Franciscan Spirituality: Finding God in Creation, Simplicity, and Joy

In the summer of 1205, a young man named Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone knelt in the crumbling chapel of San Damiano, just outside the walls of Assisi, and heard a voice from the crucifix above the altar: "Francis, go and repair my house, which, as you see, is falling into ruin." He took the instruction literally. He sold cloth from his father's warehouse, tried to give the money to the priest at San Damiano, and set off on a collision course with his family, his city, and every assumption he had held about what a life well-lived looked like.

That young man, whom history knows as Francis of Assisi, was born in 1181 or 1182 to Pietro di Bernardone, a prosperous cloth merchant, and his wife Pica. He grew up wealthy, charming, and ambitious. He fought in a war between Assisi and Perugia, was captured, spent a year in prison, and returned home ill and changed in ways he could not yet articulate. A series of encounters followed: a pilgrimage to Rome, a meeting with a leper on the road below Assisi, the voice at San Damiano. By 1206, Francis had publicly renounced his inheritance, stripped off his fine clothes in the town square before the bishop, and declared that he had no father but God.

He was twenty-four years old. He had nineteen years to live. In that time he would found three religious orders, compose one of the most beautiful poems in the Italian language, receive the stigmata on a mountainside in Tuscany, reshape the medieval church's understanding of poverty and preaching, and become, after the Virgin Mary, the most beloved saint in Christian history.

This article is about what Francis left behind: not a rule or a doctrine, but a way of seeing. Franciscan spirituality is not a system. It is a disposition, a particular way of encountering God in the world that emphasizes creation, simplicity, joy, and solidarity with the poor. It has been lived and developed over eight centuries by figures as diverse as Clare of Assisi, Bonaventure, and Richard Rohr, and it continues to shape the practice of spiritual direction and contemplative life today.

Francis: The Life That Became the Teaching

To understand Franciscan spirituality, you have to understand Francis. He did not write systematic theology. He wrote a short Rule for his friars, a handful of letters, some prayers, and the Canticle of the Creatures. His teaching was his life, and the stories about his life, however embellished by hagiographers, carry the essential shape of his vision.

The early years after his conversion were marked by radical poverty and manual labor. Francis and the small band of companions who gathered around him lived without fixed dwellings, worked with their hands or begged for food, cared for lepers, and preached in the streets and fields. They owned nothing. Francis was insistent on this point. Poverty was not a hardship to be endured but a freedom to be embraced. Money and possessions created barriers between the friar and God, between the friar and the poor, between the friar and the natural world. Without possessions, you were free to receive everything as gift.

This understanding of poverty as freedom rather than deprivation is central to Franciscan spirituality. It is not asceticism for its own sake. Francis was not interested in suffering as an achievement. He was interested in availability: being available to God, to other people, and to the created world in a way that possessions and status and self-importance make impossible.

The stories about Francis and animals, the wolf of Gubbio, the sermon to the birds, the Christmas creche at Greccio, are not sentimental anecdotes. They express a theology of creation that was radical in the thirteenth century and remains radical now. Francis saw every creature as a brother or sister, not metaphorically but ontologically. The sun, the moon, water, fire, earth, even death: all were siblings because all came from the same Creator. This was not pantheism. Francis was not worshipping nature. He was recognizing in nature the signature of God, and responding with gratitude and reverence.

The Canticle of the Creatures, composed in 1225, the year before Francis died, is the fullest expression of this vision. Written in Umbrian Italian rather than Latin, it is one of the earliest poems in the Italian vernacular. "Praised be You, my Lord, with all Your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, who is the day, and through whom You give us light. And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor; and bears a likeness of You, Most High One." Francis composed the final stanza, praising "Sister Bodily Death," while he himself was dying, blind, in pain, and at peace.

