Sr. Sharon Dillon
Prayer in the Franciscan Life
(Adapted from Franciscan
Morning and Evening Prayer)
We know that neither Clare nor Francis offered a complicated
method of prayer. They called their followers to prayer with a decidedly
contemplative dimension: to be present to God who is present to all creatures.
They required that all prayer be Trinitarian. Prayer is to always be addressed
to God in the Son (Christ) by the power of the Spirit. That prayer is focused
as an incarnational action. A person
becomes alive to God’s deeds in the greatest gift of God, the incarnation, the
word made flesh, in which God becomes one with us in the bodily person of
Jesus, the Christ. The purpose of all Franciscan prayer then, is to give God
ceaseless praise and thanksgiving for all God has done and does in creation and
in our re-creation (relation) in the Christ.