The Feast Day of St. Francis

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord! All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing. To you, alone, Most High, do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Be praised, my Lord, through those who forgive for love of you; through those who endure sickness and trial. Happy those who endure in peace, for by you, Most High, they will be crowned.

Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living person can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin! Happy those she finds doing your most holy will. The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give thanks, and serve him with great humility.

It was a hard day for me to think about St. Francis. For one thing, I'm still working out what happened to make me lose one of my longtime online friends; teasing out from our last exchange what culpability of my own led to my friend's very angry and bitter reaction.

For another, yesterday I was told by a couple of self-assured fundamentalist homophobes elsewhere on the Internet that I needed to die. Yes, you read that right; capital punishment for gays and lesbians. Now, these individuals later qualified their comments -- they pointed out to me, after I'd asked them whether they preferred stoning or hanging or Zyklon B or some other means of dispatching me, that it wasn't their job to kill me; that that was God's pleasure and prerogative, one way or the other; "Watch your back," in so many words. Thank you. I feel so much better now.

So, between these two events, I didn't feel like I could pray the prayer of St. Francis with a great deal of personal integrity. I wonder if Francis himself ever had down days; days when cold and hunger and other deprivations of his monastic rule, and when the fatigue of always helping, of always being accessible to needy others, would get to him and, even for a second, he wondered if he'd gotten it all completely wrong. I wonder if he ever became sullen or snappish. I wonder if, in his attempts to reform the Church of his day, he ever heard hissed warnings to watch his back.

Maybe this is why Francis loved nature so much. Perhaps, when things started not making sense, he'd go off for awhile and regain his bearings in the fields and forests and hillsides, where he could see the hand of God again.

Today at lunch I took a long walk down the paved trail that winds along a local river from Outer Podunk's city park up to the middle school. This trail is fairly new; unbelieveably, I'd never walked the whole route before. Leaves are just beginning to turn; scarlet sumac and Virginia creeper, a hint of yellow and orange in the maples. I turned off the mental churn and just enjoyed. A patch of funny, conical mushrooms that looked as if elves might jump out from behind them. Sprays of asters and star thistle and butter-and-eggs along the path. The plashing of the water in the river, and the brief glimpse of a darting minnow. The startling gold of apples hanging from a "volunteer" tree around a bend. The pterodactyl call of a pileated woodpecker in the nearby woods, and the chittering of young squirrels as they frolicked in the oak trees.

I still don't feel like an instrument of God's peace. But I think that perhaps the world along the walking trail became an instrument of God's peace for me...enough to get me back to a place where I can even think about love and peace and service and renewal again.

Almighty God, we praise you for the men and women you have sent to call the Church to its tasks and renew its life, such as your servant Francis. Raise up in our own day teachers and prophets inspired by your Spirit, whose voices will give strength to your Church and proclaim the reality of your kingdom; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

St. Francis preaching to the birds, Wissington, Suffolk, C13-14