Francis received the stigmata in September 1224 on Mount La Verna, a rocky mountain in the Casentino forests east of Arezzo. According to the earliest accounts, he was praying when a seraph with six wings appeared, bearing the image of the crucified Christ. When the vision faded, Francis bore the marks of the nails in his hands and feet and a wound in his side. The stigmata are controversial. They are also, for the Franciscan tradition, central: a physical sign that Francis's identification with Christ was not merely interior but embodied. The body, in Franciscan spirituality, is not an obstacle to the spirit. It is the medium through which the spirit is expressed.

Francis died on October 3, 1226, at the Porziuncola, the tiny chapel outside Assisi that had been the first home of the Franciscan movement. He was forty-four or forty-five years old. He was canonized by Pope Gregory IX less than two years later, in 1228.

Clare of Assisi: The Contemplative Partner

Clare di Favarone was eighteen years old when she heard Francis preach during Lent in 1212. She was from a noble Assisian family, wealthier even than the Bernardones. On Palm Sunday of that year, she left her family's house under cover of night, met Francis and his friars at the Porziuncola, and consecrated herself to God. Francis cut her hair and gave her a rough tunic. Her family tried to bring her back. She refused.

Clare founded the Order of Poor Ladies, later known as the Poor Clares, at the church of San Damiano, the same chapel where Francis had heard the voice from the crucifix. She lived there for the remaining forty-one years of her life. She never left.

Clare's contribution to Franciscan spirituality is the contemplative dimension. Where Francis was itinerant, preaching and serving across Italy and beyond, Clare was rooted, dedicated to a life of prayer, community, and radical poverty within the enclosure. She fought for decades to preserve the "privilege of poverty," the right of her community to own nothing, not even communal property. Previous women's religious communities had been required to hold endowments for their support. Clare refused. She wanted her sisters to depend on God alone.

Clare's spirituality was not a withdrawal from the world but a different mode of engagement. In her letters to Agnes of Prague, she described a practice of contemplative prayer centered on gazing at Christ. "Place your mind before the mirror of eternity," she wrote. "Place your soul in the brilliance of glory. Place your heart in the figure of the divine substance. And transform your whole being into the image of the Godhead Itself, through contemplation." Clare practiced what she preached. Her sisters reported that she sometimes returned from prayer with her face shining.

The Franciscan tradition, from the beginning, has had these two dimensions: the active and the contemplative, Francis on the road and Clare in the cloister, preaching and silence, service and prayer. Both are essential. Neither is complete without the other.

Bonaventure: The Intellectual Vision

Giovanni di Fidanza, known by his religious name Bonaventure, was born around 1221 in Bagnoregio, central Italy, and entered the Franciscan order as a young man. He studied at the University of Paris under Alexander of Hales, became a master of theology, and in 1257 was elected Minister General of the Franciscan order, a position he held for seventeen years until his death in 1274.

Bonaventure is important to Franciscan spirituality because he gave it an intellectual architecture. Francis had lived his vision. Bonaventure thought it. His masterwork, the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Soul's Journey into God), composed in 1259 during a retreat on Mount La Verna, the same mountain where Francis had received the stigmata, describes a six-stage ascent of the soul through creation, through the self, and beyond both into God.

The Itinerarium draws on Augustine, the Victorines, and Pseudo-Dionysius, but its governing image is distinctively Franciscan: the six wings of the seraph that appeared to Francis. Each wing represents a stage of the journey, from contemplating God's traces in the external world, through contemplating God's image within the mind, to the final ecstatic union in which the soul passes beyond itself entirely.

Bonaventure's first two stages, contemplating God through the created world, are particularly important for Franciscan spirituality. Francis saw God in a bird. Bonaventure explained why that seeing was theologically coherent. Every creature, Bonaventure argued, bears the vestige (vestigium) of God, a trace of the Trinity imprinted in its very existence. To contemplate creation attentively is to read the book God wrote before the Bible: the book of nature. This creation-centered theology, the conviction that the natural world is a primary revelation of God, has remained a hallmark of Franciscan thought down to the present.

