Dear Friends,
This Sunday marks the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis. In popular imagination, he’s a saint associated with animals, birds, and nature, a kind of free spirit who celebrated the good things of creation while remaining somehow apart from the problems of the world. But digging a little deeper reveals a man deeply aware of the world’s pains and griefs. A soldier in his city’s campaign against neighboring Padua, he was injured, captured and held for ransom as a prisoner of war. Revolted by leprosy and the unsightliness of the poor, his decision to renounce his family’s wealth and wed himself to Lady Poverty was a decision to embrace what appalled him rather than run away — literally, by embracing a leper on the street in the first flush of his new calling.
Francis’s first mission was to rebuild, stone by stone, by himself, with his own hands, the little church of San Damiano outside Assisi. This is the work that attracted his first followers and would begin the Franciscan order of friars minor. Somehow, for St. Francis, bringing the joy of the Gospel into the darkest corners of human life entailed great care and attention to the actual physical buildings of the Church. We’re used to thinking of these commitments as standing in opposition to each other, at different ends of a spectrum, or at the very least in tension with each other. Yet for St. Francis, they belonged together, they were wrapped up in each other. The problem with wealth was not that it existed, but that it permitted an escape from the demands of loving God and our neighbor. Paying attention to buildings, bodies, and even the birds of the air was a way of saying we escape all these things only at our peril — peril of losing something essential about ourselves, of forgetting what it means to be human.
Celebrating the 800th anniversary of St. Francis’s death is a good opportunity to remember that the spiritual and material worlds belong together, both “out there” in the world at large and “in here,” in the church and within ourselves. Love of God entails love of neighbor — and vice versa. Heaven and earth meet in the person of Jesus Christ, and through him, in each of us as well. By the example and intercession of St. Francis, may we too refuse all escape, giving ourselves to the care and keeping of this world and its creatures, that the glory of God may shine through all the brighter.
Yours faithfully,
Fr. Blake
