Incarnational Presence
Since Francis’ own time, two elements at the heart of the Franciscan life have been held in tension: the call to affirm the world by active, loving presence within it, and aloneness with God in contemplative withdrawal. Both elements are essential to any attempt to approach life as Francis did. When Francis withdrew to pray, he took with him the needs of those who might have no other access to God. And when Francis himself was praying alone for the world, his brothers and sisters, and those who came to be inspired by his message, were still in the midst of it, tackling with their presence the magnitude of human need. Both are important ways of living out the Franciscan vocation to be an incarnational presence in the world. For in both activities, prayer and work, Christians seek to do as Jesus did and to be, as nearly as they can, as he was.
All Christians are signs of God’s presence, whether or not it is recognized and interpreted as such by those among whom they live. Wherever someone of faith is, there is a reminder that people still seek to love and serve their God, and that God has not gone away. As in Francis’ own time, though arguably for different reasons, the institutional Church today has in many places become remote from everyday human concerns. It can be perceived, rightly or wrongly, as having very little to do with the loving message of the gospel. People still need to know that they are loved, as they always have – but they no longer automatically trust the Church to be the bearer of that message. So people who live out their faith in an undramatic, down-to-earth way, communicating genuine love and humility, still have the capacity to reach hungry hearts, minds and souls with a sense of God’s presence.
The leper who challenged Francis has never gone away. There are still people, existing rather than living on the margins of society, who desperately need someone to reach out to them in their isolation. Franciscans across the world continue to engage, together with others, in trying to communicate to them the reality of God’s love. The materially secure ‘post-Christian’ citizens of the affluent West also need to hear that message of love. Modern life in the West has become so complex that there are signs of a renewed yearning for simplicity. There is growing recognition that a sense of purpose does not always accompany success. People want to be assured that their lives have meaning and worth. In the intense questioning that arose out of the events of 11 September, many who had never considered themselves religious came to ask whether there might be more lasting values than possession, accumulation and achievement. The ‘little poor man’ of Assisi, who called all people his brothers and sisters, is ideally placed to speak to our search for a solid base from which to live.
The Word Made Flesh
The birth of Christ is the most powerful reminder we have of God’s reality. Every Christmas we are reminded that God loves us so much that he chooses to become known by us in a new way, by becoming one of us. The presence of God among us is made concrete, given a shape. Yet, despite God’s terrifying power and majesty, the shape in which he chooses to become known as a human being reflects not might, but vulnerability. The defenceless child in the manger foreshadows that terrible human death at the hands of an occupying power. Yet this child, utterly dependent, is nevertheless truly God. H. R. Bramley’s hymn sums it up beautifully:
O wonder of wonders which none can unfold;
The Ancient of Days is an hour or two old.12
Francis brought home this reality to the congregation of the church in Greccio, a village in the Rieti valley some way south of Assisi. One Christmas, he sought to recreate the scene of the stable in Bethlehem. Francis had brought into church all the props we associate with the Nativity: a cow, a donkey, hay, a manger, a real baby. To us, familiar with cribs of all varieties, this action has lost much of its impact. At least once a year these things become part of the paraphernalia of church or home; we are not surprised to see them, and may in fact have become so familiar with the sight that we stop really seeing it at all. To the people of Greccio, seeing it for the first time, it was a revelation. The everyday things of the world were invested with new holy meaning; these ordinary, everyday creatures were part of the story which God wants us all to hear and participate in. To them it was not a remote symbol to be grasped only through the powers of the intellect, but a visible, instantly comprehensible reminder that God is present with us everywhere, willing to be continually reborn for us and in us. Showing and preaching Christ’s continued presence in the world in this very concrete way was central to Francis’ ministry. His mission to rebuild the Church included making the faith real and accessible to its people.
The story of the crib at Greccio, as told by Francis’ early biographers, highlights one more interesting fact about him: that he appears to have been ordained as a deacon and sometimes took the role, appropriate to the deacon, of reading the Gospel in the liturgy as he did at that particular Christmas service. We do not know when or by whom he was ordained; it is clear from the way he spoke and wrote about priests that he never aspired to become one himself. Instead, he again mirrors the calling of all Christians to follow in Jesus’ footsteps. The Greek word diakon can be translated as ‘servant’. The Jesus who took the role of a servant and washed his disciples’ feet, despite their 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