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Way of Penance
La Via della Penitenza in
Francesco d'Assisi
Vincenzo Cherubino Bigi, OFM
Edizioni Franciscane Bologna, 1988
Translation: Fr.
Seraphin J. Conley, T.O.R. & Fr. Patrick J.
Quinn, T.O.R.
After so many centuries, and in spite of the different
forms of society, there is still a fascination with the life of St. Francis of
Assisi. And it is not a waste of time to consider the question that Fra Masseo put to Francis as we
read in the Little Flowers, Chapt.X: Why after you,
Francis? Why is the whole world running after you? (Read text of chapter in the
Fioretti.)
But, after reading the story, perhaps the thought that
comes to mind is that it does not explain the reality of Francis. It might be
seen more as a pious statement about the humility of the Saint rather than
telling us something about his real personality. Such an interpretation on our
part is probably mistaken because Francis truly believed himself to be a great
sinner.
St. Francis had a profound awareness of sin; so the
sense of himself as a great sinner came from his conscience, it was not a
pretext or a way of avoiding the task of responding more faithfully to God's
call. It was really a more perceptive response: "I am the greatest of
sinners"; namely, "I have within me a profound and radical sense of
sin ... and this sense of sin places me in some way in the presence of
God."
It is this that we will consider as the point of
departure for our reflection on the penitential way of St. Francis. It is true
that the word "penance" has a very forbidding quality, since it goes
against all the fashions and values of our modern society which is deeply
marked by desire for pleasure, for profit, for ownership and for power.
The way of penance: Even for Catholics, the life of
penance is rarely considered. Thus, Penance might be seen as an extraordinary
act, for example during a Holy Year, but generally it does not form a part of
Christian life. Moreover this term is burdened with a somewhat masochistic
meaning in its long semantic development and in practices of Christian life.
It is important for us today to recover the sense of
penance in the life of Francis. This is so in order that we can practice it and
to integrate in our own lives the penance lived by Francis. It must be noted
that Francis was also the man of perfect happiness, of joy. In him anything
seemingly distorted or masochistic such as scourging or other practice of
mortification is more incidental than being the purpose or the goal of his
life.
It is important for us today to recover the true sense
of penance in Francis. And this begins with our own awareness of being sinners
before the Lord. Today our view of sin is very superficial.
The consciousness of sin places me before God, because
the reality of sin places me naked before God and before Christ. Sin is not
guilt. Guilt is concerned with the laws of this world, with duties which we
have not fulfilled. On the other hand, sin is concerned with the mystery of God
who gives himself to me and I refuse Him: "Only against You
have I sinned." And then again especially for the Christian, sin puts him
before Christ himself. Sin is not a word of this world, of our worldly culture;
it is a word which links us with the divine; antithetically certainly, but it
makes a break with the limited world of earthly culture and places us before
the mystery of God. We see in the Gospel that the Pharisees, when confronted by
a Christ who says:"My child, your sins are forgiven you," are
scandalized and say "Who can forgive sin? Only God!."
Sin must be seen in the context of Christ, because the
presence of Christ in the world and, therefore. in
each one's personal history is ignored and rejected by the sinner. To have a
sense of sin means to be conscious of having disregarded God in one's life. The
sin of Cain was that he offered to God the leftovers of his labor. Francis,
reflecting on his youth, saw it like this: a life which had neglected God. He
knew God only by convention but God was not the central value of his life, nor
was Christ was the inspiration of his choices.
Note well, that this condition is very common among us
in our daily lives because we leave God at the margin of our interests. God is
the great outsider both in our personal existence and in our culture. Many
times, however, one is afraid to admit the fact that God is emarginated in my
life and is distant. The Christian may be considered as Christian in so far as
he is attentive to Christ, the God who became incarnate in Christ, the model of
life for every person. For the Christian, the abandorunent
and neglect of this truth is called sin.
Our great sin is to live without an awareness of God,
without an awareness of Christ. Francis was deeply aware of this, so deeply
aware that it became a determining truth for him. This enabled him to say truly
that he felt himself to be the greatest of sinners because in his youthful
efforts for self-realization he had excluded God and His Son, Christ.
He had wanted to be a great knight, he wanted to
attain worldly glory, power, preeminence and splendor but he had not lived in
the presence of Christ. Christ had no part in his plans for his future. This
was his great sin.
When one wants to speak of the way of penance in
the life of Francis, it is necessary to begin with this deep awareness. It is
not the disciplines, the fasts, the hairshirt or the
penances of the flagellanti of his time which
characterize or qualify his life of penance.
The way of penance is putting God as the center of all
we value so that neither profit, nor personal success direct
our lives in this world. What matters now is living in God's Presence, and
allowing Christ center place in our lives. To be attentive to Christ as my
Model and to try in some way to integrate Him in my life is the point of
departure and the continual renewal of the true sense of penance: a continuous
conversion which is profoundly internalized. It is not the mortification of
the body but the conversion of one's spirit.
