THREE STEPS OF FRANCIS’ PERFECTION

 Francis’ life was indeed, an expression of his journey towards God and process of perfection of imitating Christ. Here we have summarized his life in three steps of his ascent towards Christ according to St. Bonaventure.

1.    Kiss of feet  

The first step shows, Francis’ conversion which is depicted as “kiss of feet.”

The coming of Christ in the life of Francis marks with the event of encounter with a leper. A person, who hated lepers most, now sees Christ in him. There is a struggle within him; the devil within him is pulling him back from reaching to a Christ, hidden in a leper. But Francis determined to the divine will, forces his steps towards the leper and calls him as “Brother” and embraces him by giving a kiss of love. Here Francis has lost to his self and to his ego and has become a new person. He has seen a crucified Christ in a leper and he now has a new vision, new life and new mission. Francis gives up all riches and goes wandering.

2.    Kiss of hands.

Francis raises second step that is kiss of hands. The book Song of Songs says in the chapter 2:11-12, that, “for now winter is passed, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come and the voice of turtle-dove is heard in a land.” The days of darkness have gone. Francis has no worry and no care. He has started seeing Christ in others and in creation. Francis now goes round evangelizing Christ to believers and non-believers. Even he preaches to birds and animals.

3.     Kiss of lips

Now Francs takes the third step to be united with Christ, which is the last stage of imitating Christ in his life. Francis goes on the mountain to pray. After the forty days of fast and penance, Christ appears to him in the form of “Seraph” and asks Francis, his desire. In reply Francis says to him, “Grant me only two graces, first, let me bear the pain as much as Christ bore on the cross and second is that let me love others with which Christ loved us.” In a moment Seraph covers Francis with his wings and after the disappearance of seraph Francis sees nothing but bleeding wounds on his palms, legs and side. Christ has made his servant like him, he has glorified him, and he has become one with Christ and like Christ. 

THE WOLF OF GUBBIO

St Francis had the great respect towards nature he accepted every animal and birds as his brothers and sisters. Once in the town call Gubbio there was a large and ferocious wolf which was harming and killing to the people of that town. People told Francis of their sad plight. The saint took pity on them and resolved to meet the wolf and try, if he could, to convert him. Then St Francis soon reached to the place where the animal was known. At that instant, Francis traced the hallowed sign of the cross over it and called aloud : come here, brother Wolf , come I order you in the name of Christ , do no harm neither me nor anyone the Wolf immediately shut his head down and laid down at his feet .       

Solemnity: The most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

                Dear brothers and sisters; today we celebrate the solemnity of the most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

            In the first reading of today, taken from the book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds his people as they are about to enter the Promised Land, that, they must not forget God’s goodness to them in the past. He also exhorts them to remember that they are God’s own people, who need to nourish themselves on His Word.

            In the second reading of today, taken from the first letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, St. Paul narrates the divine institution of the Holy Eucharist by our Lord and invites his readers to generously commemorate this mystery until he comes again. 

            And the Gospel Passage of today is taken from St. Luke which narrates Jesus’ miracle of the multiplications of the loaves. This miracle points to the heavenly banquet where everything will be in plenty because of God’s generosity.

            Therefore dear brothers and sisters, as we have assembled here for today’s Holy Eucharistic celebration, let us ask pardon from our merciful father, for all our wrong doings and pray for his blessing, so that the Lord will grant us his wisdom and insight by which we will understand the value of Holy Eucharist.

                                   MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE

Francis was the first founder of an order whose adherents could, if they so wished, go among the saracents and other believers’. Thus right from the time of Francis himself there was an enormous missionary expansion, especially eastward in moslem countries for at least a century. Afterwards, though there was a slight decline for some time, it was known to pick up all they were sponsored by the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. Naturally the capuchin who steered this aspect strongly gave great importance to the missionary vocation of the reform, even though the actual possibilities of sending missionaries st the time were rather few. The order in fact could organize some missionary enterprise only from end of the 16th century. All the same one cannot but put on record the wonderful missionary enterprise of the capuchins. For when church founded the ‘propaganda fide’ in 1622 for the ‘evangelization of the peoples’, it was the capuchins who were its first main forces. Just a decade thereafter in 1632 they were seen already crossing lands and ocean and arriving at the shores of our own mother-land India. Gradually the field of missionary activity was amply widened to spread everywhere. It saw great expansion, beginning from the Christian orient to all the continents of Africa, South America, Asia and Oceania. Truly the missionary endeavors of the capuchin have been immense and their missionary zeal anything but extinguishable.

