virtue. On the contrary, he lived as a dashing, young man of the world. He was a man of action who sought after high ambitions, and a rich man’s son who lived for worldly pleasures. But by allowing God’s intervention into his life, he became the person we know as St. Francis of Assisi. Francis refers to this process of transformation in his life as the call “to do Penance”, to change or transform one’s life.
When I joined the Franciscan seminary, they told me that Franciscan life is a life of penance, of metanoia, of transformation. But what was there to change in me? Change or transformation was for those others – gamblers, drunkards, womanizers, robbers, … I was a good and pious Catholic boy. I went for daily Mass, was a regular altar server, and joined in the family rosary everyday. I had the good intention of becoming a Franciscan and a priest to serve God and people. In what way had I to change? So, for many years to be Franciscan meant spending a little more time in church, saying some more prayers (Franciscan prayers), fasting on particular days, and continuing being good to others as I had always been. Oh yes, there were some small faults I had – like bad thoughts, distractions during prayer, getting angry sometimes, telling little lies, etc. which I had to confess once a week.
Only gradually, over many years, did I come to understand what “life of Penance”or metanoia really means, what in me had to be transformed.In fact, all the kind of things mentioned above which we make us feel good are precisely what block true metanoia or transformation in us. Which is what Jesus was trying to tell the Pharisees and Saducees – the religious and priests in the Jewish Church.
Steps in Francis’ Conversion
What was the change or transformation that Francis is speaking about? It takes place in various dimensions of life. We can see it as a succession of steps in Francis’ life.
1) 1202-04: It was the failures he met with in reaching his military ambitions that filled him with emptiness and apathy. This emptiness created in him a yearning for some new fulfilment.(Withdrawal into isolation – waiting in patience, keeping up hope in darkness)
2) 1205: An accidental meeting with a leper made him act contrary to his personal abhorrence of them. He took a step against his personal fear and dislike.(Turning point – letting go of a deep-seated personal attitude)
3)This was followed by another ‘accidental’ experience in the church of San Damiano, where he glimpsed the connection between suffering people and a suffering God. He broke through social taboos by devoting himself to these suffering people and found in this a new fulfilment. (Social transformation — a new way of seeing reality)
4) a] 1206: But it also led to a definitive break from his father and his social moorings – letting go of his social identity. (Social transformation decisive).
b] At this moment he intuits a deeper personal identity – “Our Father in heaven”. (Faith transformation, a new way of knowing)
5) 1208 Finally, at Mass in the Portiuncula, the instruction of Jesus to his disciples came to him as the answer to his search for a new purpose: to follow the instructions of Jesus to his disciples as laid out in the Gospel.He begins by changing his belt and footwear. (Behavioural transformation, a new way of having)
6) He discovers gradually that to follow in the footsteps of Jesus he also had to “put on the mind of Christ”, assimilate the spirit of Jesus, to love as Jesus loves.This he expressed in the prayer he made on Mount La Verna before receiving the Stigmata. But nobody can love as God loves unless he is connected to the Source of love. He has to enter into God who is Love. He has to yearn for God to become “My God & my ALL.” And this is a lifelong task. (Life transformation, living in a contemplative stance).
Dimensions of Prayer Life
“Doing penance” for Francis refers to transformation in all these dimensions of one’s life.
First of all, it must be stated that such a transformation of life is a grace – God’s action in us:“This is how the Lord gave me, brother Francis, to do penance …” But we have to allow God to act in us, and that is the purpose of a serious and authentic life of prayer:
1) There has to be some conscious letting go in our lives, letting go of those things which give us our social identity, which shape who we want to be in the eyes of society around us. Our congregational religious identity is part of our social identity. Experiences in our life clarified in prayer should make us aware of where such letting go has to take place.[Francis – steps 1 & 2]. In classical theory of the spiritual life, this is called the stage of Purification.
2) As this letting go happens in us, we begin to relate to people and reality in new ways. We acquire a new way of seeing them [Francis – steps 3 & 4a]. We digest these experiences inPrayer – that is, seeing in God’s light, and this leads us to further letting go of elements in our former identity.Deeper Purification.
3) As this purification intensifies within us, we also begin to see God in a new light. What were formerly for us just belief formulas about God, now become lived experiences of God-within-us. We undergo a Faith transformation and come to a new way of knowing – a contemplative awareness [Francis – steps 4b & 5). This is the stage of Illumination.
4) As this contemplative awareness of God deepens within us, we become more and more one with God-in-us, and we discover new aspects of our life which need transformation and new directions to grow into the image and likeness of Christ. The life of Penance is an ongoing process of transformation through continuous contemplative prayer, leading to a closer union with God-within-us. [Francis – step 6 through his whole life]. This is the stage of Unification.
