in the worst times, when Easter is unimaginably far away, God is nevertheless right there at work. God does not remain safely on the outside looking on at our suffering, but is deeply, intimately, involved with it. We do not like reminders of our vulnerability and neediness. But in the Incarnation, God deliberately takes our vulnerable humanity and lives it fully, absolutely – messiness, failure, death and all.
The keynotes of Franciscan spirituality are humility, love and joy. For Francis, and for those who seek to walk in his way, they are the fruits of that continuing process of conversion which begins with Jesus’ call to ‘come, follow me’.2 They allow us to examine new ways of engaging with the world. The attempt to live with others in humility, love and joy opens up the possibility of finding and reflecting Christ anywhere we happen to be; the more broken and damaged our world appears, the more it needs to see humility, love and joy in action.
Saints are ordinary people who find in themselves the resources to do extraordinary things. Francis’ way of life was devastatingly simple. He witnessed to a manner of living which is rooted in dependence on God, rather than on any power or status we may have accumulated for ourselves. Everything we have has been given to us, and to come with honesty before God we need to start, as Francis did, with nothing. God looks with love on our frailties and hesitations, and still he invites us: ‘Come, follow me’.
Modern life, at least in the affluent West, offers a bewildering range of choices and possibilities. We are uncertain what to choose. How will we know if we have made the right choice? Competing values clamour for our attention until we are almost paralysed by indecision. We yearn for simplicity. But to begin again with nothing feels very exposed. We are afraid of our vulnerability. A life of humility, love and joy in the pattern of St Francis offers a strange freedom, but one so different from what we are used to that we scarcely recognize what it has to offer.
Even if we can bear to risk it, the way ahead is by no means easy. The complex questions of existence do not simply melt away. Yet Francis’ life, shorn of choice, free from all encumbrances, but radiantly in love with God, offers a hopeful model for life in harmony with the true ground of our being:
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.3
Notes
1 Archbishop Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust, Hodder & Stoughton, 2002, chapter 1.
2 Matthew 19:21.
3 T.S.Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, in Four Quartets, Faber and Faber, 1963.
Part One: Humility
Humility is the recognition of the truth about God and ourselves, the recognition of our own insufficiency and dependence, seeing that we have nothing that we have not received.
(The Principles of the First Order of the Society of Saint Francis, Day 25)
1. Life and Context
Among all the other gifts which we have received and continue to receive daily from our benefactor, the Father of mercies, and for which we must express the deepest thanks to our glorious God, our vocation is a great gift.
(The Testament of St Clare)4
Francis has become one of the best-known and best-loved saints of recent times. It is odd to think that, after his intense popularity in his own time and immediately after his death, he was little known or studied until the end of the nineteenth century. He didn’t write all that much himself, but after he was canonized almost immediately after his death, several Lives of St Francis were written. Some were by people who had actually known him, often early brothers of the order, so his story as told by them does have an immediacy recognizable from the Gospels. The first ‘modern’ attempt at a scholarly Life of St Francis was published in 1894 by the French author Paul Sabatier, and the thirst for Franciscan spirituality has hardly slackened since.
The Challenge of St Francis
So who was St Francis, and what does he have to say to us today, nearly 800 years after his death? He remains a hugely charismatic figure, and his way to God attracts many people through its sincerity and wholeheartedness. Conventional images of Francis conjure up a dreamy-faced young man in a brown habit, surrounded by birds and animals. He is often made to appear sweet and unthreatening, even whimsical. Yet this image of him is seriously misleading. It is unlikely that such a person could have a lasting impact over eight centuries; still less that he could have any valid message for a cynical and questioning generation like our own. Perhaps the animal-lover persona has been imposed on Francis in order to soften the real bite of his message for today – to keep him ‘safe’ so that we do not have to take him seriously? We do not want to be reminded that gospel living, if it is done wholeheartedly, is anything but safe. Over-emphasizing the cute, animal-loving Francis enables us to miss the point – that following Christ is a dangerous vocation. Complete simplicity has its cost.
Francis has much more to offer us. His way of being in the world has a great deal of significance for our behaviour and attitudes. It is not because he skips around facilely chanting ‘hullo trees hullo sky’ like an adult fotherington-tomas5 that Francis has become the patron saint of nature and ecology! Instead, much more demandingly, he points to a new way of living as a citizen of the world. Not just other human beings but all creatures, from the elements to the insects, are our partners in a song of praise to God who created all of us for relationship and co-existence. Psychology has made us much more aware of how self-centred we are. But embarking on the Franciscan way demands that we question ourselves profoundly. What is at the heart of my life? Does my knowledge of myself, and of God, lead me into relationship with others as they really are, or only as they are of use to me?
If we take on Francis’ challenge, we will be required to relinquish our sense of control. There is no room here for a sense of superiority about our place in the created order. We do not have the right to exploit other creatures for our own satisfaction, or to satisfy our own perceptions of what we need. In Francis’ vision, we have no right of power or dominion over our environment, but are required to work with it. Most vitally of all, we are called to recognize the hand of God at work in our lives, and in the lives of all the other creatures who share our space. God is at the centre of this equation. A right relationship with each creature involves learning to know it as its Creator intended it to be known; understanding the purpose of its existence, enabling it to fulfil whatever potential it has to reflect that Creator back to other creatures.
Such a view was revolutionary in Francis’ time, and little, essentially, has changed; although we have made great advances in scientific understanding, our view of ourselves as the real masters of the universe has done untold damage to our environment. So Francis’ sermons to the birds and the animals become a contemporary challenge to all who are capable of understanding. We desperately need to rediscover the humility that characterizes Francis’ whole approach to his world. And we also need to rediscover God at the centre of life.
A Way of Commitment
Christians
