The Seraphic Spirit

The Franciscan Order is also known as the Seraphic Order. Seraphs are called the “fiery ones”, those angels closest to God, burning with love as they bow before the Most High God. Two years before the death of St. Francis, our Lord appeared to him in the form of a seraph and bestowed on him the wounds of His suffering, marking him with the stigmata. Known for his ardent love of God, we address him as our Seraphic Father Francis. Seraph wings and seraphs are symbolic of the Franciscan Order.

Another great Franciscan, St. Bonaventure, was said to have done his theology on his knees. He put into systematic words the sublime and radical wisdom of the ‘poverello’, St. Francis, the ‘seraph’ wounded with the fire of the stigmata on Mount Alverno. His writings emphasize love for God, intimacy with God, and the clarity of thought resulting from it. The Seraphic Doctor taught that it is not primarily the intellect that seeks God, but the will. He had a ardent love for Jesus and the Church. Like his model, Saint Francis, Jesus was the center of everything—his teaching, his administration, his writing, and his life and he was given the title the “Seraphic Doctor.”  

“If you ask how such things can occur, seek the answer in God’s grace, not in doctrine;

in the longing of the will, not in the understanding;

in the sighs of prayer, not in research;

seek the bridegroom not the teacher;

God and not man;

darkness not daylight;

and look not to the light but rather to the raging fire

that carries the soul to God with intense fervor and glowing love.

The fire is God, and the furnace is in Jerusalem (Isa 31:9), fired by Christ in the ardor of his loving passion.”

St. Bonaventure