“Be doers of the word and not hearers only.” Whenever I hear this particular verse from the Letter of James, I think of a passage from the Life of St. Francis written by Brother Thomas of Celano:
“One day the gospel was being read in that church about how the Lord sent out his disciples to preach. The holy man of God, who was attending there, in order to understand better the words of the gospel, humbly begged the priest after celebrating the solemnities of the Mass to explain the gospel to him. . . Francis immediately exulted in the spirit of God. ‘This is what I want,’ he said, ‘this is what I seek, this is what I desire with all my heart.’ The holy father, overflowing with joy, hastened to implement the words of salvation, and did not delay before he devoutly began to put into effect what he heard. . . For he was no deaf hearer of the gospel; rather he committed everything he heard to his excellent memory and was careful to carry it out to the letter.”
St. James goes on to say that if one is a hearer only and not a doer, he is like one who looks at himself in a mirror and promptly forgets what he looks like when he walks away from the mirror. This verse also bears a similarity to another Franciscan source, one of the letters of St. Clare to St. Agnes of Prague. Clare asks us to use God’s Word as a mirror in which we gaze at the image of Jesus and recognize in that image the imperfections that exist in our own image.
Reading the Scriptures and praying with them are not simply pious practices in which we engage every day. They are transformative experiences. Even if we understood every passage of Scripture and its various interpretations, if they do not move us to repentance and transformation, then our knowledge and understanding is all for naught. We are called to be doers, not hearers only!
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator