Francis of Assisi (Mid-week Message)

Francis of Assisi

October 4, 2017

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Today is the feast day of Francis of Assisi.  Donald Spoto, in his wonderful book Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi, writes: 

“The life of Francis of Assisi and the journey of his progress toward God had meant accepting a series of corrections and simplifications, a refining of his understanding about what God had wanted of him.  We might even say that Francis had constantly to revise what he believed would honor God.  Hence, Francis; conversion was the work of a lifetime, with all its autumns and winters; it was not the achievement of an afternoon in springtime. 

“Like Jesus, Francis had been a seeker in the world.  He had not fled to the desert or a monastery but rather believed that God could be found in the crowd.  As God’s knight, he had been willing to sacrifice his life; now, his share in the cross was the illnesses contracted in the service of him who had been nailed to the cross once for all, and who now lived beyond death forever.

“…Francis learned that he had nothing he could call his own except his utter dependence on unimaginable mercy.  The daily process of turning to God, of allowing himself to belong to God, reveals the deepest logic of Francis’ ever more serious insistence on poverty—which did not primarily mean having no possession but rather not being possessive about anything or anyone, not acting as if he were the proprietor of anyone or anything. 

“Every day, he tried to have no single thing as his own property so that he could rely on nothing, so that nothing would become a wedge between himself and God.  Hence he could paradoxically sing—quietly in his troubadour heart, and aloud in the songs he composed and sage—that everything in creation belonged to him: the sun, the moon and stars, the water and wind and fire, the earth and trees, birds and meadows.  Everything was his sister and brother. 

“The divine paradox was that poverty had enriched him…  With him, as Evelyn Underhill wrote, ‘mysticism comes into the open air, seeks to transform the stuff of daily life, speaks the vernacular, turns songs of the troubadours to the purposes of divine love.’”   (pp. 210-11)

Francis is a saint because he took Jesus at his word: sell everything and give it to the poor; care for the outcast and the leper; take up your cross and follow me.  He is a saint because in the face of repeated failure and disappointment, he simply kept on picking himself up and resumed following Jesus, again and again.   He followed Jesus and did not judge those who did not follow the same path as he.  Francis and Claire stand as great examples that following Jesus is a real possibility in the world, not simply high-minded gas.    It is costly, but the joy of sharing with Christ—even if only his suffering and the opprobrium of others—more than justifies the cost. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+