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 do not have a monopoly on the desire to live well and fulfil our human potential. The Church, at least in the affluent West, has to adjust to the fact that it has lost much of its former power to influence what people believe or how they behave. Moreover, those of us who call ourselves Christian have to face the fact that it is now our beliefs that are counter-cultural, marginalized, irrelevant to the mainstream culture in which we live. Here too, Francis may be able to indicate a way forward. Although he was always loyal to the institutional Church, that very loyalty led Francis to question the institution from the inside, in a way that a mere interested observer could not have done. Slavish obedience to an institution – ‘my Church, right or wrong’ – would not have led Francis or his soul-mate St Clare to insist on the adoption of their respective Rules against the wisdom of the hierarchy. And an institution which stifled opposition by insisting on slavish obedience could not have allowed itself to be won over by their vision, or their persistence. It is not for nothing that obedience has its root in the Latin audire, to hear. Listening to each other is essential for growth in any relationship. Francis and Clare found the root of their vocation was in obedient, attentive listening to God.
Such concepts may seem alien to a world which has grown used to the rational as the only approach. Insistence on a loving God can seem impossibly naive when faced with disaster. Religion itself is discredited by the devastation wreaked by fundamentalists of every creed. However, whether or not there is any room in our personal philosophy for a God, we will all need at some stage to question the values that shape our lives. What truly lies at the heart of our life defines who we are. Francis’ life shows the possibility of living with complete consistency.
Much anxiety is expressed nowadays about our apparent fear of lasting commitments. This is demonstrated, or so the argument goes, by shifts in attitude to relationships, to institutions, or indeed to the concept that any hard and fast rules can apply to the way we live. It is often assumed that this fear is especially prevalent among younger people. In my own experience, however, it has little to do with being incapable of commitment. It is not that my generation is any less willing to follow our values than those who came before us. It is, rather, that we take commitment extremely seriously, and we are only too aware of the pain that can be caused when it breaks down. In the affluent West, at least, we are presented with such a range of choices that we are paralysed by the fear of choosing wrongly and losing everything which gave our lives meaning. Simplicity is paradoxically seductive to people who are continually being bombarded with ‘lifestyle choices’. Having no choice