Feast of St. Francis

My dichotomies are the best dichotomies.

I do like the guy. Please don’t get me wrong. But I’m gradually coming to the understanding that I am not interested in being like Francis except in the ways that he was like Jesus.

Following Francis, for me, is to follow Jesus. That’s all Francis was about after all, being like Jesus. If you wish to worship Christ, be like him. If you wish to glorify Christ, be like him. The incarnation, that tricky bit of God becoming flesh, is an invitation to humanity to become like Christ. Emulating Francis is to endeavor to be more Christlike with each day, to take upon yourself the narrative of Jesus’ life and ministry…even his death.

Does one need to become a Franciscan to do this? No. Of course not. But, it’s fun.

Today is the Feast of St. Francis. I’ve already seen several social media posts of his likeness pass through my feed. I’m reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD. It’s a pretty Franciscan work that I wish I had written. What does it mean for someone to find God, the Holy, in all of life’s materiality? And, when one does, what does one do in response?

The radicality of the Franciscan call, the call of the Gospel, is not simply a rejection of some kind of middle class gnosticism where WWJD is an internal disposition separate from the socio-political and economic realities of our lives. Rather, it is the insistence that a different world is upon us now, real, and enfleshed in the person of Jesus the Christ. We only need to say yes.

Yes to charity.

Yes to kindness.

Yes to self sacrifice, prayer, and the Eucharist.

It is a religious *and* spiritual (if such a dichotomy exists, I don’t think it does) response to the reality of God.

The dichotomy of the material and the spiritual vanishes when one fully embraces the implications of the Incarnation of God in Christ Jesus as Francis did.

In other news, my son is wandering about with some powerful refrigerator magnets testing to see what is and is not magnetic. I keep seeing the ghosts of cats out of the corner of my eye. I miss my feline friends. My wife is enjoying coffee. Today, I will spend much of my workday on ZOOM. I’m still struggling to live into my vocation and that’s a good thing.

Y’all be excellent to each other.

Gracious and merciful God, you kindled in the heart of Francis such a flame of love that he became wholly yours; increase in us a wholehearted trust in you and a humble love of all your creatures, that we may know the joy the gospel brings; through Jesus Christ our Redeemer. Amen.

For All the Saints, © The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, 2014