Francis, Clare, and Bonaventure believed that God was relational, incarnational, and companionable. You could gaze upon God, as Clare counseled, and see God suffering on the cross and feel your own pain and joy, and the pain and joy of the human and nonhuman world. You could feel God’s own pain at the suffering of all creation, human and nonhuman. More than that, the first Franciscans believed that God was in the world, actively shaping human experience, and inspiring birds’ songs and wolves’ howls. Francis’s stigmata reflected the interplay of divine and human empathy and revealed the intimacy of a suffering God who invites us to share in his sacrificial love, transforming self-interest into selflessness, to incarnate God’s realm “on earth as it is in heaven.”
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