Bonaventure also addressed the tension between learning and simplicity that had divided the early Franciscan movement. Some friars, the "Spirituals," insisted that Francis's radical simplicity was incompatible with academic study. Bonaventure disagreed. He argued that study, done in the right spirit, was itself a form of prayer, a way of ascending the ladder of creation to the Creator. The Itinerarium was, in part, his demonstration: here was a work of sophisticated theology that led not to intellectual pride but to mystical union.

Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation

The most influential interpreter of Franciscan spirituality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar of the New Mexico Province born in 1943 in Topeka, Kansas. Rohr was ordained in 1970 and spent his early ministry working with marginalized communities. In 1987, he founded the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, around a kitchen table with a handful of volunteers.

The CAC's name is itself a thesis. Rohr has spent his career arguing that action without contemplation is merely activism, and contemplation without action is merely navel-gazing. The Franciscan tradition, he insists, holds the two together. Francis did not choose between serving lepers and praying on mountaintops. He did both, and each fed the other.

Rohr's theology is grounded in what he calls the "Franciscan alternative orthodoxy," a term he uses to describe a strain of Christian thought, running from Francis through Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, that emphasizes the goodness of creation, the cosmic scope of Christ's redemption, and the priority of love over law. In Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (2014), Rohr argued that the Franciscan tradition offers a corrective to the guilt-based, fall-focused theology that has dominated much of Western Christianity. Where the dominant tradition begins with the fall and sees creation as a problem to be solved by redemption, the Franciscan tradition begins with incarnation and sees creation as a gift to be received with joy.

This distinction has practical consequences for spiritual direction. A director working from a Franciscan perspective will tend to emphasize what is already good and alive in a directee's experience rather than focusing primarily on sin and failure. They will pay attention to the directee's relationship with the natural world, with their body, and with beauty. They will be suspicious of spiritualities that require you to leave the world behind and drawn to spiritualities that help you find God within it.

Rohr's daily email meditations, launched in 2002, reach hundreds of thousands of subscribers. His Living School for Action and Contemplation, a two-year program launched in 2013, trains people in the contemplative and justice traditions that the CAC represents. The CAC has also invested heavily in online content, podcasts, and digital education, making Franciscan spirituality accessible to a global audience. Rohr stepped back from daily involvement in the CAC's operations in 2023, but the center continues to operate under the leadership of his successors.

The Franciscan Approach to Spiritual Direction

Franciscan spirituality shapes the practice of spiritual direction in several distinctive ways.

Creation-centered attention. A Franciscan director will be attuned to the directee's experience of the natural world. Where do you encounter God in nature? What landscapes, seasons, or creatures stir something in your soul? How does your body respond to prayer? These questions, which might seem peripheral in other traditions, are central in a Franciscan framework. If every creature bears the vestige of God, then your response to creation is a form of prayer, and a director trained in the Franciscan tradition will help you attend to it.

Simplicity as spiritual practice. The Franciscan emphasis on poverty translates, in a direction context, into an attention to simplicity. What are the attachments that clutter your interior life? What would it look like to let go of the need to control, to possess, to perform? These are not primarily moral questions in the Franciscan tradition. They are questions about freedom. Attachments bind you. Simplicity frees you. A Franciscan director will gently help you notice where you are bound and invite you to explore what freedom might look like.

Joy as a spiritual indicator. Francis was famous for his joy. His early friars were sometimes called joculatores Dei, God's jesters. In the Franciscan tradition, joy is not a superficial happiness or a denial of suffering. It is a deep gladness that arises from right relationship with God, with creation, and with the poor. A Franciscan director will take your joy seriously as a spiritual datum. Where do you feel genuine gladness? What brings you alive? These are clues to God's action in your life.

Solidarity with the poor and marginalized. Francis's conversion began with a leper. His spirituality never left the margins. A Franciscan director will be interested in your relationship with those who suffer. Not as a guilt trip, but as a spiritual question: how is God present to you in the suffering of others? How does your encounter with poverty and injustice shape your prayer? The Franciscan tradition insists that God is found not only in beauty and consolation but in the suffering face of the marginalized.

