A Reflection for the Feast of St.
Francis (transferred) St. George's Church, Engelhard, NC
October 7,
2018 Thomas E Wilson, Supply Celebrant
On
the Occasion of the Blessing of Animals 2018
What we have done today is to take the
lessons for the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi on the 4th
of October and transferred them to this Sunday as we gather to bless
the animals and the world in which we live. Francis was born in the
Italian Umbrian City of Assisi, dying at the age of 45 on October
4th, 1226. His father, Pietro di Bernardone, a cloth
merchant, was away on a sales and business trip to France when
Francis was born. Because there was at that time a high death rate
among infants, his mother baptized him quickly naming him Giovanni,
Italian for John the beloved, before Pietro returned. When Pietro got
home, because the business trip to France was so successful, he
nicknamed Giovanni Francesco, Italian
for “the Frenchman”, in English – “Francis”.
Otherwise this would have been the Feast of St. Johnny of Assisi.
Francis was therefore an outward and
visible sign of his father's ego so that his father could always be
reminded what a great businessman he was and his hope that the family
business ties with France might be enriched. For Pietro, the world
was a rough place and scarcity was the norm, never enough to go
around so you had to grab and hold on to what you needed and since
the world was divided into two parts, winners and losers; real
winners strived to win and take advantage of the losers.The region
the family lived in was plagued with bitter sporadic warfare between
the forces loyal to the Pope and the Pope's adversary for power, the
Holy Roman Emperor; think of it like modern day Republicans and
Democrats but with sharp swords instead of elections, debates and
committee hearings.
Francis was not a very good
businessman, but he had his own ego to think about and lived and
spent lavishly. He did not care too much about the world since he was
too busy consuming it selfishly; the world was about winners lording
it over the losers. Francis at 21 decides he really wants to be a
soldier, the ultimate game to determine winners and losers, and he
pushed Pietro to buy him some expensive armor to go to war to find
his own personal glory. Giovanni, Johnny, goes to war and did he ever
look grand swaggering all the way to fight with a neighboring state.
That is when we find out that Francis, besides not being a very good
businessman, was not a very good soldier either, when he was captured
and held for ransom. After about a year as a prisoner of war, his
father paid the ransom and brought Francis home. This son, who once
had been a sign that his father could make a lot more money, was
costing his father a lot more money. Pietro was looking at his son as
a losing proposition.
In 1205, when Francis was 24, he could
not figure out what he was going to do. As he was wandering though
the Umbrian countryside he stopped at a small run down chapel of San
Damiano. He went in side to pray and as he sat inside this ruin, he
meditated on the cross there of an icon of Christ. It shows Jesus on
the cross but instead of dying and suffering, he has his arms wide to
embrace the witnesses to the crucifixion, with a look of hope in his
eyes. The crucifixion is an outward sign of a loser but the embrace
of others and the eyes of hope give a different dimension to this
“loser”. In his meditation Francis thought he heard Christ say to
him, “Repair my church.”
Francis thought; “At last, this is
something I can do and be a winner and make God, the Big Daddy in the
Sky impressed.” One problem was that he did not have enough money
but he solved that problem by stealing some of his Pietro's Silk
stock and selling it on the sly. That is when he found out he was a
failure as a thief, because his father had an audit and discovered
the theft. Francis runs away and hides in a cave. Pietro finally
finds Francis hiding in the cave, Francis was a failure in hiding out
as well, but the cave experience is a symbol of the universal
experience about going deeper into himself, which is the beginning of
healing. Pietro drags him out, beating him all the way back home to
be locked up and then dragged him before the Bishop to cut Pietro's
losses and disinherit Francis.
When people fail; they have a number of
choices; 1) Be the victim and blame someone or something else, and
entertaining fantasies of getting even, 2) Accept that you are a
loser and live in resentment, or 3) Stop playing the game of winning
and losing and move toward wholeness. Francis chose the 3rd
option and told his father Pietro that Francis was no longer going to
play this ego game and he absolved Pietro of any responsibility. He
gave back to Pietro everything he had, even the clothes on his back,
walking away buck naked to live in harmony with his Heavenly Father's
world.
A friend gave him an old ragged and
torn robe to cover his nakedness; a great comedown from the fine
silks and furs he used to strut around in as he projected the image
of a winner. He now was dressed as the part of a loser in the world's
eyes, but he became a living icon, like that icon at San Damiano,
embracing the witnesses and viewing the world with the eyes of hope.
He went from town to town and earned his bread by begging, juggling
and being an acrobat and then giving the poor the better part of what
he earned. He stopped and looked at the world in awe. He saw that the
world was not a game of losers and winners but a place where there
was a middle ground of peace between people to be cultivated. He
realized that God's call to repair his church was not about buildings
or even institutions but about God's church being the world which was
in a horrible shape with the ego games of winners and losers.
Francis
found the deeper truth that we repair the world first by repairing
ourselves. We begin by repairing the eyesight of our soul which sees
a world utterly divided between an Us and a THEM, winners versus
losers. Francis saw that it is only when we discover that we are all
part of the same larger community of God's love, in which there are
only apparent, but not real, difference between east and west, male
and female, slave and free, race language or culture, geographical
distances, political or economic systems. Animals, humans, stars,
rocks, trees, winds, life, death, you name it, we are all part of the
same community of star dust which began with that explosion of love
14 billion years ago when God spoke: “Let there be light!”
Scott Peck in his book, The
Different Drum, wrote about the
need for community which begins when we going into our metaphorical
caves and come to an awareness of our own divided self:
Community requires the confession of
brokenness. But how remarkable it is that in our culture brokenness
must be “confessed.” We think of confession as an act that should
be carried out in secret, in the darkness of the confessional, with
the guarantee of professional priestly or psychiatric
confidentiality. Yet the reality is that every human being is broken
and vulnerable. How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled
to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the
ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures.
It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others.
But even more important is the love that arises among us when we
share, both ways, our woundedness. With remorse, confession becomes a
joy.
When Francis embraced his poverty, he
declared his own brokenness in a broken world and he walked into
situations to bring peace into times and places of conflict,
divisions between Us and Them. At one point he risks his life to
cross battle lines to go to the Sultan of Egypt to try to bring about
peace in the middle of a war between the Christians and the Muslims.
He sang and joined the birds in singing God's praise for the
creation. He blessed animals and sinners and enemies. Blessing is not
something we do to make something “Holy”, blessing is what
we do when we take the time to see the deep holiness of everything
that is before us. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning reminds us:
“Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common
bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his
shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
Today
we bless the animals as a first step of blessing all of this creation
even blessing those people with whom we disagree. As the Pope, who
took his Papal name from Francis, said last year:” Let us help each
other, all together, to remember that the “other” is not a
statistic or a number, we all need each other.
On
the Occasion of the Blessing of Animals 2018
Yoda's
not pure bred but a mongrel with
cleft
palate and one ear up the other down,
ending
up landing twice placed in a pound,
an
escape artist over or under fence swift.
The
very first afternoon at our house he
jumped
up onto the fine dining room table
leaving
deep unhealable scratches as able,
yet
mending heart scratches of Pat and me
He,
knowing he was broken but, accepting
our
very own less obvious brokenness
with
a grace unbidden but sorely missed,
our
love of him and each other rekindling.
Often
when he begs for time of play or treat
reminds
us we are all beggars at God's feet
AMEN, brother, AMEN!
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