To live in the presence of Christ, to live in the
presence of God is to assume in oneself the law of love which was
expressed by Christ in His life. Beginning from this point, we will seek to
discover the essential moments of the penitential life of Francis. The
fundamental point already described is that of putting God at the center of our
daily life, to refer to God in the continual horizon of our daily choices.
In our daily activities, we can find ourselves in a
fortunate condition: we can do, good in our actions.
The conversion of Francis is to be found right here: in referring the good
we do back to God.
This is the interior poverty of man as against the
boast of the Pharisee who attributes to himself the possibility of doing good, of saving himself by means of the observance of the
law in his good works.
St. Francis always has this concern at the core: all
the good that I perform by my actions is not mine, but is God's work.
From here flows the centrality of God in my life. It is not my possessions, not
my riches, my prosperity but everything good that I am able to do is a gift
from God and so I refer it back to God in thanksgiving and in self- emptying.
The heart of one who does
penance is a heart empty of self ... which recognizes that the journey of this world is a gift of God. All the
good things one does in the course of daily living are not his riches, his
possessions but rather come from the God Who is the Giver of every good gift
and so must be referred to, and brought back to Him. Hence, the first
characteristic of the penance of St. Francis is purity of spirit, of
interiority, is a poverty of the heart.
Referring things back to God implies yet something else, it implies not seeking our reward in this
world. "You have received your reward." Many times in life after
doing something good we expect to receive the reward for this good act and,
when we don't receive it, we complain to God: I chose the good and still I have
this sickness, etc.. To be converted means not looking
for a reward in this world. Here is the deep reality of the Spirit, namely that
if I do good in order to receive a reward, it means that I wish to possess, I
wish to enrich myself, I wish to have a lasting place
in this world. Often St. Francis in his writings admonishes us on this very
point. The gift of yourself must be free
just as the gift of God is free. The reference back to God means not
seeking in this world one's reward: this is what it means to be free.
When Christ multiplied the bread and when they would
have made him king, He hid himself, because if He had agreed to be King then,
it would have been this miracle which ruled men. Jesus would be manipulating
them through persuading them by satisfying their physical needs. The reward of
bread as a promise for meeting Christ would have taken away their liberty.
I am free when I am able to give, not when my conduct
is influenced by selfishness. even when it is a
spiritual selfishness, which always seeks to be rewarded and gratified. One who
acts in this way is not yet converted.
Penance is above all this deep freedom from one's
selfish demands in order to be perfectly free for God and our neighbor. It is a
profound guiding concept which interiorizes the
notion of changing one's mind. Generally our mind is concentrated on ourselves,
our power, our benefits, our possessions, our success.
We really become the center of our life. Conversion means to put God at the
center and myself to the side.
The journey of St. Francis from the beginning to the
end consisted in this very movement. One might say that externally nothing
changes, but everything changes internally, because in the interior of man God
becomes everything, the center of emotions of action, from which I draw and to
which I refer all my deliberations and my daily choices.
Therefore, the life of penance in Francis presents
itself first of all as an awareness of sin and immediately thereafter as a
profound displacement of self as the center of one's existence and allowing God
to be the Lord. Cristocentrism is characteristic of
the Franciscan school, because St. Francis lived in a real and existential way
centered on Christ. His was not an egocentric but a Cristocentric
life.
In this study concerning penance a question arises
regarding the body. When one speaks of penance, immediately one thinks of
disciplines, hairshirts, and mortifications. When St.
Francis lived there this form of penance was prevalent. There were the "flagellanti. " The body came
to be abused by penances of various sorts that were all directed towards a
mortification of the flesh. Many went too far in reducing the meaning of
penance to consist in these. The theme of the body in penance is a very
delicate one.
There is a need to be very aware of some aspects: St.
Francis did not seek corporal penance in itself. He desired the mortification
of the body when it rebelled against the law of the spirit, the Law of God. Yet
one is not to do penance when it is done to weaken the body so that it can no
longer carry out its work. The penance that S. Francis wanted for a man is
found in work. "I want to work and I wish that all would work with
their hands." It is one of the fundamental points of his spirituality. No
idler could appear before him without being strongly admonished; he considered
the lack of work as a reason for being sent away from the Order (ex. Bro. Fly).
It is labor which is the true penance he himself
practiced and proposed for his friars. St. Fraricis
never accepted idleness, considered by the ancient philosophers as a
consequence of a superior status, a striking type of idleness which placed a
man in a kind of an ivory tower, in a privileged state. Thus, the first penance
which is concerned with the discipline of the body is our daily labor. Having
said that, we must make a further step in examining the way St. Francis lived
this dimension of the life of penance. We see that at the end of his life he
asked pardon of his body, "Bro. Ass." St. Francis wished also to
submit the body by penance, and by penance he understood vigils, fasts,
frequent flagellations and the use of a hairshirt.
Yet, in his biography, we see that he did not advocate this type of penance and
he even warned the friars against such practices so as not to be regarded as
superior to holiness.
But he did desire mortification of the body. In what
way and why did he want it? Because the body (the
"flesh" as St. Paul expresses it) fights against the spirit.
