Franciscan Writings

New:

Here is a new text on the connections between jazz improvisation and a Christian attitude of faith (October 2024):

Body, Soul and Spirit – Jazz Improvisation, the Human Person and Our Relationship with God

Franciscans

The Franciscan Order goes back to Francis of Assisi, who lived in Italy from 1182 to 1226. In an encounter with a leper he had the existential experience that God came to meet him through the poor and in turning towards those who were shut out. From then on he lived in radical poverty and founded a community whose way of life was directly oriented towards the Gospel and towards Jesus Christ. In doing so he set in motion an unprecedented reform movement in the Church of his day, a Church with many abuses, in which a complicated theology obscured the view of the Gospel.

Alongside the men’s order, in which the brothers lived together unmarried in small communities, a Franciscan order for women soon arose under the leadership of Saint Clare of Assisi, and finally a lay community. In the lay community, known as the “Third Order” (OFS = Ordo Franciscanus Saecularis, the Secular Franciscan Order) or simply as the Franziskanische Gemeinschaft (FG, Franciscan Community), people came together who wanted to live the Franciscan ideals in their ordinary lives, with family and work.

This so-called Franciscan spirituality has a number of focal points that are closely bound up with the person of Francis. They naturally include a life of solidarity at the side of the poor, and also a sense of kinship with the whole of creation (Francis is the “official” Catholic patron saint of environmentalists). They also include an attitude of non-violence in every situation and an active commitment to peace and justice. Not least, Franciscan spirituality also consists in a patient commitment to the renewal of the Church and in a deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Francis’s way of life was also marked by creativity and improvisation. His Canticle of the Sun is prayed all over the world, and in the history of literature it is the first poem in the Italian language (before that, literature was written only in Latin). This side of his personality shows a close connection with the arts, and above all with jazz.

If you would like to learn more about Francis of Assisi and his ideas, you can find some further texts here. Since I have already come across some of my texts on other websites, I have written down a few rules on copyright and the use of these texts for anyone who would like to quote or reproduce something from this site, and I ask you to observe them.