St Francis College - Franciscan Yearbook (Brooklyn, NY)

Page 8 text:

neither the allurements of mind nor the fury of passion can distract, is more precious to his fellow-men than a conclave of dons and savants who drift in the mists of speculation and hypothesis. As authors, the men of the latter school urge the world today to learn two lessons from the life of St. Francis—faith and joy. Our passive religionists, left starkly cold after long conflict, can learn from him that there is a God! They can know that Christ, the Lord and Redeemer of earth, wants Love, and that Love must be sweetened with Suffering. They can realize with St. Francis that iniquity will come but that faith cannot be quenched. Because of faith we all will understand the virtue of poverty, not temporal poverty, but the angelic poverty of spirit which should direct all economic and social movements. And that poverty is primarily a personal conversion to Christ; it is a definite condition for the realization of the soul’s freedom. The Seraphic Saint can then teach a cynical and disillusioned society the magical power of joy. He can reopen the heart of man to the divine gift of laughter. The way to break the barriers of heaven and earth is by song. Francis was the Troubadour of Our Lady; his companies wer e penitents but wished to be known as Joculatores Domini, God’s jongleurs; their leader was the official jester at the court of the King. In that delightful capacity, he tumbled joy¬ ously, standing on his head and kicking his feet ecstatically in the air. While in that posture he himself first learned the true relation of earth and sky; for then he saw that the world does not swing proudly in space but that the fields and trees and birds—yes, even the sun—are really suspended from the blue heavens. t

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Many a mile from London Town A happy spirit clad in brown } Ragged but woodland-scented y clean y Dances and sings before his Queen } Phantom but ringing laughter fills Wide heavens over noble hills , When Fashion deigns to call him sweet. Who bled f row heart and hands and feet. The attitude of Fashion is so lacking in taste that it must be passed over hurriedly. Yet a pertinent remark is in order: one must never be too optimistic of reconversion in the case of our brethren of our religious affiliations who profess an exquisite devotion to the Franciscan Ideal. Oftentimes, such men admire a spiritualized Pied Piper who had an amazing power over the gentle birds and beasts of the fields. Their position is germane to that entertained by the dilettantes of literature. There is a small group of writers, truly spiritual thinkers and visioners of greatness, to whom II Poverello is a living force for the improvement of in¬ dividual and social conduct. They look to him today particularly and relive the life of their model, urgently desiring that they “ . . . might ivake St. Francis in you all Brother of birds and trees, God ' s Troubadour, Blinded with weeping for the sad and poor: Our wealth undone, all strict Franciscan men, Gome, let us chant the canticle again Of mother earth and the enduring sun. God make each soul the lowly leper ' s slave: God make us saints and brave. It is from such sentiments as these that really constructive thinking follows. When society realizes that it needs most badly the freedom of companionship with fellow-men so that “each soul (is) the lowly leper’s slave” and that in order to be saints we must necessarily be brave, then there will be hope for relative surcease from the disease of our times. With such writers there is the permament knowledge that Francis is as ageless as the perennial Peter Pan, and without being irreverent, as delightful and charming as that literary creation. They have learned from their subject that life cannot be divorced from God; that the easiest way to Him is not through the noise of words or the expression of fine formulae but by way of folly and childishness, for God so loves the simple child and him who becomes so cheerfully a fool for His sake. So Francis never attempted to appear other than a fool, but to us, through the lenses of time, he is a glorious fool who did not recognize limits to love. He has taught that a single soul with a simple purpose, from which

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