If our only goal is to love, there is no such thing as failure. Francis succeeded in living in this single-hearted way and thus turned all failure on its head. He even turned failure into success. This intense eagerness to love made his whole life an astonishing victory for the human and divine spirit and showed how they can work so beautifully together.
That eagerness to love is the core and foundation of his spiritual genius. He encountered a love that just kept opening to him and then passed on the same by “opening and opening and opening” to the increasingly larger world around him. He willingly fell into the “bright abyss,” as poet and faith writer Christian Wiman calls it, where all weighing and counting are unnecessary and even burdensome.
After his conversion, Francis lived the rest of his life in an entirely different economy—the nonsensical economy of grace, where two plus two equals a hundred and deficits are somehow an advantage. Such transformation of the soul, both in the inflowing and in the outflowing, is the experiential heart of the Gospel for Francis of Assisi. He then brought the mystery of the cross to its universal application (far beyond the Christian logo), for he learned that both the receiving of love and the letting go of it for others are always a very real dying to our present state.
Whenever we choose to love, we will—and must—die to who we were before we loved. So, we often hold back. Our former self is taken from us by the object of our love. We only realize this is what has happened after the letting go, or we would probably always be afraid to love.
People are only afraid of death as long as they do not know who they are, but once we know that we are objectively children of God, we are already home and our inheritance is given to us ahead of time. Then we can begin living and enjoying instead of climbing, proving, or defending. Our false self, all religions say, in one way or another, must die before we die. Only then can we sincerely say with Francis, “Welcome, Sister Death”!
“I have faced the first death, and I lost nothing that was real. So, the second death can do me no harm,” as Francis declared in his Canticle of the Creatures. Death itself will only “keep opening, and opening, and opening,” and I think that is exactly what we mean by resurrection.
All this creates a very different form and shape to our spiritual life. It is no longer elitist, separatist, or competitive, but changes our deepest imagination in the direction of ever greater simplicity. This imaginal world will not normally change until we place ourselves, or are placed, in new and different lifestyle situations. As we state in one of our core principles at the Center for Action and Contemplation, “We do not think ourselves into a new way of living, but we live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” Francis and Clare displaced themselves into different worlds where their hearts could imagine very different things, and they had to pay attention to something other than comfort or convenience.
This excerpt is from Chapter 13 in Richard Rohr’s book Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi. The 10-year-anniversary edition and accompanying Eager to Love Companion Guide are available in the Franciscan Media Store.
