objections that this was unsuitable work for the Son of God, is the same Jesus who inspired Francis to humble service of the outcasts of his time. The Acts of the Apostles spells out in more detail the role of deacons in the early Church, including making sure that the poor of the parish were included and fed. Today, the Church of England requires that deacons should be ready to share in the Church’s work of caring for the poor, the needy and the sick. ‘They are to strengthen the faithful, search out the careless and the indifferent, and to preach the word of God’;13 in short, to act as an incarnational presence in the world. Thus it is clear that Francis did exercise a diaconal ministry, in the pattern of the Servant Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.14
Mind, Body and Spirit
In order to speak with any kind of integrity to people who have no conception of what God is like, people of faith need to live it honestly and openly. Our beliefs must be consistent with everything we do, say or think; they must influence every aspect of our lives and relationships. The tremendous reality of incarnation means that there is no part of our human existence that cannot be touched by God. There is no need for shame or evasion. Jesus has been there before us. Every human emotion and experience is infused with the presence of the divine. Yet this approach, rooted in a sense of the goodness and integrity of all creation, has not always been evident in the teachings of the Church.
Today we are beginning at last to come to terms with a different concept of bodiliness from that which would have been understood in Francis’ time. It is not always easy. Much Christian theology, from the time of the Desert Fathers onwards, had spoken of the body as inferior to the soul or spirit – it was messier, less easily controllable, constantly demanding. In much Christian thought, our bodies have been rejected as at best a distraction from the life of the Spirit, and at worst completely divorced from it. The spiritual realm was consistently portrayed as somehow higher than the physical; the spiritual body would be perfected only after death, and this life was merely a preparation for the life of the spirit. We are still living with the remnants of this attitude today. Yet it was into the physical form of a human infant that Christ was born. He did not reject the limitations of the human body. A fully incarnate Christ must necessarily have been physical, and sensual. From the Gospel accounts we know that he ate and drank, walked, rode donkeys. Touch was a vital part of his ministry of healing. He loved, wept, got angry. He died.
What does it really mean, then, that God created us physical beings? How do we live out to the full our call to become the Body of Christ today? A healthy Christian approach to our humanity should happily recognize our spiritual and physical reality as equally valid expressions of our Christlikeness. It could be argued that, despite the example of the incarnate Jesus, Christians believe what has been absorbed from Pauline theology about the opposition, rather than the integration, of body and spirit. Many of us are still uncomfortable with having bodies at all. This discomfort has become all too clear through the sorry mess we make of discussing anything to do with gender or sexuality, for example. We attempt to argue that Jesus was somehow exempt from that one area of human embodiment; if he was a sexual being, even in the broadest sense, we would really rather not know about it. In fact, we secretly doubt that Jesus could really have been flesh at all; if he truly was heir to the same range of weaknesses and temptations that we are, we would then have to be able to face up to them in ourselves rather than write them off as bad and not really of God. In the same way, the fact that he was able to come through human temptations without sinning forces us to confront our own failures. So our vocation to be the living Body of Christ is impaired, because we do not want to envisage what that body might be like. It is all too painful, and we find it easier to reduce the Body of Christ to a picturesque symbol. However, the mystery of the Incarnation calls us to contemplate the truth that God became flesh, and that we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’15 in his image. Wholehearted membership of the Body of Christ begins with the call to accept our own physical embodiment, and rejoice that Jesus shared it. It was our own human reality, however far from ideal, that Jesus accepted and shared in his own body. Flesh cannot be separated from mind or spirit if we are to see ourselves as whole beings, and dedicate our whole selves joyfully to God’s service. Our human life and the physical world in which we live can be the vessel for a profound encounter with the love of God. In order to become accurate reflections of the incarnate God, we need to put every aspect of ourselves at God’s disposal. According to the Principles of the Anglican Society of Saint Francis, for example, the balanced Franciscan life is made up of three ‘ways of service’:16 prayer, study and work. Thus mind, body and spirit all find a place of equal value in the service of God.
The place of the mind in Franciscan life, however, has also given cause for dispute over the years. Although study quickly did become an accepted part of the ministry of the friars, and there were many learned Franciscan scholars, it is arguable that Francis himself was somewhat anti-intellectual. Certainly he was, at best, ambivalent about the benefits of academic learning. It played no part in the life he envisaged for the early brothers. The only book they needed to learn from was the Gospel. This attitude might in part be explained by the fact that literacy was then restricted to those who could afford it. Education was often available only through the very monasteries which had come to symbolize the Church’s arrogance and detachment in their apparent rejection of the real world. To be ‘unlettered’, as Francis himself always claimed to be, was to be closer to the poor majority. Jesus and the disciples were simple people with little or no formal education. Francis knew that his Little Brothers would reflect that, coming as they did from a society in which the majority had no access to learning. From the start he was determined that they should be Little, or Lesser, Brothers. That acceptance of poverty and littleness affected every aspect of their life, both corporately and individually.
It is of course true that, even for academic theologians, writing, thinking or theorizing about God is no substitute for a direct personal relationship with him. Francis was right to distrust the glib games which can be played with truth, thus keeping it safe and manageable, unable to work its transformation. Having said all that, Francis himself displayed an unusual knowledge of Scripture. His writings also betray a familiarity with authors of the early Church, such as Jerome and Ambrose. In this too, of course, he resembles the Jesus who was able to argue with the learned men in the temple at a very early age. He also knew the Divine Office of the Church, presumably required of a deacon, and was able to marshal theological arguments of some complexity. His claim to be ‘unlettered’ is therefore somewhat disingenuous if taken literally. It was, however, entirely consistent with his desire to know God rather than know about him. The truth and reality of what is revealed about God in Scripture is paramount. God is real and knowable, not as arcane theory but as lived reality in relationship.
Francis’ concern, with study as in all things, was that we need to rid ourselves of all the props that can shield us from living that reality ourselves. Poverty was about stripping off every cause for pride or self-absorption, everything that might draw the consciousness back from God to self. We are to become ‘instruments of God’s mighty working’:17 whatever we do is to be directed by God and to direct us back to him. In an article on Francis and poverty, an Anglican Franciscan brother tellingly remarks that as Francis saw it, a life of poverty ‘must be a habitual reference to God, and such a life then really has no limits, because its dimensions are the dimensions of God’.18
All three of these ways of service, then, if held in healthy balance, can become pointers to a Franciscan way of living in the world. Mind, body and spirit all need to be dedicated to the loving service of God. So, by persisting in prayer we learn to love the world and its people, by study we can aspire to understand it (which helps us in turn to love it more honestly), and by works we seek to do what we can to improve it, so that it mirrors more exactly the will of its Creator. Some brothers and sisters may find themselves drawn more to one aspect than another. There have been endless debates within the Franciscan movement, as in most other branches of Christianity, as to whether it is better to ‘be’ or to ‘do’. The answer, is, naturally, both – but never to lose sight of God in attempting either.
Francis and ‘Brother Ass’
Francis