                                          APOSTOLIC MINISTRY

The type of religious life that was begun by Francis was somewhat new in the sense it included preaching as an exigency of the commitment for the faithful reproduction of the life Christ and his disciples. Francis was however convinced that all preaching worth its name could only\y be the result of an intensely lived gospel from of life. Still history is the witness that he was not totally averse to a certain academic preparation. Accordingly the capuchins, while seeing it as an indispensable necessity, if not the only reason, did make room for the introduction of studies, after a certain initial hesitation. But they never failed to alternate preaching and study together with times of intense work, especially manual and deep quiet and peaceful retreat, just as Francis had strongly enjoined. For all that, the capuchin were wholly as unusual band of preachers, as we already made mention of. It was their contemplative experience, evangelical earnestness, visible austerity, fraternal concern, ready pastoral service, absence of oratorical ornamentation, untied to the ‘biblical formation’ that rendered them uniquely acceptable and convincingly effective preachers for the learned as well as the unlearned. 

All kinds of ministry and preaching were cultivated by the capuchins, in particular, the so called ‘popular mission’, preached always by a group of brothers while living and witnessing to the evangelical ideals of brotherhood. Still that which gave real power to their words, was at all times, as we said, their lived witness to the gospel way of life and the service that flowed there from. They preached more by their deeds than words, as demanded by Francis. To the early initiatives of fraternal assistance to victims of hungry and plague- stricken were gradually added many others, such as aid to sick in the hospitals and to the prisoners in jails, installations of store houses and other institutions destined to project the poor and the abandoned, service to the labor class against the usurence, etc. even today a capuchin is not to be different; he maintains a balance between contemplative life and apostolic ministry, as already directed by the capuchin constitutions of 1536; he is one who preached more by his deeds than his words. But there is one thing that a capuchin Franciscan cannot afford to forget; all Franciscan capuchin ministries are nothing other than an overflowing of the Christ-like love others. “It is the witness of an evangelical life that wins acceptance for his words”. 

                    PENANCE AND ASCETICISM

Francis’ life of penance derived partly from his being wedded to holy lady poverty and partly from his own evangelical experience of being always in need of conversion and spiritual renewal, accomplished in complete openness to ‘the working of the spirit of the lord’. Penance and asceticism were meaningful in view of the eschatological life of be witnessed to. Accordingly the capuchins cherished ‘the cheerful spirit of penance in an austere life’ as forming part and parcel of their own reformed life. They strove continually for their own conversion and that of others so that all may be ‘conformed to the crucified and risen Christ’. The concrete life of penance, valued by the capuchins did of course vary, but it always include a radical but liberating and joyful austerity in all things, especially board and lodge, utensils and furniture, dress and travel. For the same, their life had the obvious effect of leaving a deep impression on the people they were in contact with. The external aspect of a capuchin with his bare feet, rude habit, rough beard, tonsured head, hands inside his sleeves and mortified eyed, humble and retiring deportment was always a continual and enduring sermon, understood and accepted not only by the simple people but even the ecclesiastical and civic aristocracy. For the latter, it was as well a powerful message of clear prophetic denunciation of an anti-gospel value.

                                     POVERTY AND HUMILITY

Francis was convinced that such brotherhood as he envisaged could not be practically lived without another importance gospel prerequisite, namely ‘minoritas’ (minority or being a lesser brother) which he concretized in his own person with the double virtues of ‘poverty and humility’. If the povererllo of Assisi, renowned for no other reason than a veritable re-creation of the ‘gospel form of life’, had the ‘most high poverty’ as the main hallmark of his brotherhood, he had indeed is reason. For in the spirituality of Francis, poverty did go along with her sister holy humility; but still neither of them was an end in itself. They both together were merely means to charity. So as far as the early capuchins were concerned, poverty together with humility was not only their primacy evangelical option in the following of Christ but also ‘the great liberator of the mind for the love of God and neighbor” i.e. to put into practice fraternal love and ‘provide of the best disposition for true prayer’. We would understand this better if we bear in mind that ‘the poor are not always visible’. For we all suffer ‘structure amnesia’. (Remember the rich man of the gospel and the poor man, Lazarus). It is only the poor who recognize the poor. When a section of the brothers and sisters are out of our perspective, we also do not truly ‘pray’. Prayer is possible only in total solidarity with all God’s people. 

