Implications

Talk 2: Implications of a Franciscan Penitential Way of Life for Us Today
 
by Sr.  Elise Saggau, OSF
 
 
Francis’s Worldview
 

Toward the end of his life, Francis was suffering from an almost indescribable poverty in his body.  Racked with illness and pain, his physical powers were diminishing, his sight was almost gone.  For the sake of his eyes, he needed to be shut away from light, even firelight, it seems.  In addition to his physical destitution, we can imagine that there was also a kind of spiritual poverty.  His great dream for the brotherhood seemed to be going nowhere.  Others, who did not share his vision, had taken over the direction of the Order.  He needed to deal with anger and disappointment.  It seems only appropriate that he should engage in some genuine self-pity; which indeed he does.  His depression is tangible in the texts.  Both the Bishop of Ostia and his general minister must order him to take treatment for his illnesses, as he has evidently been resisting such treatment.  Of course, one could make a case for resisting the rather barbarous medical treatment of the time.  We know that Francis’s eye disease was treated with the application of red hot irons to his temples.
 
However, in the throes of his laments, he understands, through some kind of vision, the blessings that are and that will be his.  These blessings are purely the gift of God and nothing of his own.  His depression lifts.  The sense of amazement that so often characterizes his response to life breaks through again.  In his mind’s eye, if not in his poor blind bodily eyes, he “sees” the whole of creation in spectacular glory—the sun that he has enjoyed so much, the moon and stars, lovely clear water, winds and rain, fruits and flowers.  He understands that it has all been given freely and lovingly and that it all has a purpose.  Everything reveals God, proclaims what God is like, gives God praise and glory by its very being, and, ultimately, returns to God, the Source.  This is a universal song that Francis must join in.  He begins to write down his images in a poem and to make a melody to accompany it.  His soul is flooded with joy—again a pure gift.  This is the story as his brothers tell it—a kind of healing, not of the body but of the spirit of Francis. 
 
Francis understands that there is only one response to make to such a generous outpouring of creativity and loving kindness and that is to surrender himself totally to it.  That God should love him, Francis, this miserable little man, with such abandon, is enough to make Francis ecstatic with joy, with the mystery of it all.  He had to proclaim it.  He directs his brothers to go all about and preach the Gospel and sing this song.  Then the brothers are to ask for their “payment”—that the people live in true penitence and that they open themselves to the transforming power of God in their own lives.
 
The Ecological Mission
 
What is the lesson for us today, then, of the Canticle of the Creatures?  Surely it is a call to single-hearted commitment to God and to living a life of ongoing conversion.  The first nine verses of the Canticle challenge us to new understandings of how to living a penitential life in relationship to our precious environment.  As we confront the ecological damage that is being done to our earth, we begin to see how we are often in collusion with the human practices that cause harm to our life-sustaining atmosphere.  We see that we are somehow drawn into the “sin of the world,” which is a collective affront to human well-being.  It is carrying us to the brink of catastrophe.  We participate in this, not by consciously choosing to do harm or to damage our planet, but by simply “going along” with the way things are, drifting into destructive practices without appropriate realization or question.  Belonging to a community of faith gives us a way to reflect together on how we unconsciously become part of all this and a way to examine together how we might wake up and do things differently.  In this community of faith, we challenge ourselves and our society to take a closer look at our unexamined practices.  We do this not only by the words we say, but by the lives we lead.
 
Franciscans have traditionally been associated with a deep reverence for and love of nature.  Sometimes this perception suffers from a superficial kind of romanticism or sentimentalism.  Unless we go farther than that, we may seem to be trivializing the dynamic possibilities of viewing the world fundamentally as God’s gift.  Francis’s response to the world, seen as gift, was a joyful spirit of celebration and gratitude and an almost scrupulous care for all that existed—just because it existed!  (Picking up worms from the roadway, lest they be trampled; refusing to extinguish a fire, even if it was burning his habit; being careful not to trample on water that he had used to wash himself.)  These stories are symbolic of how care-ful (full of care) Francis was for even the minutest aspects of reality.
 
We often think of poverty in connection with Francis.  And truly Francis and his early followers lived life very close to the line.  But for them, poverty did not mean lacking the goods of the earth.  Rather, it was the profound recognition that one’s relationships to the gifts of the world and to other human beings must never be relationships of domination.  When we own something, we might be tempted to believe we have some kind of power over that object, that we can do with it whatever we please.  The current American climate supports this idea.  We are an “ownership society” and a “throw-away society.”  We have the idea that we have the “right” to do whatever we want with what we “own.”  Francis and his early followers established an alternative position.
 
Francis was not opposed to ownership per se, but he found an attitude of ownership unacceptable.  To make a point of it, he decided the brothers would not own anything.  He admonished them not only to abdicate any rights over material property, but not even to appropriate to themselves credit for their talents, skills or intellectual gifts.  Everything is given by God, and God must be acknowledged as the author and giver.  This attitude initiated a powerful challenge to the economic and social practices of his time.  The way the brothers lived offered a social and political critique of the times, an actual alternative.  They didn’t have to say a word.  They didn’t have to engage in public demonstrations.  They didn’t have to wave banners.  People noticed how they lived and learned from it.  This view of things continues to challenge us in our times.  Rosemary Radford Reuther, the Chicago theologian, one asked a compelling question: “How do we change the self-concept of a society from the drives toward possession, conquest and accumulation to the values of mutual limitation?”[1]
 
This question may be the fundamental issue of our day.  How we answer it, individually, corporately, nationally, and globally, will determine not only the well-being but the very survival of our earth community.  If we are to live lives of human quality and responsibility, if we are to live Gospel lives, we must move from wanting to dominate nature and material things to wanting to cherish them, care for them, and share them equitably.  The alternative is self-destruction and world destruction—and this is actually happening as we speak. 
 
