Sabiduría de un pobre

“It is hard to accept this effacement of things and to maintain a conversation with what seems to be nothingness. It is hard to remain awake in the midst of empty darkness, where not only all familiar beings have lost their color, their voice and even their identity, but where the Divine Presence itself seems to have disappeared. Francis had desired poverty. He had espoused it, as he used to say. And here, at this moment of his existence, he was poor─painfully poor─beyond all that he had ever dreamed.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“So too, when one lives far from all human support, from all which habitually gives existence a semblance of solidity, only then can one test for oneself the truth of words such as these: “My rock, my fortress, it is you.” At such a time, a person without fearing can see one's existence tremble like the frail stem of a columbine in the crevice of a rock above the steep ravine.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“Without comfort or glamour, this life did not permit any disguise. There one was compelled to face one's own true self. In keeping with the surroundings, the friars tended to become sparing in words and gestures. Feelings, too, were assuaged and became more simple─not by dint of reading or inner search, but through a holy and harsh obedience to those things which poverty demands when it is accepted in all its right.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“In this wild and treacherous mountain scene, where all moving about meant difficult climbing or rapid and dangerous descent, the body itself had to undergo a discipline of conformity and purification which made it more docile to the spirit. In order to live this contemplative life one needed the coordination of a tumbler or an acrobat. A friar could not fear creeping on hands and knees, nor wearing out clothes on the rough rocks.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“but sanctity is not developing oneself to the utmost, nor is it an achievement of one's own doing. It is at first a void which one discovers in oneself and accepts and which God then comes to fill in proportion to how much one makes oneself receptive to God's bounty.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“We cannot avoid them, and when we see them, we do not have the right to be indifferent. Woe to us, if by our silence or inertia the wicked become obdurate in their malice and eventually triumph.” “It is true, we cannot be indifferent in the face of evil or error,” resumed Francis, “but we should be neither irritated nor dismayed by it. Such dismay and irritation will only restrict the charity within us or in others. Rather must we learn to see evil and error as God sees them. It is precisely that which is so difficult. Where we would tend to see an error to be condemned and to be punished, God sees, from the very start, a suffering to be alleviated.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“El corazón puro es el que no cesa de adorar al Señor vivo y verdadero.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“At present, it was the hour of the ebbing tide and he was there, oppressed, gasping like the fish which struggles not to die.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“What else was this voice saying? That the glory with which God is surrounded is awful and that no one can see God until one dies and passes through water and fire. Fire fell now from heaven─and soon water was mixed with it. At first a few large drops came─then it poured, a hard driving downpour which fell on the rocks, bounced off, then streamed from all sides toward the ravine, gurgling as it went. The water descended on the mountain like a giant baptism, like an invitation to a great purification. Francis watched and listened.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“This evening, the voice of God was in the storm. But one had to know how to hear it. Francis was listening. And what was this powerful voice saying as it reechoed in the black night, interrupted only by the lightning? It decried the vanity of everything of this world.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“they know that they were expressing something vital. Then all of these oft-repeated prayers held for them the zest of the real thing. There was not God on one side and reality on the other. God was real, at the very heart of reality.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi

“They hoped that he was going to take charge of his order, but his physical strength betrayed him. Francis had returned from Palestine with his health completely broken. To face the malcontents, one had to be strong, with a leader's robust temperament. Cardinal Hugolin, protector of the order, had thus advised Brother Elias to take the leadership and Francis had acquiesced─although not without misgivings. For his own part, suffering with ailments of the liver and stomach, his infected eyes burned by the sun of the Near East as well as by tears, Francis had kept to a course of silence and prayer. But a heavy sadness had descended upon him like a sort of blight; it clung to his soul and corroded it, never ceasing to gnaw at him by night and day.”

Generate ImageSave to Screvi