             Poverty and humility therefore had a strong emphasis in content as well as witness among the capuchin, all the exaggerated extremes of a return to st. Francis notwithstanding. The capuchins did not own anything. They lived by work and when it was insufficient they faith gladly had “recourse to the table of the Lord” Putting thus their faith daily to the test with regard to God’s providence and the goodness of the people. True to the spirit of Francis, their dwellings were constructed with ‘vile materials’ and were known to be fit only for ‘pilgrims and strangers’. Their churches were as small and simple as not attract people to them, because as the constitutions said “we do a greater good by preaching in churches belonging to others…” to experience better the virtue of non-appropriation, the houses and lands where the brothers lived had different immediate owners who could well deny them the permission to continue to live if they so willed. The brothers would then naturally go joyfully to other places “with the blessing of God to do penance”, as Francis had written in the testament. More importantly, the brothers could leave them, whenever necessary, without undergoing in the least the usual pangs of attachment or pain.

  The voluntary poverty of the capuchin entailed a further natural consequence, in that it fostered an all-importance and unflinching solidarity with the poor. In the general chapter of 1535 itself, the capuchins had in this respect laid down two heroic resolutions: one, the obligation to help the poor in time of need and shortage; second, and the obligation of assistance to those afflicted in time of epidemics. Obviously these two realities were rather frequent at that time and those who ordinary suffered most were the people. In our own day these heroic prescriptions have all but disappeared from our constitutions. Still capuchin conscience, inured as it is for centuries to be always sensitive to these duties towards the poor cannot but cherish ‘a preferential option and love for the poor’.

1.     UNIVERSAL BROTHER-SISTERHOOD:

Form the beginning Francis was aware that he was founding an order that was wholly different from all the previous monastic orders. His call was specifically to replicate ‘a life lived according to the pattern of the gospel’ and his gospel life was expressly a witness to ‘fraternitas’ or brotherhood, which was its basic focus. To Francis fraternity meant being ‘members of one household’ and a brotherhood of evangelical witness that was accomplished first within the fraternity itself, and then extended to others and even to the entire creation. It was truly a ‘universal brother-sisterhood’. Keeping the model of Christ and the apostles before him, Francis greatly desired to form his brotherhood for mutual service by the simple acceptance and plain co-penetration of each and every member in the everyday life of the fraternity. Such a fraternity of brothers therefore could admit differences but never any of the inequalities, on account of either their origin or their intellectual capacity, either the office fulfilled in the internal structure of the order or even the ordination to sacred orders. The ordained brothers were in truth specifically understood as ‘the ministers and servants’ of all the brothers, in the strict gospel sense of the words.

              It is precisely this type of fraternity that the first capuchins tried to re-establish from within. Verily theirs was a brotherhood of voluntary poor men, free and happy, fraternal zing and loving, open and simple. The simplicity was all the more visible in as much as there was a total leveling of the brothers, according to the pattern of love and faith. Famous theologians, renowned preachers, persons of high nobility, all lived in brotherly equality within the fraternities, no seldom governed by a simple brother. In order to guarantee at all times this atmosphere of  fraternal intimacy and evangelical vibration, the constitutions laid it down that numerically the fraternities be neither too big and crowded nor too small and be individualistic, becoming thereby less vital. The first chronicles of the order do indeed give us a beautiful and picturesque account of this simple fraternal life of the capuchins, almost worthy of the times of st. Francis himself. It is therefore importance to bear in mind that ‘fraternal life is always and everywhere to be basic requirement of the formation process’ and for the individual fraternities to be capable of carrying out the task of formation, they should draw inspiration and encouragement from the primary fraternity, that is provincial fraternity.

                               PRAYER AND CONTEMPLATION

             The foremost concern of the capuchin reformers in their sincere effort to return to st. Francis’ gospel way of life involved an urgent and irresistible re-evaluation of the contemplative element of Francis’ life. It was prayer that gave Francis the powerful experience of god, providing him the needed consistency to realize the integral gospel vision of life. In Francis’ personality prayer was at the very centre of his being so much so he did not only pray but become a ‘pray-er’ himself. It is out of his own practical experience of prayer, for example, he wrote the ‘rule for hermitage’ which combined both life of prayer and life in brotherhood. His brotherhood was a praying brotherhood. Being well aware of the importance as well as the vital necessity of prayer, the capuchin of the first generation had, as all the earlier Franciscan reformers, a singular attraction to prayer occupied central place. The first capuchin statutes were therefore found to prescribe two hours of mental prayer every day, while affirming that ‘a true friar minor prays always’.