Embodiment. The stigmata are the most dramatic expression of Franciscan embodiment, but the principle is broader. Francis saw the body as a partner in the spiritual life, not an obstacle. He walked, fasted, worked with his hands, embraced lepers, and received the wounds of Christ in his flesh. Franciscan direction takes the body seriously. How is your prayer affected by your physical health? What does your body know that your mind has not yet admitted? Where do you carry tension, resistance, or grace in your physical self?

Franciscan Scholars and Resources

Beyond Rohr, several contemporary scholars have made significant contributions to understanding and practicing Franciscan spirituality.

Ilia Delio, a Franciscan Sister of Washington and theologian at Villanova University, has written extensively on the relationship between Franciscan theology and modern science. Her books, including Simply Bonaventure (2001) and The Emergent Christ (2011), explore how the Franciscan vision of creation as God's self-expression can be enriched by contemporary cosmology and evolutionary biology.

William Short, OFM, a Franciscan friar and professor at the Franciscan School of Theology at the University of San Diego, has produced important scholarly work on the early Franciscan sources, making them accessible to a new generation of students and practitioners.

Murray Bodo, OFM, author of Francis: The Journey and the Dream (1972), a widely read imaginative biography of Francis, has helped countless readers encounter the human Francis behind the hagiographic legend.

The Franciscan Intellectual Tradition series, published by the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University in New York, provides rigorous scholarly treatments of Franciscan theology, philosophy, and spirituality.

For those seeking a direct experience of Franciscan spirituality, the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, Arizona; the San Damiano Retreat Center in Danville, California; Mt. Irenaeus Franciscan Mountain Retreat in West Clarksville, New York; and the Franciscan Center in Tampa, Florida all offer retreats, spiritual direction, and formation programs rooted in the Franciscan tradition. The CAC's Living School remains one of the most comprehensive formation experiences available.

Duns Scotus and the Primacy of Love

No account of Franciscan intellectual tradition is complete without John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), the Scottish-born Franciscan philosopher and theologian whose ideas have experienced a remarkable revival in recent decades, partly through Richard Rohr's popularization.

Scotus is important for Franciscan spirituality for two reasons. First, he argued for the "primacy of Christ," the idea that the Incarnation was not primarily a response to human sin but an expression of God's desire to share divine love with creation. In this view, even if humanity had never fallen, God would still have become human. The Incarnation is not Plan B, a rescue mission for a broken world. It is Plan A, the fulfillment of God's creative intention from the beginning.

This idea, which Thomas Aquinas explicitly rejected, has profound implications for how Franciscans understand the spiritual life. If Christ came not primarily to fix something broken but to complete something beautiful, then the fundamental posture of the Christian is not guilt but gratitude. The starting point of the spiritual life is not "I am a sinner" but "I am beloved." This is not a denial of sin. It is a reordering of priorities. Sin is real, but love is more real. The Franciscan tradition begins with love.

Second, Scotus developed the concept of haecceitas, or "thisness," the idea that each individual being has a unique, unrepeatable identity that God wills and loves for its own sake. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet who was deeply influenced by Scotus, coined the term "inscape" to describe this quality and wrote some of the most vivid nature poetry in the English language as a result. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same," Hopkins wrote in "As Kingfishers Catch Fire": "Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves, goes itself; myself it speaks and spells." For Hopkins, every creature was a unique expression of God's creative love, and attending to the "thisness" of things was itself a form of prayer.

This theological conviction has practical consequences for spiritual direction. A Franciscan director informed by Scotus will be attentive to the unique, unrepeatable quality of each directee's experience. They will resist the temptation to fit the directee's story into a generic template. They will honor the "thisness" of this particular person's journey and trust that God is at work in the specific details of this particular life.

The Third Order and Lay Franciscan Life

Franciscan spirituality is not limited to friars and nuns. From the earliest days of the movement, laypeople were drawn to Francis's vision and sought a way to live it within their own circumstances. The result was the Third Order, now known as the Secular Franciscan Order (OFS) or the Third Order Regular (TOR).