Prayer and Doing Penance
If our life of Penance has not to stagnate, it must be constantly enkindled by silent contemplative prayer in which the process of letting go (leading to new ways of seeing and knowing) and resulting in transformation of behaviour and lifestyle is continually at work. A life of prayer which does not result in a transformation of the way we see others, of how we know by experience the God of our faith, and of our behaviour and life style consistent with this new knowing and seeing, is a life of pseudo-prayer.
Prayer, even for many religious, has become predominantly a vocal and social practice used by religious authorities to convey to us information on Scripture and Tradition, or a method used by churches and congregations to bind their members together.Such congregational prayer is a functional and social thing for believers to do; it is a social need in any congregation. On the individual level, prayer for many people is the means used to petition God for earthly favours in this life or to buy a ticket to heaven in the next life. In both cases, prayer remains very much an externally oriented activity. The prayer of contemplative silence, however, is not so much to express truths about God or to petition God for various things, but to experience in the soul our mutual relationship with God. Contemplative prayer is an inner experience of God’s presence in and with you that urges you to change and act differently.
The interior experience of God’s presence makes us sensitive to His presence in everything else—in people, in events, in nature. Then we will respond to this presence with reverence, respect, service – in one word, with love.We can then enjoy union with God in any experience of the external senses as well as in prayer. Therefore it could be said of St. Francis that “he was not so much praying as becoming himself a prayer”(2Cel 95). He was not merely a man who prayed at fixed times, but a man whose whole life had become prayer.
Contemplation and Action
Francis once found himself so attracted to solitude and contemplation, to living apart in the caves and in nature, that he was not sure if he should dedicate his life to prayer or to action. So he asked Sister Clare and Brother Sylvester to spend some time in prayer about it and then convey to him their answers. After a few weeks, they both gave him their answer through Brother Masseo. Francis knelt down before Brother Masseo and put his arms out, prepared to accept whatever answer they gave him. They both, in perfect agreement, without having talked to one another, said that God was calling Francis not to be solely contemplative nor to be wholly active in ministry. Francis was to go back and forth between the two (much as Jesus did). Francis jumped up with great excitement and immediately went on the road with this new permission and freedom.
Francis always viewed the following of Christ in an evangelical life-style as the only way towards union with God. The Spirit of the Lord was showing him the way in the footsteps of Jesus. In the mind of this little Poor Man, a humble evangelical lifestyle would always be tightly and permanently linked with a deep contemplative union.
Before Francis, the “secular” priests worked with the people in the parishes and were considered “active.” Those who belonged to religious orders went off to monasteries and prayed. Francis found a way to do both. St. Francis broke with historic monasticism. We were to be “friars” instead of monks, living and working in the midst of ordinary people, in ordinary towns and cities. Francis took prayer on the road; in fact, prayer is what enabled him to sustain his life of love and service to others over the long haul, without becoming hostile, angry, or frustrated. Francis didn’t want a stable form of monastic life; he wanted us to mix with the world and to find God even amidst its pain, confusion, and disorder.
The words action and contemplation have become classic Christian terminology for the two polarities of our lives. They are often put in opposition to one another. Spiritual maturity, however, is the ability to integrate the two into one life stance—to be service-oriented contemplatives or contemplative sin service. By temperament we all tend to approach life from one side or the other. This integration happens slowly and by practice, as it did for Francis. It means that we learn to live constantly in the presence of God, allowing his Spirit to activate our life from within, or, to use a Pauline phrase, that we live “in Christ”.The way to arrive and remain in the presence of God, to live within the activating power of the Holy Spirit, is one way of describing the contemplative consciousness or contemplative stance.
Francis did not only exhort his brothers to spend time in prayer and adoration. He was himself an example of prayer. He would often leave his apostolic activities and retire into solitude for long weeks, in order to be alone with God. It was for him a kind of intense thirst (L.M.10.3).
His spiritual journey is marked by several secluded and wooded places where he built hermitages: Carceri, Celle, San Urbano, Poggio Bustone, Fonte Colombo, Greccio, La Verna…. (1Cel 71). He even wrote a special Rule for hermitages.
These ‘high places’ were not meant to be a perpetual abode. The Spirit of the Lord always brought him back to the people, following the way of the Gospel. The spiritual formation of the disciples in the four Gospels does not happen in the sanctuary of in the seclusion of a monastery; it happens on the road, in the company of beggars, prostitutes, and lepers.
