This year commemorates 800 years since the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, and Father Dave welcomes Jon Sweeney to discuss this saint’s lessons for the modern world. Jon is Religion Editor and Associate Publisher at Monkfish Publishing, as well as the author of many books on Franciscan spirituality including his latest, “Experiencing God: 36 Ways According to Saint Francis of Assisi.”
They first discuss the 800th anniversary of Saint Francis’ death. “I’ve been looking forward to this year for a long time, because I started writing about Francis 25 years ago. The 700th anniversary of his death in 1926 was a really big deal around the world. There were conferences, gatherings, new research and discoveries [about his life], and it was part of a renaissance of Franciscan studies that has really continued to today,” Jon says.
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“For years I’ve been saying to friends, ‘I can’t wait until 2026 when the world does this again,’ and I’m not sure the world is quite doing it yet, but I’m trying to be a little piece of it,” he continues. “I wanted to write this book, so I could bring the themes of Francis back to people’s attention in this anniversary year.”
Jon describes some ways that we can experience God through the example of Saint Francis, including how he would free captive creatures. “One of the early stages of Francis’ conversion was when he went to the public market, where there were people selling all sorts of things. He convinced a boy to give him two doves,” Jon explains. “[Saint Francis] didn’t take them home and cook them and eat them for dinner, which is what he was probably supposed to do. Instead he threw his arms up in the air and released them; Francis was always doing this kind of stuff.”
“[Francis says] that salvation is like that: being free from captivity of all kinds…God is at work in this kind of activity,” Jon continues. Krista offers that her children help her put this ideal into action. “My kids love bugs. If there’s a spider in the house, my 5-year-old daughter won’t let us kill it; we have to trap it and release it outside,” she says.
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Father Dave notes, “Of your 36 ways, two of them back-to-back are ‘Practicing Attachment’ and ‘Practicing Detachment.’ I’ve heard Jesuits and people that love Ignatian spirituality talk about detachment, so I think I kind of know what that means — but what’s attachment?”
Jon explains that attachment refers to how we engage with the world. “Attachment is the way in which we insert ourselves into our communities, deeper friendships, and moving beyond passing recognition of other people,” he says. “In Francis’s case, it also involved creatures and paying close attention to the natural world. This then led to all sorts of ways in which he lived out his charism, or his spirituality, in the world. The attachment is the way in which we are deeply and intimately involved [with others], which then relates to other experiences of God.”