The centrality of Christ in my life can be deposed by selfishness and its
desire to dominate, to possess to enjoy, etc. thus making my body subject to
selfishness in place of Christ. Thus S. Francis in this dialetical
battle between the spirit of the flesh and the spirit of God is very demanding
regarding the mortification of his own body so that the body would always in
its expression would always reveal the actions of the body of Christ.
St. Francis highly esteemed the human body. In a
remarkable exception in Christian literature, in Admonition V, he says:
"Remember 0 Man your dignity, namely that you are made in the image of
Christ as regards your body and in the likeness to God in your spirit."
There is none among the Fathers of the Church who had said this. It is a
splendid exception and a great intuition. It can in no way be held that S.
Francis had a mistaken sense of his own body. But if his body was opposed to
the image of Christ then it was necessary to punish it by means of penance, so
that it would become obedient, that it "be conformed" to the body of
Christ. For this St. Francis often sought to reproduce in his own life the
actions of Christ, from Bethlehem to Calvary, culminating in his receiving the
sacred wounds of the Lord.
Concluding, we might ask: What is the goal of the way
of penance according to St. Francis? The goal is joy and happiness.
Today we live in a world in which to be truly
authentic it is necessary to be distressed, to have an uneasy conscience
because of this world's misery. Certainly, our age is not characterized by an
evident joyfulness. In Francis, on the other hand, there is this esteem for
joy. He explains it by saying that the joy of good works is very important; one
gives greater witness to communion with God and to the way of penance through
the joy which is communicated to another through the witness of a cood work. The devil has great fear of the joy which comes
from a good work. However, until a man possesses such joy he is vulnerable to
the insidious temptations of the devil.
We are all familiar with the famous dialogue about
perfect joy. It is really a dialogue about penance in the sense that
selfishness becomes completely destroyed in the suffering which is accepted for
love of Christ. Hence, one can demand of the man who leaves everything: that
the end or the purpose which gives meaning to his renunciation or penance, is
joy. A penance which does not bring joy cannot come from God and does not lead
to God. It is a penance which ends in selfishness. Then it turns hostile
because it looks at the other with a sense of judgment and contempt. This
attitude, which we might call strict, is none other than an attitude of Egoism.
If a sense of joy does not accompany our life of penance then we are very
likely operating from a sense of superiority or from a desire for
self-security. Joy is the tell tale sign of the presence of God. If we lack
this in our efforts at penitential living then we are not doing penance.
In summary: the way of penance is a simple way, but it
is not simplistic. It is most profound. It consists in this: metanoia, change. I have an awareness of my sinfulness
because I have dismissed God from my life. There is no sinner like myself
because I, who have been so loved, have disregarded that love and I
have made myself in the central value of my existence. There can be no
progress in the way of penance if one has not deepend
the awareness of sin in oneself. The beginning of penance is to feel oneself to
be truly a sinner before God.
Conversion means above all to put God at the center of
all my considerations and Christ at the center of all my actions. Each day my
journey in penance must embrace this conversion of spirit and body in such a
way that my spirit and body will be one in harmony giving credit to God while
claiming nothing for myself. Penance has in itself this radical poverty. It is
God Who gives me the possibility and power to do good.
It is not my doing and thus any good I do refers back to Him. And in my
physical, corporeal life the body is the expression of my spirit which points
to God. One accepts this task: the Father works in me and I cooperate. Should
the body refuse the dignity of being the Image of the Body of Christ, in that
case St. Francis seeks penance, but only so that the body can realize itself.
The goal of this life of Penance of St. Francis is
Joy. The joy which is noted especially in humble people, who may not even be
aware that they are living in this way of penance. Joy which
is so rarely seen on the faces of the powerful and on those who believe
themselves to be important in life. Joy is this world thus becomes the joy for
which we were created, that joy which Christ in the Kingdom of His Father lives
in His spirit and glorified body.
There can be no being on the way of penance if one has
not deepened the awareness of sin in himself. The
point of departure is to feel oneself truly a sinner in the presence of God.
Conversion means, before anything else, this: to put God at the center of all
my considerations and Christ at the center of all my interventions. My journey
in penance must embrace each day this conversion of spirit and body in such a
way that my spirit may be always in agreement crediting God while claiming
nothing for itself. Penance has in itself this radiant poverty. It is God who
gives me the possibility and power to do good. It is
not my doing and thus the good goes back always to Him. In my physical,
corporeal life, my body must always be the dynamic sphere of my spirit which
refers to God. A dynamic sphere is one which embraces this work: the Father
works and I also work. Should the body refuse this dignity of being the image
of the Body of Christ then St. Francis also seeks penance, but seeks it so that
the body can realize itself.
The result of this penitential life of St. Francis is
joy. The same joy which is seen especially in humble people, who may be unaware
that they are living in this way of penance. Joy which is always very rare on
the faces of the powerful and those who believe they have arrived. Joy in this
world is thus the anticipation of the joy for which we were created. That joy
which Christ in the Kingdom of the Father lives in His spirit and glorified
body.
La Via della Penitenza
in Francesco d'Assisi
Vincenzo Cherubino
Bigi, OFM
Edizioni Franciscane Bologna, 1988
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