I Am the Truth
- MOTHER MARY FRANCIS
Evil has not an existence of itself.
Its business is destruction. And, like physical malignancy, destroying good is its work and scope. Evil is everything that God is not. It is everything that God has not created; evil is distortion to the point of deception. It is the lie. Our blessed Savior said, "I am...the truth" (Jn 14:6). Evil is the negation of truth, without reality in itself, but rather the absence of that reality which is the good. Therefore, malignancy of the soul would of necessity have pretenses as its expressions, since evil is the lie. It can never have any expression of itself except some form of untruthfulness....
The first lie that the world tells us is that it is a lasting city....
Once we subscribe, even in small measure, to this deception, all things assume a disproportion. If the world is our lasting city, ipso facto and instanter, our values are changed. The world keeps insisting, "I am what endures. Pitch your tent here. Put your roots down in me." Once we lose our healthy sense of the world as a lovely stopping-off place, but passing, fading and ephemeral, once we lose the sense that we are pilgrims in via ad Patrem…and clasp it to ourselves as a lasting city, all things are distorted. From this first lie of the world, that we have here a lasting city, we ask Jesus to defend us.
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Acknowledgement
Mother Mary Francis, "I Am the Truth." excerpt from Anima Christi (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2001).
This excerpt appeared in Magnificat.
Reprinted with permission of Ignatius Press.
The Author
Mother Mary Francis helped found four new Poor Clare monasteries, including one in Holland, and led the restoration of two others. She was a strong voice for authentic religious life during the turmoil of the years following Vatican II. In addition to serving as abbess of a convent and of the federation of Colletine Poor Clare monasteries in the U.S., Mother Mary Francis was a prolific writer, producing spiritual meditations, plays, books and poetry. She is the author of A Right to Be Merry , A Time of Renewal, But I Have Called You Friends, and Anima Christi.