And so the cycle of life and prayer begins. And you are never sure which is feeding which, or whether it is action or contemplation that comes first. They live through one another, and neither of them can exist healthily by themselves. The dance of action and contemplation is an art form that will take your entire life to master.
Francis’ Teaching on Prayer
Saint Francis of Assisi hasn’t written any treatise on prayer. But he still is an experienced guide and also a living example on the way towards union with God. His essential teaching on prayer, also coming from his own experience, is summarised in a sentence from the Rule of life: “Let the Brothers be mindful above all to keep on asking for the Spirit of the Lord and to leave Him free to act within themselves”(2Reg.10/8).
Praying, according to Francis, means:
1) earnestly desiring and longing for the Spirit of the Lord — for, as St. Paul says, “we do not know how we ought to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs that words cannot express” (Rom 8: 26);
2) leaving Him free to act within oneself.
Which means that we must be constantly made free of all those desires and attitudes in us that arise from our own egocentric spirit, our tendencies to assert and protect ourselves — our petty loves. Letting go of our wilfulness and surrendering our self-will is for Francis the highest form of poverty, of non-appropriation. This is the core message of the Admonitions.
How are we to open ourselves to the Spirit of the Lord? How do we give Him freedom to act within us?
Francis indicates that the quest for the Spirit of God is an adventure requiring first of all ‘a pure heart’. After exhorting his brothers to long for the Spirit of the Lord, he also invites them to “pray always with a pure heart” (2Reg.10/9).This purity of heart is not a narrow moral concept for Francis.
The man with a ‘pure heart’ is aware of his own poverty; turning humbly towards his Lord for fulfilment. He cannot anymore remain closed within himself, as he is wholly turned towards God — lives with an abiding spirit of adoration, in a contemplative stance, even in the midst of action.Then God becomes for him “My God and my ALL.”
Francis’ Teaching on Discernment
Francis is very much aware that we are not spontaneously docile to the Spirit, whatever spiritual and religious level we seem to have reached. Devoting oneself to so-called spiritual activities doesn’t mean that we obey the Spirit of the Lord. We may have a zeal for prayer, do mortifications, devote ourselves to missionary activities or long studies of the Word of God…but Francis tells us that the motives behind all these activities may be far away from the Spirit of the Lord. And we may not even be aware of it.
Therefore, in his Admonitions, Francis helps his brothers to become self-aware and truthful, to distinguish the voice of the Spirit of the Lord from our human and self-centred tendencies. The criterion he gives them is simple and infallible: Suppose that a Religious, wholly given to a noble activity, gets upset and worried as soon as he gets opposed or criticised. It shows that he is following his ego, is centred upon himself, and pursues his own needs for power. Such a man wants to keep control over his own life. Under the illusion of a virtuous and spiritual activity, he isn’t aware that his motives are far away from the Spirit of the Lord. Water gets cloudy when it isn’t pure: in the same way confusion and anger show the impurity of a human heart. Confusion, irritation, impatience, anger are the signs of a self-centred soul, even if it has already reached a high spiritual level. (see especially Admonitions XII, XII, XIV).
So Francis admonishes his brothers in the 1 Rule :“In that love which is God, I entreat all my friars, ministers and subjects, to put away every attachment, all care and solicitude, and serve, love, honour, and adore our Lord and God with a pure heart and mind; this is what he seeks above all. We should make a dwelling place within ourselves where he can stay, he who is the Lord God almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (1Reg 22,26-27).
Conclusion
At the end of a letter written to the whole Order, Francis writes a prayer addressed to God in his own name and that of his brothers, where he stresses clearly his views:
“Almighty, eternal, just and merciful God, grant us in our misery that we may do for your sake alone what we know you want us to do, and always want what pleases you; so that, cleansed and enlightened interiorly and on fire with the ardour of the Holy Spirit, we may be able to follow in the footsteps of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and so make our way to you, Most High by your grace alone, you who live and reign in perfect Trinity and simple Unity, and are glorified, God all powerful, for ever and ever. Amen” (Lord 50-52).
This short prayer synthesizes the whole spiritual teaching of St. Francis: Purified, illuminated and ablaze under the action of the Holy Spirit (contemplative prayer), a human being is able to follow in the footsteps of the Beloved Son (evangelical conversion), and reaches union with the Father (spiritual transformation).
When speaking about those living in poverty, humility and mutual service according to the Beatitudes, Francis will write: “On those who live this kind of life [in other words, live in penance] and persevere up to the end, the Spirit of the Lord will come and abide in them, and they will become children of the Father in Heaven” (2 L Fid 48-49).