and we haven't much Time
Father Richard Rohr's spiritual and religious viewpoints, evidently those of his Franciscan community, often seem close to mine, and he states his more subtly than I do mine. As in his meditation for today, copy and pasted below.
God's footprints, handiwork, and presence in nature that is not human construct, rather than in liturgy, theological concepts, and the various sacred scripture of disagreeing, even warring, religious factions.
Who or What is God? Possibly not the variants that humans decide to say, image, believe, and dogmatize God as.
From the burning bush, the angel of Adonai speaking to Moses: "ehyeh asher ehyeh," I AM that I AM.
Tell them that He-Who-Is sent you.
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My image of God is too vast for me to comprehend or say, the evidence of God's presence in images sent back to Earth from the deep space probing of NASA's Hubble and JWST, and as we perceive in a microscope and quantum realms. From the Universe itself, or Multiverse, to sub-atomic particles: not God, but what Fr Richard calls fingerprints or footprints, not man-made things and ideas, but Creation itself.
And in Life Itself, a blessing for a Time, to look around and marvel and be glad to have been here for a while.
Francis and the Natural World
God’s Resting Place
Sunday, October 4, 2026
Feast Day of Francis of Assisi
Father Richard Rohr explains how Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) experienced the natural world as filled with God’s presence:
In stories of his life, Francis is quoted as talking to or about larks, lambs, rabbits, pheasants, falcons, cicadas, waterfowl, bees, the famous wolf of Gubbio, pigs (whom he praised for generously giving their bodies for our food), and hooked fish that he tried to throw back into the water whenever possible. He addressed inanimate creation too, as if it were indeed ensouled. We know this because his “Canticle of the Creatures” includes fire, wind, water, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and, of course, “our Sister Mother Earth” herself.
So-called “nature mysticism” was in fact a worthy first path for Francis and also for Bonaventure, the first Franciscan theologian, who saw all things as likenesses of God (vestigia Dei), fingerprints and footprints that reveal the divine DNA underlying all living links in the Great Chain of Being.
Creation itself—not ritual or spaces constructed by human hands—was Francis’s primary cathedral, his resting place in God, which then drove him back into the needs of the city. It’s very similar to Jesus’s own movement between desert solitude and small-town healing ministry. The gospel transforms us by putting us in touch with that which is much more constant and satisfying, literally the “ground of our being,” and has much more “reality” to it, rather than theological concepts or the mere ritualization of reality.
Daily cosmic events in the sky and on the earth are the reality above our heads and beneath our feet every minute of our lives: a continuous sacrament. I find that a preoccupation with religious rituals tends to increase the more we remain untouched by Reality Itself—to which the best rituals can only point.
Jesus himself commonly points to things like the red sky, a hen, lilies, the fig tree, a donkey caught in a pit, the birds of the air, the grass in the field, the Temple animals (which he released from their cages), and on and on. He was clearly looking at the seemingly “nonreligious” world, ordinary things all around him, and he appeared to do most of his teaching outside.
In the five-day Men’s Rites of Passage that was a focus of my work for fifteen years, many men discovered that prayers and rituals inside of human-scale buildings made with artificial materials also came to seem very domesticated and controlled. They often perceived that the salvation offered there was also “small” and churchy. Almost without exception, the greatest breakthroughs for the men occurred during extended times of silence in nature, where the human and the merely verbal were not in control—or during rituals that were raw and earthy.