Last summer when I left for retreat I brought with me Sr. Ilia Delio's excellent Franciscan Prayer. While on retreat this year I discovered her book, The Humility of God: A Franciscan Perspective.
I was able to read the first couple of chapters last week and I've culled some of the best quotes for you:
See what I mean?As God bends down to love us where we are, we must be open to welcome God in our lives, to embrace this God of humble love and to allow God to live in us in every way. Every breath of life must be the breath of God. This is divinization. The humility of God’s love in some way demands a human response because it is hidden and unobtrusive and quietly sustains life without force or manipulation (11).
How can God be close to you (or you to God) when God seems so far away or not at all? Even better, how can God be close to you when you are totally confused? This is my answer to you: God is a mystery of humble love. It is a mystery that you cannot reason or try to figure out. You must simply live in the mystery (15).
Silence is a language God can speak without being constantly interrupted because God is a mystery of incomprehensible love, and love speaks for itself (17).
Who really knows what happened to Francis [of Assisi] in that church [of San Damiano] or when he was alone at prayer? All we can say is that God bent low to kiss Francis when he least expected it. An unexpected kiss can change one’s life forever (19).
Love is a mystery. When you love someone you know him in a deeper way; yet, the more you know someone the less you truly know him. The more the face of the lover is revealed, the more it is concealed. And so it is with God (20).
If we truly recognized God in poor and humble fragile human flesh, we probably could not bear the weight of the mystery. We would find it overwhelming precisely because of its simplicity. However, this is the mystery of God that Francis perceived (25).
This is a God who loves us so much as to be reckless in love; a God who throws it all away out of love and never tires of loving (25).
Francis understood that God is not remote or distant, a God who has nothing in common with creation. Rather, God is unstoppable goodness – a God who simply can’t wait to give everything away and to love us where we are. God comes to us – that is God’s humility – and we are called to love him in return (30).
…the Father of overflowing love is unstoppable goodness, overflowing into the other, the Son. The turning of the Father toward the Son is the Father’s humility. Humility is not a quality of God, it is the essence of God as love. The Son is the object of the Father’s love and yet loves the Father so completely as to breathe forth love in the Spirit. The Son is the heart of the Trinity and the center between the Father and Spirit, receiving love from the Father and loving with Father in a single breath of love, which is the Spirit (42).
If the lover were to distance himself from the beloved, the beloved would perish from lack of love. So, too, if we emerge out of the loving relationship between the Father and Son, then it is indeed love that has brought us (and continues to bring us) into being. Without the source of love that sustains us, God’s love, we would die (44).
Within that loving embrace of God, our lives are brought into being and sustained in being. As we have been loved into birth, so, too, we are called to mirror God’s love for others so as to birth God anew in creation. For that is how God, the tremendous love of life, delights in his creation (46).
I really need to get this book. Thanks!
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