The Third Order was formally established by Francis around 1221, though its exact origins are debated. It provided a rule of life for married people, workers, and others who could not join a religious community but wanted to live according to Franciscan principles. The rule included commitments to prayer, simplicity, peacemaking, and service to the poor. Third Order Franciscans were expected to practice regular confession, attend Mass frequently, give generously to those in need, and refuse to take up arms except in defense of their homeland.

Today, the Secular Franciscan Order has hundreds of thousands of members worldwide. Local fraternities meet regularly for prayer, formation, and mutual support. The commitment is serious: the process of becoming a professed Secular Franciscan typically takes three years and involves ongoing formation, community involvement, and a public profession of the Franciscan rule.

For people exploring Franciscan spirituality, a local OFS fraternity can be an excellent entry point. The communities welcome inquirers and offer a structured way to explore whether the Franciscan charism resonates with your own spiritual hunger. Many professed Secular Franciscans also serve as spiritual directors, bringing their Franciscan formation to the companionship they offer.

Where the Tradition Meets Your Life

Franciscan spirituality does not ask you to become a medieval friar. It does not require you to give away all your possessions, though it will make you think about why you have them. It does not demand a particular form of prayer, though it will draw you toward forms that engage the body and the senses.

What it asks is a shift in attention. Instead of looking for God only in churches, books, and religious experiences, look for God in the face of the person sitting across from you. In the tree outside your window. In the feel of water on your hands. In the texture of bread. In the suffering of the world and in the persistent, inexplicable joy that surfaces in the midst of suffering.

Francis saw the world as a sacrament: an outward sign of an inward grace. The contemplative traditions teach you to be still and attend. The Ignatian tradition teaches you to discern. The Celtic tradition teaches you to find a companion for the journey. The Franciscan tradition teaches you to look at what is right in front of you and recognize it as holy.

Lectio Divina practitioners will find a natural resonance with the Franciscan approach: the slow, attentive reading of Scripture that lectio cultivates is the same quality of attention that Francis brought to creation itself. The world, for Francis, was a text to be read with the same reverence as the Gospel.

If you are interested in exploring Franciscan spirituality with a trained companion, our directory of spiritual directors includes directors formed in the Franciscan tradition. You can also seek out Franciscan retreat centers, Third Order Franciscan communities (lay communities affiliated with the Franciscan family), and the CAC's online offerings.

Francis was dying when he composed his most famous poem. He was blind, in pain, and deeply at peace. He praised the sun he could no longer see. He praised the water and the fire and the earth he would soon leave behind. He praised Sister Bodily Death, from whom, he sang, no living person can escape. Then he asked his brothers to lay him on the bare ground and sing the Canticle while he died.

They did. And people have been singing it ever since.

The Canticle as Spiritual Practice

The Canticle of the Creatures is more than a poem. It is a practice. Franciscan communities have used it for centuries as a form of prayer, singing or reciting it as part of their daily worship. But its practice need not be formal.

Try this: go outside. Stand somewhere you can see the sky. Read the Canticle slowly, aloud if possible. Let each stanza redirect your attention: to the sun, the moon, the wind, the water, the earth, the flowers and fruit. Do not analyze the poem. Let it do what it was designed to do: reattach your attention to the world and, through the world, to the One who made it.

This is Franciscan prayer at its simplest and most powerful. It does not require a chapel or a technique or a spiritual vocabulary. It requires only the willingness to stop, look, and respond with gratitude to what you see. Francis composed the Canticle when he was too ill to walk, too blind to see the sun he praised. He did not need to see it. He had been seeing it his whole life.

The Franciscan tradition does not ask you to achieve something extraordinary. It asks you to notice something ordinary and recognize it as holy. That is harder than it sounds. It is also, in the end, what every spiritual tradition is pointing toward: the capacity to see what is actually in front of you, and to be grateful for it, not because Francis was extraordinary, though he was, but because what he pointed to is available to anyone willing to pay attention. The world is full of God, and the appropriate response is gratitude.