An essential aspect of Franciscan spirituality is what Father Richard Rohr calls “the integration of the negative.” Rather than insisting that God values perfection or an idealized morality, Francis of Assisi intuited, through the example of Jesus’ life and death, that God could be found in all things, even those our religion and culture urge us to reject. Father Richard writes:
I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the “integration of the negative.” Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus’ revolutionary good news, the apostle Paul’s deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare of Assisi lived out with such simple elegance.
The integration of the negative still has the power to create “people who are turning the whole world upside down” as was said of early Christians (see Acts 17:6). Today, some therapists call this pattern of admitting our shortcomings and failures “embracing our shadow.” Such surrendering of superiority, or even a need for superiority, is central to any authentic enlightenment. Without it, we are misguided ourselves and poor guides for others.
Francis and Clare made what most would call the negative or disadvantage shimmer and shine by their delight in what the rest of us ordinarily oppose, deny, and fear: things like being insignificant, poor, outside systems of power and status, or weakness in any form. Francis generally referred to these conditions as minoritas. This is a different world than most of us choose to live in. We all seem invariably to want to join the majority and to be admired. Francis and Clare instead made a preemptive strike at both life and death, offering a voluntary assent to full reality in all its tragic wonder. They made a loving bow to the very things that defeat, scare, and embitter most of us, such as poverty, powerlessness, and being ridiculed.
I personally think that honesty about ourselves and all of reality is the way that God makes grace totally free and universally available. We all find our lives eventually dragged into opposition, problems, “the negatives” of sin, failure, betrayal, gossip, fear, hurt, disease, etc., and especially the ultimate negation: death itself. Good spirituality should utterly prepare us for that instead of teaching us high-level denial or pretense.
Needing a ladder to climb only appeals to our egotistical consciousness and our need to win or be right, which is not really holiness at all—although it has been a common counterfeit for holiness in much of Christian history. The Ten Commandments are about creating social order (a good thing), but the eight Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12) of Jesus are all about incorporating what seems like disorder (a negative), which promotes a much better and different level of consciousness.
The Difficult Work of Loving Others
Jesus taught them, “But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” —Matthew 5:44
Richard Rohr describes how loving our enemies is a practice of “integrating the negative,” accepting what we find unacceptable within ourselves:
Our enemies always carry our own shadow side, the things we don’t like about ourselves. We will never face our own shadow until we embrace those who threaten us (as Francis of Assisi embraced the leper in his conversion experience). The people who turn us off usually do so because they carry our own faults in some form.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says in essence, “If you love those who love you, what’s so great about that?” (Matthew 5:46). It’s simply magnified self-love. Instead, we are called to love the stranger at the gate, the one outside of our comfort zone. Until we can enter into love with them, Jesus is saying we really have not loved at all.
And what’s Jesus’ motivation for doing this? Some translations say, it’s to “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). In my opinion, a more useful and accurate understanding of the word translated as “perfect” is “whole.” Jesus and Francis met a God who is One, whole, and all inclusive. Be all inclusive as our God is all inclusive and all merciful. This is the heart of the gospel. Jesus’ and Francis’ goal was imitation of a loving, forgiving God. [1]
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) modeled how to “integrate the negative” by facing the realities of racism, poverty, and war, while insisting that we follow Jesus’ command to love our enemies.
Let us be practical and ask the question, How do we love our enemies?
First, we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive…. Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship….
Second, we must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that they are. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy….
There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the surface, beneath the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of their acts are not quite representative of all that they are. We see them in a new light. We recognize that their hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God’s image is ineffably etched in their being. Then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love.
| JAN 20, 2025 MLK on Idolatry |
 Click Here for AudioTo understand Martin Luther King Jr. as a Civil Rights leader, you first have to understand King as a minister of the Gospel. He made clear that his pursuit of justice was rooted in his faith. The two were inseparable despite the attempts of recent remembrances to erase or ignore the Christian foundations of King’s life.In July 1953, when MLK was just 24 years old, he worked alongside his father, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. That summer the young minister preached three sermons in a series he called “False Gods We Worship.” The messages were titled, “The False God of Science,” “The False God of Money,” and “The False God of Nationalism.” The short sermons remain remarkably relevant even seven decades later. Behind all three sermons was King’s biblical understanding of worship and idolatry. In the opening of his first message, he said:“Certainly worship is as natural to man as the rising of the sun is to the cosmic order. Men always have worshipped and men always will worship. There is the ever-present danger, however, that man will direct his worship drive into false channels. It is not so [much] disbelief as false belief that is the danger confronting religion. It is not so much downright atheism as [much as] strong, determined polytheism which impedes the progress of religion.” MLK understood that the real threat isn’t that people will stop believing in God, but that they will devote themselves to the wrong one. Even in those early years—well before the Montgomery Bus Boycott would launch him to the forefront of the Civil Rights movement—King was already beginning to recognize and name the spiritual maladies of American society. What some may find surprising is the breadth of MLK’s diagnosis. His preaching was not limited to racism or segregation. Instead, he saw these evils as intertwined with materialism, greed, laziness, and nationalism. With so many Christians expressing concern over the secularizing and the de-churching of America, we need to hear King’s warnings again. It’s possible to become so fixated on the growing number of non-believers with no faith in God that we never stop and ask the believers which God they are worshipping. But MLK understood that calling oneself a “Christian” and attending church regularly was no guarantee that one was devoted to Christ, as revealed in scripture. Instead, we may be employing the trappings of Christian faith to mask our devotion to a very unchristian false god. Over the next few days, we will look at some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s prophetic words about our culture’s idolatry as we ask ourselves how we can redirect our worship to where it rightfully belongs. DAILY SCRIPTURE DEUTERONOMY 12:30–31 AMOS 5:21–24 WEEKLY PRAYER. Hilary of Poitiers (310–367) Keep us, O Lord, from the vain strive of words, and grant to us a constant profession of the truth. Preserve us in the faith, true and undefiled; so that we may ever hold fast that which we professed when we were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; that we may have you for our Father, that we may abide in your Son, and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. |
| HEATHER COX RICHARDSON JAN 20. Dr. King’s final speech: |
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
