Perfect Joy by Kerry Walters

Author:Kerry Walters
Language: deu
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781616369224
Publisher: Franciscan Media
Published: 2016-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

~ Be Not Afraid!~

Francis’s Words

Too much confidence makes one guard too little against the enemy. If the devil can get but one hair from a man, he will soon make it grow into a beam.

—Thomas of Celano, Second Life of Francis

Mirror

One is tempted to view la Portiuncula as a kind of paradise, an uncomfortable paradise, to be sure, but a paradise nonetheless, because the comfort that we cling to with horrible cowardice becomes quite ridiculous when measured against the inner joy that the brothers lived on. Amidst the prayer, mortification, and poverty reigning there was a merriment such as few brotherhoods have known on earth. Freed from all their material goods, which they had discarded as so much ordure (tanquam stercora), they cast themselves upon God.

—Julien Green, God’s Fool

Our reflections on Lady Poverty, Holy Simplicity, and Gracious Humility have brought us ever closer to the secret of perfect joy. When Francis stripped naked in Assisi’s square, we saw that the joy he sought was linked to freedom. The novelist Julien Green likewise saw that the connection between the two is unseverable. He tells us that the life Francis and his brothers lived at their makeshift monastery of la Portiuncula was joyful precisely because poverty, simplicity, and humility had liberated them.

What’s still not entirely clear, however, is why the three virtues practiced and taught by Francis bring joy—much less merriment (as Green claims). It’s pretty obvious that poverty, simplicity, and humility free us from our attachments to the things of the world. But why should this detachment in turn cause joy? Contentment, perhaps. But joy? Somehow, it seems too strong a word to use.

We can begin to get a handle on why spiritual freedom brings joy by considering this: the freedom that Francis sought—the same that Jesus Christ preached—defeats the oldest and deadliest foe humankind faces: fear. Spiritual freedom, which Lady Poverty, Holy Simplicity, and Gracious Humility prepare the way for, is essentially freedom from fear. This is the wonderful breakthrough Francis and his brothers at la Portiuncula make. They become victorious over fear, that horrible slayer of the human spirit.

They no longer fear losing material goods. Why? Because they have none! They no longer fear their own desires and lusts. Why? Because they’ve let them go. They no longer fear what a cynical or hostile world says of them or might do to them. Why? Because they know that their very being is in God’s hands, and God is untouchable! They are liberated from fear’s death grip.

How could they not be joyful, and even merry?

Dorothy Day has something interesting to say about freedom from fear. She claims that the ultimate source of our fear is our insistence on permanence in life—on what we typically call “security.” We cling to possessions, social status, intellectual models, even to other people, because we fear change and want stability. We deceive ourselves into believing that we can force the world to cease spinning, thereby guaranteeing that our future will remain unthreateningly like our present.

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