The Peacemaking Mission
 
In July 1226, suffering severely and preparing for death, Francis heard of the scandalous behavior of the mayor and bishop of Assisi.  The bishop had excommunicated the mayor, who had reacted angrily by forbidding anyone in the city to do business with the bishop.  This appalling power struggle was leading to hatred between the two men and their constituents.  Francis was desolate.  He composed two new verses for his Canticle, appealing to human beings to be peacemakers:
 
 
Praised be You, my Lord, through those who give pardon for Your love
and bear infirmity and tribulation.
Blessed are those who endure in peace
for by You, Most High, shall they be crowned.
 
He then sent the brothers to call together the mayor and the bishop and their supporters.  When all had assembled, the brothers sang the Canticle with the added verses.  At once the hearts of the two leaders were touched.  Each humbly accepted responsibility for his offensive behavior and begged forgiveness of the other.  Thus was peace was restored to the city of Assisi (AC 84).
 
Francis understood that we humans are subject to all kinds of challenges to our sense of well-being.  When these come from the faults, destructive decisions, violent actions, and sins of others, the most instinctive thing for us is to respond in like manner.  However, we have received from God not only life and all its possibilities, but also mercy and the assurance of forgiveness and salvation.  Thus we are uniquely positioned to be the image of God on earth by exercising our graceful power to forgive others as we have been forgiven, to make peace by being merciful. 
 
Francis understood the connection between how humans relate to non-human creatures and how they relate to each other.  If humans abuse what the earth and the universe offer, they will also abuse one another.  If humans do not see themselves as part of the family of creatures, they will not see themselves as sisters and brothers to one another.  Only by exercising in freedom the God-like activity of forgiving are we able to attain our full spiritual potential and to be true peacemakers, children of God and heirs of the Gospel promises.  G.  K Chesterton claims that “Francis walked the world like the Pardon of God.  .  .  .  His appearance marked the moment when [humans] could be reconciled not only to God but to nature and, most difficult of all, to themselves.”[2]
 
The Eschatological Mission
 
As his death approached, Francis composed two more verses of his Canticle:
 
All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,
From whose embrace no mortal can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those She finds doing your will!
The Second death can do no harm to them.
 
One imagines that Francis came to long for death, even while accepting day by day the sufferings that were his lot.  He grew to understand that death was not something to be feared, but something to be received as a Sister who embraces with kindness all who have lived their lives in faith and love.  Death is to be dreaded only when it comes upon those who have not opened themselves to the mercy of God, who have chosen themselves over others, the goods of the earth over the Good that is freely given by the Divine Lover. 
 
Today, technology has advanced to such a degree that diseases once inevitably terminal respond to preventive measures and effective treatment.  We can increase the likelihood of long life by healthy personal practices.  Treatment measures once deemed extreme have become more or less routine—organ transplants, joint replacements, interventions directly into the heart, brain and other organs for damage repair.  Amazing curative drugs have been developed.  These “miracles” of science are, of course, good and have done wonders to improve our quality of life.  However, we have come to expect that we have a right to unlimited and effective treatment and that those who die have been failed by the system.  We have come to believe that aging itself is somehow shameful and even avoidable.  In fact, those who look old or sick are taken as an unpleasant reminder that we have not yet got on top of this “dying” thing.  Francis, who was only forty-four when he died, never did get old; but his body was worn out, eaten up by debilitating illness, used up by his own spiritual passion.  But he was not afraid of death.  He did not see in it something to be dreaded.  He saw in God’s will his complete fulfillment and happiness.  Whether healthy or ill, he accepted life as God’s gift.  Whether young or old, he understood himself to be in God’s will.  What was happening in his life was his own doorway to God’s loving kindness and his own invitation to witness this loving kindness to others.  Happy those that Sister Death finds doing God’s will, he says.  Her embrace is sweet and tender and she accompanies them into the unimaginable joys that God has prepared for those who can say without condition: My God and my All!
 
Conclusion
 
Thus Francis teaches us that grace is not some kind of miraculous event.  God’s loving kindness speaks to us from every side every single day of our lives.  It is for us to have ears to hear and eyes to see.  Franciscans bring a reverential attitude toward all of creation.  As Christians and as authentic human beings, we seek together more effective ways to make this the basic attitude of our societies; and we do this more by how we live than by what we say.  Even though we are small and our contributions are essentially little, God works through us in ways beyond our imagining to make the Gospel effective in our world in our times.
 
Thus we must work together bravely and hopefully to help build up this Gospel society.  Our actions need not be spectacular.  They can be very simple.  Several years ago, Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan woman, won the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting a tree-planting program.  She recognized the interconnectedness of reverence for the earth with the welfare of peoples and with peace.  Hers was a simple movement that made a difference to thousands of people in her country and throughout the world.  Together, in some mysterious way, we make a difference.  The world is ready for our Franciscan gifts.  Francis is no longer here.  Clare is no longer here.  We are here.  It is our turn now.  It is time for us to be instruments of peace, healing and renovation in our own societies.