The Life of Penance Until the Coming of the Lord

 

We are preparing for the Feast of our Holy Father St. Francis that will be celebrated on Wednesday, October 4th.  Here is a meditation:

    If by true penance we have determined to follow Him Who is the only Way to the Father, we must keep our eyes focused on His second coming, that we may be ready to go forth to meet Him.  The thought of His return must guide our every action in this life and govern our every judgment on present realities.  Whenever Saint Francis speaks of the Way of Christ, it is always to include its final goal in the second coming. 

 

    What Saint Francis believed and prayed and lived shaped his whole being, making him for the men of his age a striking and unforgettable witness of the final ages that are to come.  Saint Francis seems to have been vividly conscious that the final age of the world had already dawned.  It is under this aspect, as a preparation for the judgment and final consummation of all things, that he views the special mission of his Order.  The motivating force and the very content and tenor of Franciscan preaching of penance is faith in the second coming of the Lord, toward which we mortals are moving in this life. 

 

   Saint Francis finds the other-worldly attitude that must mark the Christian Life of his friars summed up in the words of Saint Peter: “as pilgrims and strangers.”  In his role as pilgrim, Saint Francis lived that Christian hope which even here lays hold of what it seeks for as a precious if not visible possession. 

 

    Though wholly conscious that in this life he awaits the life to come, the Christian must contribute to the manifestation of the Kingdom of God in this world.  Saint Francis spells out in many details what conversion to God means in practice.  Even though these make him a fool in the eyes of the world, they are a faithful expression of his other-worldly view, since for him they make present and visible here and now the Kingdom of God to come.  What now seems folly in the eyes of the world will then be revealed as the prudence of the children of God.  Once again men will discover that only when things are looked at from their final end are they truly seen.

 

    “The Lord called me to the way of simplicity and has in truth revealed this way to me.”  Saint Francis looked to the God-Man as his Model, and copied Him as perfectly as grace permitted him.  In simplicity he forgot himself and did purely and simply what the Lord Himself had done.  This is the way of simplicity to which the Lord had called him and which the Lord had shown him.