Francis of Assisi lived 800 years
ago. He died on October 4th,
so the Christian church remembers Francis today.
Of the many saints who might capture the
imagination of the contemporary Christian, St. Francis trumps. To many, he is the most obvious saint
who ever lived. He was born into a
wealthy family, became a soldier, and then, to his father’s dismay, renounced
knighthood and nobility. He chose
to give away his money and worldly possessions, and practice what one scholar
describes as “direct, simple and natural, if not naïve, spirituality.” Whereas he could’ve married for power
and prestige, he wedded himself, as he said, to Lady Poverty. He prayed constantly, and showed
remarkable love and service to the outcast; he would kiss the sores of lepers,
believing that was what Jesus would do.
If Francis of Assisi is the most admired
of the historic saints, he might also be the least imitated. We must always remember that if we want
to take the saints seriously we are to follow their example, not talk about how
impressive or moving their witness to be.
He became poor voluntarily.
There is a fashionable tendency to admire those who become poor as a
matter of choice, but I often I think we (meaning the people with many
possessions and relative affluence) use their witness as an inoculation from
contracting the same disease. For
Francis, to own nothing, to have no possessions, to have no conflicts about
money, was the only way to be in communion with Jesus, who lived the same
way. Francis understood that Jesus
was not simply to be believed in, but followed. Are you an observer, or a follower?
I think Francis would agree with
ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, who finds most Christians far too spiritual in the
practice of their faith.
Christianity “is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order
to be Christian,” he says, “but rather Christianity is to have one’s body
shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is
unavoidable.”
I love this! The very motions of our body give worship to God. To kiss the sores of a leper was worship for Francis. To risk arrest while protesting a gun shop that sold guns
illegally to criminals, as many of our members have done recently, is an act of
worship. Yes, what we do in church
is worship, but every motion of life can be worship, too. That’s what makes Francis so powerful.
Barbara Brown Taylor, who is the source
for Hauerwas’ quote in her An Altar in the World, adds: “In our embodied life together, the words of our doctrines
take on flesh. If one of our
orthodox beliefs has no corporeal value, if we cannot come up with a single
consequence it has for our embodied life together, then there is good reason to
ask why we should bother with it all.”
Francis had many true followers in his
own time, and his order of friars continues to this day. With a few exceptions, as they were a
rather ragtag bunch, they were not permitted to preach sermons; this duty was
reserved for the educated and no doubt dull clerics. This suited Francis fine, being convinced that he and his
friars could preach with their deeds, not with words. “We will preach the gospel, using words only when
necessary,” he reportedly said. My
favorite quote of Francis is, “It is no use walking anywhere to preach, unless
our walking is our preaching.”
This is a far better form of, “If you’re going to talk the talk you have
to walk the walk,” and other variants.
Francis is the embodiment of what Edie tells Father Barry in On the
Waterfront, “Whoever
heard of saint hiding in a church?”
Francis incarnates what we are trying to
communicate in our class that’s based on An Altar in the World:
God is found in every daily transaction and human interaction—each
provides an opportunity to love our neighbor as we wish to be loved, to treat
our fellow human being in their particular circumstance as we wish to be
treated in our own. There is a
deep frustration in so many of us who find God in the church on Sunday, but
then find God missing in the office, at school, and in the marketplace on
Monday. I love that Francis found
God more reliably in the walk from one church to another, for he reminds us
that God is surely present in the walk to work on Monday morning, if we have
the discipline to recognize God in the common, obvious and least expected
places and people.
Francis had another thing figured out
about worship: every living
creature, and every part of the creation, gives praise to God. How arrogant we are in thinking that
only the human being can give praise to God. Listen to these verses for the great hymn he wrote:
My
Lord be praised by sister moon and all the stars, that with her soon will point
the glittering heavens. Let wind
and air and cloud and calm and weathers all, repeat the psalm.
By
mother earth my Lord be praised; governed by thee she hath upraised what for
our life is needful. Sustained by
thee, through every hour, she bringeth forth fruit, herb and flower.
Francis embodies what so many modern
pilgrim sense, that God is found on the hiking trail when we encounter the
grandeur that nature cracks open before us and beneath the canopy of stars that
glitter in a cold autumn night.
God is found in the crash of the surf at the Jersey shore as well as on
the sticky hands of a child smothered in the boardwalk’s misplaced cotton
candy. Praise of God flows from
every joyful moment.
And, certainly, Francis taught us, all
living creatures give praise to God in their own unique way. It is from this conviction that we
Francis as the foil to bless animals on his feast day each year. I come to this practice reluctantly, I
admit, because it is so domesticated.
It is very much about our pets, whom we rightly love, and not much about
the horrors of the animals condemned to factory farms and cruel methods of
slaughter so that they may become our food. Francis was convinced that the animals around him were
praising God, so he had a profound reverence for them. Francis is not the patron saint of
vegetarians; there is no indication that he was one. But he profoundly believed that the way a human treated an
animal reflected how she or he would treat another human. Today, when chicken is shrink-wrapped,
and we have no idea how it got to the refrigerated case, we need to remember
that Francis’ example was about far more than our cuddly pets, but about
respect for the creation itself.
So two last thoughts from the example of
Francis. First, when dinner is set
before you and there is meat upon it, remember that your prayer should be in
thanksgiving for the animal’s life that has been given for you. Omnivores like myself need to remember
that all life is sacred, and when I eat, I am taking life that God has created.
Second, and I must admit this sounds a
bit funny, when you put something in the recycling bin, do so with
reverence. Francis had a profound
belief that all things humans used in the creation were being borrowed. We do not own them; they are on loan
from God. In this crazy urban
existence we call home in Philadelphia, it is hard to create a space where we
reverently return to the creation what was never ours in the first place. In some way, the recycling bin is our
best shot.
Mostly, I make this second observation
because your neighbor might spot you saying a prayer over your blue bin when
you put it out on the street. She
might think you’re nuts, but then again, might see that you are preaching with
the very actions of your body, with the very priorities of your prayerful
spirit.
If she asks where you learned to do
that, tell her, “Christ Church!
The service is pretty good, but the walk down and the walk back is
better. Want to come with me
sometime?”