          The prayer life understandable required an appropriate atmosphere, especially a situation of deep solitude and quite retreat. The houses of the early capuchin were accordingly never situation too near the cities, so as to be assured of peace and quiet necessary for prayer. They were however not too far from the cities either, so as not to feel themselves left our or un-integrated and or uncommitted to humans and their situation through ministerial service. Capuchin fraternity, on the one hand, is basically a prayer fraternity and no fraternity can be called Franciscan if prayer is not a regular occurrence in them. Their life gives primacy to the spirit of holy prayer and devotion…to which all other temporal things ought to be subservient. On the other hand, however, they were not monastic communities but ‘evangelical fraternities’, purporting to maintain a delicate balance between the solitary contemplative concern and the vital apostolic disposition or ‘disponibility’. Capuchins therefore always maintain a certain dynamic tension in the search for harmony between action and contemplation. 

FRANCISCAN CHARISM

The capuchin charism is basically Franciscan. It means that it is, as Francis envisaged, christo-centric, evangelical, ecclesial, existential, devotional, prophetical and practical. Francis, after his conversion, was known to have just one desire in life, namely, to follow the teaching and the footsteps of Jesus Christ poor humble obedient, a ‘suffering servant’ who died and rose for us. He aspired to follow Christ and his gospel even literally and radically, although he was neither a fundamentalist nor a literalist. To him love alone was the reason why god became human and redemption was the way God’s love overcame the evil in this world. Francis therefore developed a tender devotion to the humanity of Jesus who made himself our ‘brother in the flesh’. For this reason he looked as well upon all creatures as brothers and sisters united as one in the vast ‘friary of the universe’. He campaigned  thereby for all that is moat liberal and sympathetic to human especially of today, namely “the love of nature; the love of animals the sense of social compassion; the sense of the spiritual danger of prosperity and even property”. To live such a life of the gospel however, he did not want any rule, written by someone else. Scripture and liturgy were to be his sole guides. Gospel in fact was his only rule and he desired to model his life upon it. According his life is seen to be characterizes with the pure gospel wisdom, i.e. surrender to truth poverty and humility prayer, and penance, ministerial service, especially to the poor, helpless and downtrodden and love for one and all after the example of Jesus Christ. This in brief is the ideal of Francis’ spirituality.

              The rule of Francis that enclosed this spirituality is evidently to be understood as the unalterable pattern of life for all his followers. However it had to be also interpreted now and then in the light of Francis’ own life and testament as well as the practical demands of the order and its apostolic purpose. The capuchin reform may therefore be said to have been born out of the continual struggle over the practical interpretation of this Franciscan ideal of spirituality. Included in the struggle were the constant efforts to return to gospel way of life initiated by Francis and to make adaptations and adjustments necessitated to incarnate it. Knowing the reform and growth of the capuchin order down the centuries therefore are of utmost importance if we are to recapture our particular capuchin charism and re-established our specific identity. A thorough investigation of this charism would certainly require a far longer amount of time and space than right away available. For the present it is restricted, among other things, to including a few of the most salient features or characteristics of the capuchin reform and spirituality.   

  The universal impermanence

The universal impermanence is the impermanence of the self nature of the conditional things. Just as we have the impermanence of the life period so we have the impermanence of all the conditional things in the world. To realize that every living being will die sometime or other is very easy, but it is not so easy to feel that every living being is coming near to death and is continuing to change as the moments pass. This draws a final conclusion that all things are impermanenent, and it brings us to the doctrine of śūnyatā. writers imagine that the word śūnyatā is synonymous with what we understand by nothingness but it means “perpetual changes happening at every step in this phenomenal world.”

It is on the truth of the impermanence of the nature of all things that the possibility of all things depends. If things were not subject to continual change but were permanent and unchangeable, then the evolution of the human race and the development of living things would come to a dead stop. If the human beings had never died or changed but had continued always in the same state, what would the result have been? The progress of the human beings would ever stop.

 Momentary impermanence.

This impermanence presupposes impermanence of moments (kșhana). It is logical to know how any great change in human being or in any other thing, which takes place within a certain space of time, is nothing else but the aggregate of minute changes which occur therein every moment. Thus, every man, everything is ever changing and can never be the same for even two consecutive moments. This is what is known in the Buddhist philosophy as “momentary impermanence.” It is with the support of this principle that the Buddhist seeks to explain any change. The treatise of the great exposition of philosophy says that, a day of twenty four hour has six thousand four hundred millions, ninety nine thousand nine hundred and eighty kșhanas or moments and that the five skandhās or aggregates of being are repeatedly produced and destroyed in every kșhana.

