The National Fraternity of the Secular Franciscan Order in the United States welcomes you to a nationwide Zoom event celebrating the 800th anniversary of the transitus of Francis to eternal life.
Even when we grumble at God’s love and concern when we first discover it, we can make God’s heart rejoice if we obey.
From the Lord’s point of view, what really matters is not what you get. What really matters is that one works in the vineyard.
When we pray “holy be Your name,” we ask that God’s name be honored not only by our words, but also by the way we live. St. Francis reminds us that the more deeply we come to know God, the more clearly we recognize His blessings, promises, majesty, and judgments. As we give thanks for His presence in our lives, our relationship with Him deepens.
Forgiveness is realizing that we cannot change the past; forgiveness is refusing to let what we cannot change control us.
We can never be certain how St. Francis of Assisi envisioned heaven and the majesty of God. Francis was a medieval man, and his understanding of the cosmos was radically different from ours. But for centuries, Christians had accepted a model of the universe as one constructed with the Earth at the center, and the Sun, the Moon, and the planets in separate, concentric spheres moving outward to the sphere of the stars.
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?
As we continue our celebration of the “Easter of St. Francis,” our attention now turns to his relationship with God. For the theme of this issue of the TAU, we have chosen the Prayer Inspired by the Our Father (FA:ED, vol.1, p.158). This prayer is one of the clearest windows into St. Francis’s inner spirituality: contemplative, Trinitarian, and centered on God’s overflowing goodness. It is an authentic Franciscan text preserved in the earliest manuscript collections and universally accepted by modern scholars.
Article 12 may be only one sentence long, but it offers a rich and powerful invitation: to witness to the good yet to come and to seek the purity of heart that frees us to love.
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?