Sept 27

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12:12–13

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

Meditation

From his article "Special Year of Saint Francis: A Mirror for Our Age," by Séamus Mulholland OFM

As we enter this Special Year of Saint Francis, we must resist the temptation to reduce this towering saint to comfortable dimensions. Francis is not our patron of nice sentiments about nature and kindness. He is the radical who abandoned everything for Christ, who found freedom in total dispossession, who discovered joy in humiliation, who saw all creation as sacred, and who pursued peace through the foolishness of the cross.

The relevance of Saint Francis to our present moment lies precisely in his refusal to accommodate the gospel to human comfort. In an age of superficial spirituality, he demands depth. In an age of material obsession, he demands poverty. In an age of narcissism, he demands humility. In an age of environmental destruction, he demands reverence for creation. In an age of division, he demands the costly peace of the cross.

This Jubilee Year invites us not to admire Francis from a safe distance but to let his life interrogate our own. The question is not whether Francis is relevant to our world, but whether we have the courage to embrace the relevance he offers, a relevance that comes not through adaptation to our age but through prophetic challenge to it. Eight hundred years have not diminished the scandal of his witness. If anything, time has only sharpened the edge of his example against the comfortable Christianity we prefer.

Musical Selection