Admonition VI: Imitation of Christ
Are saints more talented than we are? For us it is difficult, almost impossible to persevere through Lent with some penance we have chosen for ourselves. Yet when we read the lives of the saints we wonder at their long fasts, their hours of prayer, their great virtues and the miracles they worked. All of this seems to be a long way from what we know of ourselves. And yet Our Lord said to us in the Gospels that we should be perfect just as our heavenly Father is perfect. St Francis felt the same as we do as we see in his sixth Admonition in which he speaks of imitating Christ. Clearly he found it difficult to imitate the saints he knew and venerated because he wrote in this Admonition: 'it is a great shame for us that the saints have accomplished great things and we want only to receive glory and honour by recounting them'. Living a Franciscan spirituality then has to be more than taking on the name of Franciscan be it as our identity or as our ideal. Everyone admires Francis of Assisi but to what extent do we feel that we can imitate him and by imitating him imitate Christ. All Francis wanted to do in his life was to live the Gospel and this we can all want. A first and necessary step in the imitation of Christ is to want to imitate Christ. This we can all do. Then when we feel embarrassed at how poorly we imitate Christ we can remember that Francis too felt inadequate and a poor disciple of Christ. Throughout his life he retained the feeling of being unworthy, the feeling he had when meeting God in the leper.
