Who Am I?
The Human Person as Sacrament
Ilia Delio, OSF
Francis and the Leper
The story of Francis kissing the hand of the leper is a pivotal story of his early conversion.
In his encounter with the
leper that Francis confronted
the violence within him.
“What was bitter tasted sweet”
“Consider, O human being, in what great excellence the Lord God has placed you, for He created you and formed you to the image of his beloved Son according to the body, and to His likeness according to the Spirit.” (Adm 5)
“The Lord God gives each of us our whole body, our whole soul and our whole life.” RNB 23.8
Sacramentality of Person
Image and Likeness
Four Main Points of Human Person
-- Dignity
-- Relationship
-- Dialogue
-- Prayer
The Human Person
“Who are You O Lord and who am I?”
The primary locus of the life is not
work
or
prayer
but
the human person
Scotus’s ‘Haecceitas’
Haecceitas points to individuality at the core of each thing
its very
being.
The positive dimension
of being
which makes it
It “this” and
“not-that”
Grace and nature intertwine. Nothing in creation is accidental or excessive; nothing is worthless or trivial.
Each and every thing, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, is of infinite value because it images God in its own unique being.
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“The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God. This leaf has its own texture and its own pattern of veins and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonized by their beauty and their strength.”
Thomas Merton
Things are God-like in their specificity. Regular, daily attention to the wider world of creatures/nature is fundamental
As Kingfishers Catch Fire
“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame. . .
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps graces: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
G.M. Hopkins
Francis and the Sacredness of Life
To love authentically is to accept other humans and all creatures on their own terms.
Tabernacles
Graziano Marchesi
Evangelical Life is a Relational Life
“Let us refer all good to the most high and supreme Lord God, and acknowledge that every good is His, and thank Him for everything, He from whom all good things come.” (RegNB 17:17)
We Are Called To Be:
Francis was not afraid to risk. He didn’t wait for people to come to him but went out to meet them on the margins.
Poverty - living sine proprio
Inner Space
Compassion
Admonition XIV
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. There are many who, applying themselves insistently to prayers and good deeds, engage in much abstinence and many mortifications of their bodies, but they are scandalized and quickly roused to anger by a single word which seems injurious to their person, or by some other things which might be taken away from them. These persons are not poor in spirit…
What must the evangelical person do?
the Word of God
“Let us refer all good to the most high and supreme Lord God, and acknowledge that every good is His, and thank Him for everything, He from whom all good things come.”
Earlier Rule 17:17
“Blessed is the servant who attributes every good to the Lord God, for he who holds back something for himself, hides within himself the money of his Lord God and that which he thought he had shall be taken away from him.”
Admonition 18.2
Sin: the exile of unrelatedness
Evangelical Life is dialogical
Not But
I- IT I-Thou
Transhumanism
RobotPet
“Robotic Pet won’t soil your carpet.”
Educational robot
Transhumanism
Alone Together: why we expect more from our technologies than from one another.
I and Thou (M. Buber)
Deus Meus et Omnia
Francis realized that the source of his own life was the very source of all created things and all that exists.
Francis considered nothing in nature accidental or excessive; nothing was worthless or trivial.
Rather, each and every thing, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, showed infinite value because it reflected God in its own unique being.
John Seed writes: “I no longer see myself as ‘protecting the rainforest’ but rather that ‘I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest emerged into thinking.”
“That the bees not perish of hunger in the icy winter, he commands that honey and the finest wine should be set out for them. He calls all animals by a fraternal name, although, among all kinds of beasts, he especially loves the meek.”
(Thomas of Celano)
Conversion
Conversion is a way of becoming more authentically human—through turning.
From “individual” to “person”
Person = sonare – to sound through
When does my neighbor or the person I minister to become integral to who I am rather an object to be dealt with or an intrusion on my otherwise private space?
Releasement
Releasement is openness to my being-together-with-others-in-the-world.
It is a fundamental letting-be, in which I experience myself existentially as reverential openness to everything that is, as freedom which frees all things by allowing them to reveal, to give themselves to me as they are.
In its receptivity it gives because it lets-be. In letting-be it empowers.
We are released as we gaze at things not merely as objects, for they point beyond themselves to the ground from which everything comes and to which all things return.
Francis empowered others by letting be.
“He saw many rushing for positions of authority. Despising their arrogance, he strove by his own example to call them back from such sickness. He used to say that it was a good and acceptable thing in God’s sight to take care of others. . . .He grieved over those who now sank to the level of what was low and cheap. . .he prayed for God’s mercy to set his sons free and fervently begged that they be preserved in the grace given to them.”
1 Cel VI
Conversion
Conversion Conversation
CONVERSION CONVERSATION
The Centrality of Prayer
“The dilemma of our time is not that we do not have time to pray; rather our prayerlessness causes the dilemma.
This is the age of nihilism, alienation, not because God is dead but because the human person as human is dead.”
B. Fiand, Releasement
Francis did not so much pray as he himself became living prayer.
“All his attention and affection he directed with his whole being to the one thing he was asking of the Lord, not so much praying as becoming himself a prayer.” (2 Cel 95)
“Wherever we are, wherever we go, we bring our cell with us. Our brother body is our cell and our soul is the hermit living in that cell in order to pray to God and meditate.” (LP 79-80)
Action without prayer may become activism, a way of unveiling an empty center.
“The preacher must first draw from secret prayers what he will later pour out in holy sermons; he must first grow hot within before he speaks words that are in themselves cold.” (2 Cel 194)
LIVING IN A SACRAMENTAL WORLD
“When the level of our awareness changes, we start attracting a new reality.”
Right relationships in creation:
- rooted in God
- change in values:
- poverty
- humility
- conversion
- compassion
What took place in
The life of Jesus must take
Place in our lives as well
If creation is to attain its
fullness in God.
The Human person
Cant. Creat. 12-13
Relating to creation as
- family
- brother and sister
- treating the world of nature with respect and concern.
- discover the “ecological self”
In a world crying out from universal starvation for:
Love
Peace
Justice
We are called to make Christ alive here & now.
“The Glory of God is the human person fully alive.”