(This article originally appeared in the TAU-USA Spring 2024 Digital Issue #111)

Kathryn Swegart – Formation Director, Jordan Smith, and Dean Astumian – Minister of St. John the Baptist Fraternity in Winslow, Maine.

 The St. John the Baptist fraternity in Winslow, Maine is pleased to announce the winner of its essay contest, opened to high school and college students in Maine. The winner is Jordan Smith, a student at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He is a member of Corpus Christi Parish in Waterville and is active in Colby Catholics. Jordan is from Severna Park, Maryland.

With brilliance and insight, Jordan weaves a philosophical connection between beauty and God as proclaimed by St. Francis in the Canticle of the Sun. Jordan received a $100 prize and a Word of Fire Bible. We hope that you are inspired by the thoughtful writing of this young man. Praise be to God!

St. Francis’ Canticle of the Sun reveals his complex understanding of the relationship between God, Nature, and Man. From the outset, Francis unqualifiedly recognizes God as “Most High.” Nothing else matches the grandeur of God. However, this does not prevent Francis from proclaiming: “Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures.” The creation may be praised alongside God because His glory is manifest through creation. This ‘translucent’ element of creation that allows one to see through it to its Creator is the essence of beauty. The connection between translucence and beauty is emphasized in Francis’ identification of “Brother Sun” as the creature closest to God. The reason the sun “bear a likeness” to God most of all is that he is “beautiful and radiant.” Just as the sun shines its rays to not only reveal the beauty of the physical world but also to give it life and sustenance, so too God’s overflowing goodness manifests itself not only in the continual sustaining of being but in the essential beauty of all that exists. For the God Who is Beauty Itself will always produce beautiful creatures. That is to say, being and beauty are coextensive for St. Francis. Beauty is not something I merely personally will to believe or not. Beauty is constantly eliciting a response from me. It calls me out of my own being into the source of my being through the creation in which beauty inheres. Beauty raises beauty into the Beautiful Itself.

The precise connection between God, Nature, Beauty, and its implications for people on a practical basis comes to light in the second half of Francis’ canticle in which he praises “Sister Mother Earth, / who sustains us and governs us and who produces / varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.” The title “Sister Mother” is emblematic of the dual nature of all of creation: Insofar as the Earth is mere matter and must receive her being from God, she is called “Sister,” but insofar as God has given her the ability to produce her own fruits, she is called “Mother.” These fruits are intrinsically “colored,” which is to say that, just like the sun, the sustenance that Mother Earth provides cannot be separated from the beauty that she produces. Though this may seem to make the beautiful overwhelming, perhaps even to the point that the individual cannot resist it, St. Francis is careful to avoid this conclusion. For Francis mourns: “Woe to those who die in mortal sin.” It is only those who serve God “with great humility” that shall be spared from “the second death.” Humility, as the opposite of closeminded and selfish pride, is nothing but the openness to being and beauty that leads one invariably to God. The choice, therefore, is ours: We may open ourselves to the beauty of God and His creation or close in on ourselves and experience eternal darkness.

https://www.secularfranciscansusa.org/2024/06/17/st-john-the-baptist-fraternity-essay-contest-winner/

(This article originally appeared in the TAU-USA Spring 2024 Digital Issue #111)

by Bret Thoman, OFS

The Original San Damiano Crucifix

On Friday, January 5, 2024, at the Sanctuary of La Verna, the Franciscan Family officially opened the VIII Centenary of the Stigmata of St. Francis, with an event entitled “From the wounds to new life.” Eight centuries ago this year, up on the same mountain, on September 17, 1224, he received the stigmata; that is, the wounds of Christ were revealed on his hands, feet, and side. However, St. Francis’ interiorization of the cross took place much earlier. It happened around 1205-06, at the beginning of his conversion.

After Francis’ dream of becoming a knight ended in failure, he was praying in solitary places around Assisi in order to discern what God wanted for him. The Legend of the Three Companions describes one pivotal moment.

While he was walking by the church of San Damiano, he was told in the Spirit to go inside for a prayer. Once he entered, he began to pray intensely before an image of the Crucified, which spoke to him in a tender and kind voice: “Francis, don’t you see that my house is being destroyed? Go, then, and rebuild it for me.”

Thomas of Celano, Francis’ first biographer, recorded something that perhaps not everyone understood: “From that time on, compassion for the Crucified was impressed into his holy soul. And we honestly believe the wounds of the sacred Passion were impressed deep in his heart, though not yet on his flesh” (Second Life 10: Book II: 249). That would take place in 1224, in Laverna.

From that moment, Francis looked at the cross as the highest expression of the “minority” of Christ. St. Francis’ understanding of the cross was not mere abstract theological assent.

Instead, the cross was something concrete that lived within him.

The cross is the lowest place Christ assumed when he came down from the heavens to assume human flesh: “though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2: 5-8).

With Christ as his example, in his footsteps, Francis began to appropriate to himself the cross. He so identified with the cross that he used it as a type of signature. He would leave the marking of the Tau etched into walls and ceilings wherever he went. He signed his name with the Tau in the few manuscripts we have written by him.

Francis embodied the cross of Christ so fully that it informed him in every circumstance of life— especially the difficult ones. The way he did so is perhaps best revealed in one of Francis’ dictated writings known as “True and Perfect Joy,” recounted in Little Flowers of St. Francis (Chapter 8).

In the popular narrative, Francis and Brother Leo were returning to the Portiuncula from Perugia during the cold winter months. As they walked, Francis said to Brother Leo that true joy would not exist in great circumstances, such as if all the theologians of Paris, prelates, and royalty were to enter the Order. He continues, saying that true joy would not be present even if his brothers were to convert all non-believers to the faith, or if he had so much grace from God that he healed the sick and performed miracles.

Then Francis reveals what true joy is. He tells Brother Leo that if the two were to arrive at the Portiuncula in Assisi in the dead of night, during the winter, freezing, covered with mud and ice, and the porter would not recognize them, but order them to go away, telling them that they were “simple and stupid!”, then Francis says, “I tell you this: If I had patience and did not become upset, true joy, as well as true virtue and the salvation of my soul, would consist in this.”

St. Francis was teaching Brother Leo that nothing good is ours; rather, all good comes from God. He said that the greatest graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit are those of conquering oneself and willingly enduring “sufferings, insults, humiliations, and hardships for the love of Christ”; for Scripture says, “Who confers distinction upon you? What do you possess that you have not received? But if you have received it, why are you boasting as if you did not receive it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7);

Francis concludes with one final verse: “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14). And this same cross would reveal itself soon on his body.

https://www.secularfranciscansusa.org/2024/06/10/the-cross-and-st-francis/