The Franciscan Charism and Undivided Wholeness

This profound insight from Bonaventure's Sunday sermon captures the essence of Francis of Assisi's spiritual vision. Francis concentrated his entire being into a single-hearted love of God. Through this love, Francis discovered abundance in all of life's manifestations. Rather than pursuing material wealth or possessions, he immersed himself in the overflow of divine love, recognizing God's goodness in every leaf, tree, and human person. Francis's revolutionary discovery was simple yet transformative: Only love heals and makes whole. 

Our contemporary world bears little resemblance to Francis’. While we've amassed unprecedented knowledge and material goods, we've become perhaps the loneliest species on Earth. We experience division both between ourselves and within ourselves. Love has been degraded to mere sentiment, stripped of genuine meaning in our cultural lexicon. This diminishment has grave consequences—without love, life withers. 

How did we become so disconnected—from each other, from ourselves, and most profoundly, from the natural world? How did we lose our enchantment with creation? This estrangement tells the story of Western civilization, encompassing religion's retreat from secular life and the extreme specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge. We now inhabit a planet whose resources face depletion through excessive consumption and global indifference. Scholars estimate that if all humanity lived as Americans do, we would require approximately six planets to sustain ourselves. 

In his landmark 1966 article "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," historian Lynn White argued that our environmental predicament is fundamentally religious. He specifically critiqued Christianity's otherworldly focus and anthropocentrism. Since our troubles stem largely from religious foundations, White contended, the solution must likewise be religious in nature. We must reimagine our relationship with nature and our destiny. Notably, White recognized Francis of Assisi as ecology's patron saint. 

Pope Francis aptly characterized our current situation as a "polycrisis"—multiple layers of dysfunction across various levels of existence. While drawing inspiration from Francis of Assisi's "Canticle of the Creatures," the late pontiff emphasized that our challenges require more than superficial solutions. He called upon the faithful to examine their lifestyles and consumption patterns, to acknowledge how technology flattens our cognition, and to reorient our lives toward the broader network of non-human relationships. Essentially, Pope Francis urged a return to nature. The difficulty, however, is that we have forgotten how to reconnect with the natural world and what such a reconnection might mean for humanity's future. 

Nature encompasses a vast network of intricate interactions spanning physics, biology, chemistry, and ecology. Our encounters with nature—a woodland walk, the rhythm of waves along a shore, or the simple wonder of spring blossoms outside our window—offer momentary reconnection. Yet these experiences prove increasingly ephemeral as digital notifications interrupt our attention and information floods our overwhelmed minds from countless sources. We have cultivated a culture of perpetual overwhelm, unable to loosen its hold as we exchange the natural world for virtual realms. 

Bonaventure's wisdom resonates across centuries: "Lack of self-knowledge makes for faulty knowledge in all other matters." This insight speaks profoundly to our contemporary condition—not merely on an individual level, but through the interconnected dimensions of biological and cosmic existence. We remain largely ignorant of our cosmic origins and the deep evolutionary narrative of human emergence. Pope Francis emphasized the urgent necessity of integrating science and theology "to avoid remaining immobile, anchored in our certainties, habits, and fears."  

St. John Paul II, in his 1988 letter to astronomer Fr. George Coyne, SJ, envisioned this integration as mutually enriching: "Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish."  

Both pontiffs recognized the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a visionary who illuminated new possibilities for understanding Christianity alongside evolution. As a scientist, Teilhard comprehended the immense temporal scope of cosmic existence. Contemporary scientific consensus places the universe's age at approximately 13.8 billion years, with terrestrial life emerging around 3.7 billion years ago. Our species, Homo sapiens, originated in Africa merely 140,000 years ago. Observing how the universe endured massive cosmic collisions while Earth witnessed five major extinction events, Teilhard proposed a centering principle of wholeness within life's unfolding process—Omega, a presence of energetic love. He described matter as "bifacial," possessing both an inner dimension of consciousness and an outer aspect of attraction. This dual nature enables matter to continuously organize into increasingly complex and conscious forms. 

Teilhard recognized his fundamental connection to Earth—he existed both in and of the planet. He maintained that anyone experiencing this profound relationship must live wholeheartedly in union with the world's totality. He wrote reverently of "holy matter," describing it as "the divine milieu, charged with creative power."  

Like Francis of Assisi, Teilhard rejected notions of matter as fallen or profane. Rather, he understood that through matter we enter the world, and the world enters us. Matter becomes the locus of the Absolute.  

