Where your security lies

I’m having trouble focusing on things today. My friend’s death has stirred up a lot of difficult stuff.

I’m reading Francis of Assisi by Leonardo Boff. It’s a heady book. But I’m finding it worth the wade. for example:

How, beyond the mysticism of gentle and compassionate identification with the poor and the Crucified, did they make sense of their want?  No one lives by mysticism alone. Life has demands that cannot be opposed permanently. How did they humanize this objective dehumanization that is poverty? It is precisely within the context of poverty that Francis places the problem of fraternity.  Each one’s  poverty implies for others a challenge, in order, to their care, gentleness, and the creation of an atmosphere of openness and security, denied by radical poverty. For Francis, having has been toppled from its pretension of granting security and humanization to persons. Only care for one another truly humanizes life…. Care is the way of being human.

Leonardo Boff, Francis of Assisi: a Model for Human Liberation. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2006), p. 66.

I can’t describe what happened to me as I read these words. Of course!! I thought. This is it!!

My African brothers and sisters know this principle, because they live it. “Nobody’s poor here, unless they’re alone,” they said. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement also knew it.

Jesus did exactly this: he invested in people, flesh and blood, fallible people, like Peter and Mary Magdalene.  If they failed, he failed.  If they succeeded, he succeeded.

I don’t know the specifics for me yet.  But I do know the principle: our ultimate security lies, not in bank accounts or IRAs, but in caring for one another, as God cares for us.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Matt 6:8 (NRSV)

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

1 Peter 5:7 (NRSV)