In a letter to Saint Anthony, Francis wrote:
Brother Francis sends greetings to Brother Anthony, my Bishop. I am pleased that you teach sacred theology to the brothers providing that, as is contained in the Rule, you “do not extinguish the Spirit of prayer and devotion” during study of this kind.
“There is a great lesson for us today in the wisdom of a brief eight-hundred-year-old letter from one of the world’s most famous Christians to another of the world’s most famous Christians: whatever we do should take second place to how we live. If we find that our work is interfering with the priority of prayer and the spirit of devotion, perhaps we need to reevaluate what it is we are doing, or at least how we are going about doing it.
An interesting thing about the mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans, is that their way of life is modeled in such a way as to foster life with and among ordinary people. Perhaps this is why the Franciscans have remained so popular, even to this day. The wisdom of not letting one’s work or one’s ambition or one’s personal desires or even one’s will to do good for others get in the way of recalling that all things come from and should return to God is a message not only for women and men in professed religious life, but for all Christians and all people of good will.
What if we lived in such a way that our prayer was our priority, that we allowed our whole lives to reflect a spirit of prayer and devotion?”
(the above excerpt is from Daniel Horan, OFM’s book “Dating God”. See the full article.)