"The truth is," he confessed, "that even at the peak of my spiritual trajectory I was never to feel at home unless immersed in an Ocean of Matter."  

Teilhard discovered a vital divine presence—not a God merely overlaying the world with power, but a God intrinsic to the world's becoming. God and matter form an inseparable relationship: "I see in the world a mysterious product of completion and fulfillment for the Absolute Being himself."  

In Teilhard's understanding, we approach God not directly, but through our engagement with matter. "Matter puts us in touch with the energies of earth and together with the earth we find ourselves looking to the 'Unknown God' who is to come." Francis of Assisi shared this perspective.  

As Bonaventure observed: "In beautiful things, Francis contemplated Beauty itself and from each and every thing he made a ladder by which he could climb up and embrace his Beloved." 

Teilhard de Chardin recognized human evolution as an integral component of nature's creative and generative processes. We exist embedded within countless layers of energetic life, emerging from the cosmos while constituting its thinking dimension. For Teilhard, reflection represents "the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as an object...no longer merely to know, but to know that one knows." Echoing Julian Huxley, he understood the human person as "nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself." This recognition—that humanity participates in a vast developmental process spanning immense timeframes—fundamentally transforms our knowledge and beliefs, including our conceptions of God, the mystery of Christ, and the meaning of salvation and redemption. 

The Franciscan tradition should engage with modern science not only because Pope Francis has called for reconciliation between Church and scientific inquiry, but because scientific understanding forms a significant element of our intellectual heritage. Keith Warner, OFM, has worked to bridge the Franciscan intellectual tradition with science, highlighting the work of Friar Roger Bacon, among others. Within the Franciscan worldview, studying nature nurtures wisdom—knowledge deepened through love. The Franciscan approach to scientific inquiry can be summarized as knowledge pursued for love's sake.  

What aspects of contemporary science might illuminate the Franciscan charism's contribution to our world in crisis? Three essential points emerge: 

1. Openness to change and complexity manifested through higher levels of consciousness and evolving relationship structures. Living with an evolutionary spirit means releasing what has served its purpose and embracing new relational frameworks when the moment calls for transformation. 
2. Developing a consciousness of holism and living systems while recognizing cosmic life's fundamental unity. As physicist David Bohm observed, "as human beings and societies we seem separate, but in our roots we are part of an indivisible whole and share in the same cosmic process." 
3. Accepting evolution as the narrative of emergent life. Without evolution providing a guiding story, we lack coherent narrative structure and experience mythological crisis. Thomas Berry identified this need when he wrote: "The reason for aversion to the story of an emergent universe is that the story has generally been told simply as a random physical process when in reality it needs to be told as a psychic-spiritual as well as physical-mental process from the beginning." 

For Teilhard, to go in search of God means creatively uniting with matter's power—being touched, cared for, and loved by matter itself. Like Francis of Assisi, we are invited not merely to think about God but to experience divine presence. We are not simply to rest in nature but to unite with it, becoming something more profound through this union—more conscious, more deeply loving, more fully nature itself. As Saint Paul writes: "The whole creation groans aloud in its act of giving birth" (Rom 8:22). Teilhard recognized that life has constructed increasingly complex structures throughout the ages. We stand as one of its complex manifestations, essential participants in the ever-vital network of continuing life. 

Our vocation is to continue building the earth in harmony with life's evolutionary journey spanning billions of years. God seeks to emerge in greater light and thought through this magnificent process of interdependent existence. As Teilhard de Chardin reminds us, we do not approach God directly; rather, we encounter the divine through and with the earth. It is our planet that provides the essential energy enabling our journey into God. Thus, we must cultivate awareness of divine energy permeating every facet of creation—from humble grains of sand to majestic mountains and towering trees, within each leaf and the intricate veins threading through every leaf of every tree. As Angela of Foligno profoundly observed, "The whole creation is pregnant with God." 

Our relationship with creation transcends mere stewardship. We are called to immerse ourselves completely in creation, in the psychic-spiritual dimension of nature, welcoming matter-nature into our very being until the boundary between inner and outer worlds dissolves. The outer world dwells within us while our inner world extends outward. To truly know ourselves requires transcending our limited self-perception. We embody the world in its becoming. Together with all interconnected beings—fungi, bacteria, trees, mycelium, earthworms, bees, chickadees—all creatures great and small, we touch and experience the hidden God of love. To neglect this intimate communion is to abandon the charism of the Poverello, St. Francis, and to suffer the consequences of a dying planet.