In fact, all things need some sort of motive power to be changed from one state to another. We know that the sword cannot cut itself, and then we may ask, what is the power which makes all things change? Buddha said it is origination, staying, growth and decay and destruction. These are the four characteristics by which all things undergo modification and are subjected to change of themselves in endless revolution.

 The theory of the four characteristics is followed in the following way: (i) Through the origination all things are brought to a state of existence from the future to the present. (ii) Through the staying it makes a thing to stay in its present actual or identical state as soon as a thing emerges by the force of the origination. (iii) Through the growth and decay everything grows and is brought in the state of old age. (iv) And fourthly, through the destruction all things are destroyed. So such is the reason which explains why nothing can continue in the same state for even two consecutive moments in this phenomenal world. In short all things are always changing by the operation of the four characteristics.

The impermanence of life period

What is meant by the impermanence of life period? As we all know in this modern world there are laws of the indestructibility of matter and of the conservation of energy. Buddhism acknowledges all these laws in this noumenal world. It is impossible also that there should exist a thing which does not change. In the “stanzas of the Law” Buddha says the following sayings:

That which seems everlasting, will perish. That which is high will be laid low. Where meeting is parting shall be. Where birth is death will come.

There is more of less similar stanza in the Chinese which goes like this, “Not in the sky neither in the depths of the ocean nor having entered the caverns of the mountain, nay, such a place is not to be found in the world where a man might dwell without being overpowered by death.According to Buddhism we keep on changing from birth to old age and death the end of life is one of the prime miseries.

Idealist school of Buddhist Philosophy says, “All things are produced by the combination of causes and conditions and have no independent noumenon of their own. The body of a living being consists of the combinations of the four great elements, earth, water, fire and air; and when this combination is resolved into the four component elements dissolution ensues. This is called the impermanence of a composite entity.

 Buddhist concept of impermanence

                Early Buddhism dealt with the problem of impermanence in a very rational manner. This concept is known as annichā in Buddhism, according to which, impermanence is an undeniable and inescapable fact of human existence from which nothing that belongs to this earth is ever free. Even the ancient western philosopher Heraclitus held the same opinion as he had declared that, ‘all things are in constant flux.’

According to Buddhist, there is no Being there is only a becoming the state of every individual being unstable, temporary, sure to pass away. Even among things we find in each individual form and material qualities and living organisms too possess a continually ascending series of mental qualities the union of which makes up the individual. Everything be it a person a thing or a God is therefore, merely a putting together of component elements .Further in each individual without exception the relation of its component parts is eternally changing and never the same for even two consecutive moments. Putting together implies becoming; becoming means becoming different and becoming different cannot arise without dissolution a passing away which must inevitably at some time or the other be complete.

But we may ask that why is it that all things are impermanent? The Buddhism will replay that this law of universal impermanence is inseparably connected with the cause and effect, for nothing in this phenomenal world can exist without some causes while the very name phenomenon presupposes origination which again implies destruction, exactly in the same way as destruction invariably implies origination. Buddha himself before departing this world said to said disciples, “Know that whatever exists arises from causes and conditions and is in every respect impermanent.”

The principle of Universal impermanence is being considered in a three-fold aspect, namely as ­-

(a)   The Impermanence of life period

(b)   Momentary Impermanence

(c)    The Impermanence of the self nature of conditional things.

Annichā: The Buddhist Concept of Impermanence

                   

Buddhists system or a way of life was founded by Siddhartha Gautama. This system occupies the leading position in the Indian Philosophy. Gradually this system has developed in a significant way and carries lots of weight and meaningful insights. It has contributed noteworthy doctrines such as momentariness of all entities, denial of the soul …..

            This present work is intended to provide information on the concept of annichā. While I was doing my vippāsanā[1] course in Hyderabad I was so much struck at the hearing of the word annichā, which guru would always utter. At that time I understood its meaning just on peripheral level as it meant to me, arising and passing away. But now as I have read some books and with the teaching in the class it has been more clear and vivid. As far as, what I understand and as per my knowledge I feel that it’s really true what Buddha means with this concept of Impermanence.  After all we too realize that in this world nothing is permanent not even our own existence. Everything that exists will have an end one or the other day. In this paper we shall see the concept of annichā in detail.