When St. Francis took of his clothes and walked naked out of Assisi, he was not preaching from a pulpit, lecturing from a university podium, or writing a book. He stirred up our romantic imagination in the faith. He was a great artist as well as a great saint. He showed that all miracles begin with falling in love.
Ronald Rolheiser talks in his book Secularity And The Gospel, “We need to re-romanticize faith, religion, and church and give people something beautiful with which to fall in love.” In other words, we need to create a new vocabulary for the faith that will speak more convincingly to the present generation. In my time at John Carroll University, I have seen many young men and women who have fallen in love with God, service and social justice. They are familiar with Fr. Pedro Arrupe’s saying, “Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evening, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
Our urgent task in the secular world is that “Prophetic faith does not see the primary battle as the struggle between belief and secularism. It understands that the real battle, the big struggle in our times, is the fundamental choice between cynicism and hope. The prophets always begin in judgment, in a social critique of the status quo, but they end in hope – that these realities can and will be changed. The choice between cynicism and hope is ultimately a spiritual choice, one that has enormous political consequences.” I as a priest need to discipline more to see hope more often. In my confessional, I see many falters, sins and mistakes, and yet I cannot give an absolution without hope. It is not my hope for them; it is God’s hope for us as His beloved sons and daughters.
So our hope and real task is to make the secular world fall in love with God again. It could be the same to say, “We must gamble everything for love.”