Richard’s Daily Meditations

In most pictures of people waiting for the Holy Spirit they are looking upward, they have their hands out or raised—the assumption being that the Spirit is “up” there. In the Great Basilica in Assisi there’s a little bronze statue of St. Francis honoring the Holy Spirit. His posture and perspective are completely different from the usual. He’s got his hands folded looking into the earth. This is a very good artistic image of what we called our Franciscan “alternative orthodoxy.” We started looking down for the Holy Spirit instead of up, which was continued in saints like Vincent de Paul, Therese of Lisieux, and Dorothy Day. The full mystery of incarnation (“enfleshment”) takes a long time to sink into humanity’s heart.

If Divinity became flesh in Jesus, if God entered the world as a human being, then it was the world. It was henceforth the physical, the animal, the elements, sexuality, embodiment, it was the material universe—whatever your place of connection has been—but these are the hiding places and the revealing places of God. That changes everything, and it was supposed to change everything.

From an unpublished conference recording in Assisi, Italy, May 2012