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  • Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi by Richard Rohr
  • Jon M. Sweeney (bio)
Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi. By Richard Rohr. Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2014. 294 pp + xxii. $21.99.

[By way of full disclosure, for several years I have had a long-distance, reciprocal relationship of encouragement with Fr. Richard Rohr. Many of us who work in Franciscan studies have; I’m not special; Rohr is a gracious mentor and elder statesman in the field.]

This new book is not the culmination of Rohr’s work on Francis of Assisi (he has yet to write that book), so much as it is a culmination of Rohr’s passion for the Franciscan way—in his words, “one of the most attractive, appealing, and accessible of all frames and doorways to the divine.” With evangelical purpose, Eager to Love aims to reveal a Francis of Assisi who is part of the mystical thread running through all of Christian history, from the Virgin Mary’s cataphatic “yes,” through the ancient church and medieval monastic mystics, to what Rohr calls “the natural spiritual genius” that was the man, Francis, and his remarkable identification with Christ. Rohr aims to make this tradition not just understandable but relevant and available to everyone today. He claims that reviving the mystical side of faith is necessary before we can recover who we are meant to be as human beings. I think he’s right.

That said, this is not a book written for the academy. On the second page of the preface, Rohr makes a non-scholarly claim that is central to his thesis: “Francis must have known, at least intuitively, that there is only one enduring spiritual insight and everything else follows from it: The visible world is an active doorway to the invisible world, and the invisible world is much larger than the visible” (italics his). This isn’t the sort of assertion any writer may easily document. However, an endnote takes the reader to a quotation from Thomas of Celano’s Second Life of Francis, a text written in about 1246, where Thomas makes a related claim that sounds more grounded in fact: “Often, without moving his lips, he would meditate within himself. He drew external things within himself, and they would lift his mind to even higher things.” The point is: there were things Francis understood by personal experience with God that books cannot easily explain. Anyone who spends much time studying Francis will, again, suspect that Rohr is right.

The first two authors quoted in Eager to Love are Ken Wilbur, the mostly self-taught philosopher, and Neale Donald Walsch, of bestselling Conversations with God fame, which won’t garner respect from the academy, either. I doubt, however, that this concerns Rohr in any way. His book doesn’t intend to be history, biography, or theology per se, and he has a knack for finding wisdom in a wide variety of sources. Eager to Love doesn’t even intend to be about Francis as much as it is about the way made clearer by Francis’s life. Each of thirteen chapters and three appendices make the point: “the alternative way of Francis” is a rediscovery of what makes humans, divine.

Rohr writes with flare; he always has, which is surely part of his lasting appeal. “It is ironic that you must go to the edge to find the center. But that is what the prophets, hermits, and mystics invariably know,” he writes, for example, and “[Francis] . . . delighted in both his Absolute Littleness and his Absolute Connection in the very same moment.” And I’m still in the preface.

Words like “inner” and “outer,” as well as “inward” and “outward,” take on a variety of meanings in Eager to Love, often upsetting biblical notions and [End Page 132] reviving ancient understandings of these terms that would have been familiar to Christian mystics such as Origen, Jerome, or Augustine.

Rohr sets out in Chapter 1 to define mysticism: “experiential knowledge of spiritual things,” and sets it, always in a broad, historical context that includes Francis, in opposition to knowledge attained from books, schooling...

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