Oct 4 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace
On the Fest Day of St. Francis of Assisi read the book, "Sun and Moon Over Assisi"
http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/books/books.php?id=2586
Gerard Thomas Straub is a former Hollywood television producer whose
credits include three popular soap operas. This compelling, pensive, and
idiosyncratic resource charts his four-year meditation upon the lives
of Francis of Assisi and Clare. At the outset, Straub is intrigued with
the idea of conversion, especially as a change of heart. He sees Francis
and Clare as saints of incarnation: "There was a visible manifestation
of the conversion process going on inside of them. They preached by the
witness of their lives. Their lives were their sermons. And those
sermons still have something to say to us today."
On his Franciscan pilgrimage, Straub keeps a diary, stays at Italian
monasteries, visits the town of Assisi, and marvels at the artist
Giotto's interpretation of the great saint's life and works. He writes:
"Pilgrims go knocking on God's door. The pilgrim seeks new ways of
seeing and understanding; ever restless, one combs the unknown land for
new information and insights. Questioning is at the heart of spiritual
pilgrimages. Removing themselves from their own personal duties and
dramas, pilgrims go on a search for answers to the questions that burn
within them. The pilgrim is not someone who is running away from
something . . . he or she is running to something. The pilgrim is an
explorer, an adventurer, a dreamer."
Not a bad summary of Straub himself as he dives deep into the
spiritual mysteries of prayer, poverty, silence, and solitude as
reflected in the lives of Francis and Clare. The former, who was painted
by Rembrandt, filmed by Zeffirelli, and picked as the patron of the
"Beat Generation" by Kerouac, believed poverty to be the core of all
sanctity. Straub, who is used to an affluent lifestyle, struggles with
this asceticism throughout the book and provides the reader with a
smorgasbord of thoughtful quotations on the subject: "Francis loved the
radical insecurity of poverty because for him it was the ultimate act of
faith in the providence of God. To imitate Christ, which was his sole
goal in life, meant living a life of extreme self-denial."
The Sun and Moon Over Assisi is a potent and powerful
devotional work that schools us in the spiritual practices of humility,
self-simplification, listening, and love. It is a tribute to Francis and
Clare that centuries after their deaths they still can stir the souls
of those open to the grace of God and the fires of personal
transformation.
