Today we celebrate the life and legacy of St. Francis of Assisi: religious and mendicant.
St. Francis of Assisi was Francis de Sales’ namesake and patron. No surprise, then, that Francis de Sales held Assisi in great esteem and mentioned him many times throughout his writings. We find one such example in the Treatise on the Love of God. Francis de Sales observed:
“A heart seized and urged on by a desire to praise God’s goodness beyond its own abilities after many such efforts often goes outside itself so as to enlist all creatures to help it in its designs. We see how the three children in the furnace do this in that wonderful canticle of blessings by which they arouse up all things in heaven on the earth and under the earth to render thanks to the eternal God by supremely praising and blessing him. So, too, the glorious Psalmist, moved through-and-through by a disordered but holy passion that bore him on to praise God, proceeds without order. In all haste he calls on angels, fishes, mountains, waters, dragons, birds, serpents, fire, hail, and mist, gathering together by his desires all creatures so that they may conspire devoutly to magnify their creator. Some of them in themselves celebrate God’s praise; others provide matter for praising him by their various wonderful properties which manifest the grandeur of their maker. Therefore after this divine, royal Psalmist had composed a great number of the psalms with the inscription ‘Praise God’ and had gone through a vast variety of ways and instruments suitable to celebrate the praise of such eternal goodness, finally, as if failing for lack of breath, he concludes his whole scared psalmody with this cry, ‘Let every spirit praise the Lord,’ that is, ‘Let all that lives live and breathe only to bless the creator…’ Thus did the great St. Francis [of Assisi] chant the ‘Canticle of the Sun’ and a hundred other excellent benedictions to invoke creatures to come and aid his heart, languishing because he could not praise his soul’s dear Savior as he wished…”
How grateful are we for God’s goodness in our regard? How thankful are we for all the good things that God has done – and continues to do – for us? How might we make our lives convincing canticles or benedictions of praise to the eternal God who showers us with so many blessings?
From Spirituality Matters, 2011
Fr Michael Murray OSFS