The key to Francis’s fraternal relationship to the created world is identity. Francis came to know himself as a creature in relation to God as Creator. “The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him,” Thomas Merton wrote. When I find God, then I find myself, and when I find myself then I find the person I am created to be, the little “word” that God has spoken from all eternity. Bonaventure, too, wrote: “I see myself better in God than in myself.”
Only when we know the source of our lives can we know the truth of our lives—that we and all creation come from God and belong to God. We are not created to wield power over others but to join with others, including the created world, in the praise of God. Without this discovery of true identity, we go about in the world with a false sense of self, a self far away from God and from the true self. We begin to wander in the world looking for the meaning of our lives, which leads to self-centeredness and a detachment from the created world around us. The false self thrives on power and manipulation because it does not know the true self and, therefore, does not know itself in God.
—from the book Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth
by Keith Douglass Warner, OFM, Ilia Delio, OSF, and Pamela Wood
