Opening to Love

On this feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, I share the following excerpt from a reflection written by Richard Rohr.

If our only goal is to love, there is no such thing as failure. Francis of Assisi succeeded in living in a single-hearted way, in which his only goal was to love. This intense eagerness to love made his whole life an astonishing victory for the human and divine spirit and showed how they work so beautifully together.

That eagerness to love is the core and foundation of Francis’ spiritual genius. He encountered a love that just kept opening to him, and then he passed on the same by “opening and opening” to the increasingly larger world around him. He willingly fell into the “bright abyss,” as poet 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. He then brought the mystery of the cross to its universal application, 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’s happened after the letting go, or we would probably always be afraid to love.

. . . In the Franciscan reading of the gospel, there’s no reason to be religious or to love God except in recognizing “The love of [God] who loved us greatly is greatly to be loved,” as Francis said. Religion is not about heroic willpower or winning or being right. This has been a counterfeit for holiness in much of Christian history. True growth in holiness is a growth in willingness to be loved and to love.

– Richard Rohr
Excerpted from “Opening to Love”
Center for Action and Contemplation
September 29, 2024

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• St. Francis of Assisi: Dancer, Rebel, Archetype
• Francis of Assisi: God’s Gift to the Church
• No Mere Abstraction
• St. Francis of Assisi and Human Sexuality
• Francis and Elias
• Francis of Assisi: The Antithesis of Clericalism and Monarchism
• Francis and the Wolf
• Solar Brother
• St. Francis of Assisi: A Gay Man’s Man

Image: Detail of a mural by Dimitri Kadiev. Writes Richard Rohr: “This mural art on the outside of the Center for Action and Contemplation represents Francis’ love and acceptance of life in its varied and diverse manifestations.”