NATURE AS MIRROR

Tuesday, October 4

Feast of St. Francis of Assisi

I think what modern men and women lack is a deep sense of belonging. That sense of belonging is given to you by God from your very birth, and then it is mirrored to you in the natural world ¢â‚¬”if you are looking and listening. In nature you can overcome your sense of separateness or alienation ¢â‚¬”and know you are a part of the whole. If Franciscan spirituality means anything it is founded on a very positive image of human nature and all of creation,  ¢â‚¬Å“original blessing ¢â‚¬  instead of original sin.

There is a kind of therapy that I ¢â‚¬â„¢d like to call  ¢â‚¬Å“proactive ¢â‚¬  therapy, in which you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t try to heal your wounds afterwards. Instead, you rely on your inherent connection with everything and are healed ahead of time into a kind of  ¢â‚¬Å“hidden wholeness, ¢â‚¬  as Thomas Merton called it. I call it  ¢â‚¬Å“the Unified Field, ¢â‚¬  or as Gerard Manley Hopkins called it  ¢â‚¬Å“the dearest freshness deep down things. ¢â‚¬  Inside of the Unified Field you find that it is a good world and you also are inherently good, not because you are independently perfect (you never will be!), but because you belong to the Whole ¢â‚¬”that is always and deeply good and perfect in its Wholeness (the pleroma, or  ¢â‚¬Å“fullness ¢â‚¬  of Colossians 1:19-20). To live inside of such fullness is what it means to be a Franciscan.

Richard Rohr