The poverty and humility of Christ is best understood not simply by contemplating his life after the incarnation, but by understanding what He gave up to suffer and die for us.
By David Torkington
Crisis Magazine
December 27, 2025
On leaving Rome in 1223, St. Francis of Assisi made for the Rieti Valley and back to the hermitage of Fonte Columbo, where he had written his rule. It was here that he had an idea which was to stain the memories and the imaginations of everyone with the mystery of the Incarnation.
As Christmas drew near, he approached John Vellita, who owned land in the vicinity of Greccio, and asked him for permission to use a cave on his property to reenact the birth of the one he called Brother Jesus at Bethlehem. There was an ass and an ox in the cave and a manger with a statue of the Christ-child lying in the straw.
Francis was deacon at the Mass and spoke with such love and tenderness that many believed that the statue came alive as he cradled it in his arms. Whether this was true or not, one thing was for sure: Francis had brought back to life the humanity of Jesus Christ in the minds and in the imaginations of his contemporaries which had been lost to sight for all too many in the "Dark Ages." In the aftermath of the heresy of Arianism in the fourth century-that denied that Christ was divine-His divinity had been so emphasized that His humanity had been all but forgotten. After the Crusaders reopened the Holy Land to pilgrims to see where Christ was born and where He lived and died, His Sacred Humanity received a new emphasis, thanks, in particular, to St. Bernard and St. Francis of Assisi.
This achievement was graphically symbolized by this event that took place in Greccio in the Christmas of 1223 and in its aftermath. Henceforth, the practice of making cribs at Christmas spread all over the world and all down the centuries to the present day, to remind all of the world-shaking truth that is at the heart of Franciscan spirituality. However, if you want to appreciate just how much the incarnation meant to St. Francis, you must look at the reason why he embraced what he called "Lady Poverty."
Most people, and many Franciscans themselves, have never fully realized why St. Francis insisted on a life of such radical and beggarly poverty. The truth of the matter is that the life of beggarly poverty that St. Francis chose to live was not chosen in order to copy how Christ lived while He was on earth but for something far more awesome. It was inspired by the way the one he called Friar Jesus sacrificed Himself for all human kind by the way He emptied Himself of all that He experienced in Heaven.
This radical self-emptying was called by the Fathers of the Church His kenosis. In performing this act of incomparable humility, Our Lord had to temporarily forego the experience of Ecstatic Bliss that He had enjoyed from all eternity in Heaven in order to redeem us and make the ultimate reparation that only He could make. It was this that inspired St. Francis to deprive Himself of everything to the nth degree.
But for St. Francis of Assisi, this kenosis, or the self-emptying of Christ in order to redeem us, did not end there. For Francis, Christ's insatiable desire to redeem us involved an even more demeaning act of self-abasement that involved something even more radical than entering into our flesh and blood. It involved Our Lord, Christ the King, choosing to become common food, ordinary bread and wine, so that He could not just be with us but in us-both physically and spiritually.
This would enable Him to suffuse and surcharge us with what the Fathers of the Church called the Pleroma-namely, the cornucopia of God's love. This love carries within it all the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit that enable us to follow and imitate Christ daily in all that we say and do. That is why the sacred mystery of the Mass was central to Franciscan spirituality, as it was to the first followers of Christ in the Early Church.
It is here, as St. Francis saw so clearly, that our spiritual kenosis, in imitation of Christ, enables His spiritual and physical presence to bring to birth the Pleroma within us. It is this, the fullness of the Father's love, that can alone enable us to share in, and take part in, the mystery of the redemption for ourselves-and for the world that Christ Our Lord now chooses to redeem through us.
The sublime sacrifice of Our Lord was made so that God's original plan could be reinstated by His Son in the person of Jesus Christ, in whom God's sacrifice for humankind was made Flesh and Blood at the Incarnation. Last but not least, God's incarnate sacrifice that was embodied in Jesus Christ and in His continual acts of sacrificial love, that finally became a continuum of pure selfless loving, would enable reparation to be made to God.
This reparation would firstly be made by Christ the King. It would be made for what has come to be called Original Sin and the plague of sinfulness that followed in its wake that was, and continues to be, an effrontery to God. It would then be made by those who choose to follow and imitate Our Lord by taking up their daily crosses to follow Him. But it must be said that without His lifelong act of reparation, our acts of reparation would be worthless.
St. Francis said, "It is in giving that we receive," and so each day, as we try to give ourselves to God in all that we say and do, inside and outside of prayer, God gives us the fruits that our sacrificial prayers have merited, thanks to the merits of Jesus Christ, in whom we now live and move and have our being. These spiritual gifts are given to enable us, like the first people of God, to arrive at the New Promised Land, the New Paradise, which is union with our Divine Father, despite the same daily attacks from the same powers of evil that taunted and tempted Christ throughout His life on earth.
It was in contemplating the sublime mystery of the sacrifice that Jesus made-firstly, in order to come to this earth on the first Christmas Day and then, secondly, to return to the Heaven from which He came after His hideous death on the Cross-that regularly reduced the Poverello of Assisi to tears. They were shed so regularly and so relentlessly that he was all but totally blind when he finally opened His arms to say, "Welcome, Sister Death."
They were not just tears of sorrow when he contemplated what His own people did to the Man who came to redeem them but tears of joy, too, that He did redeem them and us-and still continues to redeem us and the world that is still waiting for redemption through us. Just as His sacrificial journey engendered making reparation to God for original sin and the sins that have become more and more widespread and more and more pernicious down to the present day, so reparation is an essential ingredient of our daily spirituality too.
Now we can see why any authentic Catholic spirituality is redemptive, restorative, sacrificial, and contemplative. And we can see why it can only be lived by the modern descendant of "The Poor of Yahweh"-namely, those who listen to and put into practice the repentance, the prayer, and, above all else, the sacrifice that has been the ongoing clarion call of Our Lady in her most recent revelations which she has used to galvanize the modern world.
This is her way of calling us all to return to the God-given, sacrificial spirituality that her Divine Son first practiced Himself before giving it to the modern world. May this Christmas help us all to realize once again, with St. Francis, the true meaning of the Incarnation-so that in, with, and through Him we may make every day like Christmas Day.
Then-in, with, and through Him-we can continually join Him in loving, praising, and adoring His Father in Heaven and to receive from our Father the Pleroma. The Fathers of the Church continually remind us that, contained within the cornucopia of the Father's Love, namely the Pleroma, are all the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit so that His beloved son Jesus Christ can continue His work of redemption here on earth through us.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.
David Torkington is a Spiritual Theologian, Author and Speaker who specializes in Prayer, Christian Spirituality and Mystical Theology. You can find out more about him at davidtorkington.com.