St FrancisSermon preached at All Hallows by Julie Greenan on 5 October 2003, the Feast of St Francis of Assisi(Concluding our 2003 Creation Season)Holy Spirit, discerning Wisdom Accompany us on the journey Illuminate our reflecting Unfold the truths that set us free. (Jim Cotter) When you’re asked to preach, it’s perhaps tempting to feel that you have to find something new to say. It seems to me that actually there is nothing new to say, only new ways to understand what we already know about how to live: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God. Love one another as I have loved you. We each can speak only from our own experience: doing this is what gives us the stamp of authenticity. We all have our own perspective, our own piece of the truth. That is why we need to listen to each other. What I offer you today is something of my perspective — about beauty, riches and wealth, and about pain, poverty and letting go, and a little about St Francis. There’s an awful lot written about Francis, and it’s not easy to sort the wheat from the chaff. Came from Assisi, Italy, lived around 800 years ago in the Middle Ages. Loved animals, preached to the birds, tamed the fierce wolf of Gubbio, invented the crib. Has been badly sentimentalised as a hippie animal-lover who dropped out of the real world to live in the woods among lepers. He was a man of the middle classes, had a wealthy father and a good life. This was the time of the troubadours, of the tradition of chivalry, and he aspired to be a noble knight leading a life of courtly love and carrying out bold deeds of daring and valour for his lady. He gave it all up to follow Christ. He made a deliberate choice to live in extreme poverty, to embrace ‘Lady Poverty’ and to live his life among outcasts — sick people, beggars, lepers, those on the margins of society. He was indeed a fool. A Holy Fool. His chosen way of life was so radical, people probably thought he was mad. Certainly he was impetuous and given to dramatic actions. He preached using mime, song and music. When he renounced his possessions, he stripped naked in public to give back to his father even the clothes off his back. Francis has come to be a much-loved figure for all sorts of reasons, some probably wildly inaccurate. What really appeals to me about him was that he was a man of passion, a man who followed his heart and was full of joy because he did what he was born to do, what he was meant for. Francis hears Jesus’ instructions to the apostles as speaking directly and literally to him: ‘Take no gold or silver or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics or sandals, or a staff, for labourers deserve their food.’ (Matt 10:9) His response to this call is a spontaneous and passionate outburst of longing: ‘This is what I wish, this is what I seek, this is what I long to do with all my heart!’ But he also made mistakes. His life was a series of experiments, getting it wrong and trying another way, working it out as he went along. He founded the Franciscans, although he was not happy about the idea of them being a formal order — and the power and challenge of the order was tamed, especially after his death when it became incorporated into the institution of the Church against his own wishes. He preached reverence and obedience to the Church but maintained a serenity and detached distance from it. He lived out a return to the Gospel ideals — simplicity, humility and poverty — at a time when the institutional church was rich, worldly and militaristic. And amazingly, he and his lay brothers were allowed to preach even though not ordained, a practice that is not permitted even now in some areas of the church. So this was a passionate, spontaneous man, given to the grand gesture — but what also draws me to him is his immense humility and utter refusal to judge others. He had no programme for political or social reform, although no doubt he had no difficulty in seeing the wrongs of his society and church. He simply sought to follow Christ and to love others — and, indeed, all creation — as brothers and sisters. He begins with himself, believing in teaching by example. On one occasion, Guido, the very wealthy Bishop of Assisi, was trying to get Francis to relax what he saw as the excessively rigid practice of the brotherhood. Francis responds:
He knew then the truth that we hear now from people like Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peacemaker:
Simplicity, humility, poverty. Humility — the word comes from the Latin ‘humus’ meaning ‘earth’. Francis was a very down-to-earth sort of man. He was very human. Full of contradictions and full of struggles, especially in the early days. We might think ‘Well, it was all right for him. Life was different then, the world was less complex.’ The way the story is sometimes told, it seems as if he heard God’s voice, saw the light, abandoned his wealth and comfortable life, took to the woods and that was that. In fact, it took time — he kept trying but was drawn back over and over again by his friends, the pleasure and ease of his life at home, his love of ambition. Letting go of all these things was a gradual and painful process for him. I am not romanticising the virtues of poverty. I’m not suggesting that the grinding worry of having even just a little less than you need is something to be desired. Material deprivation that is caused by injustice and inequity is probably ‘the worst form of violence’, as Gandhi said. But Francis gave up his wealth freely — and, in the end, joyfully — and for him it led to liberation. And the further he pursued this life, the more joy and freedom he found. So for Francis, material poverty led to a simplicity of life that was the greatest wealth, precious treasure, the pearl of great price. That was his way to the truth of himself — to the rich poverty we reach when we strip ourselves of all that is unnecessary, that is surplus, that is distraction, that is addiction. The things we use to cover up and push down our deepest longings — we escape, we block our ears, blind our eyes, blunt our senses with our addictions, legal and illegal, trying to satisfy ourselves with things that never really hit the spot, that leave us wanting, frustrated. Letting go of our attachments to things — maybe that does not mean that like Francis we strip ourselves naked and go into the woods. Maybe it means that we free ourselves of our dependence on material things. On the things ‘of this world’. Trappings — so called because they trap us! Things of the world that we may enjoy and take delight in, but know them for what they are. Gerard Hughes, the Jesuit writer, suggests that freeing ourselves from material possessions may be relatively easy. It may be more difficult to be spiritually poor in relation to what St Ignatius calls ‘honours’ — popularity, intelligence, achievements, status in the eyes of others — things that give us a sense of esteem and a notion of our worth. How easy is it for me to speak to you today and not hope that what I say will be useful, appreciated? But this sense of worth springs from, depends on, the continuing good opinion of others. It is fickle, transient. Where does our real worth come from? How do we find it? Poverty. In our Gospel reading, the rich young man leads a good life, he obeys the commandments. At first, Jesus appears to be prepared to let him off the hook — his first response is to tell him he may gain eternal life simply by continuing to do what he is already doing. But the rich young man know that is not enough and I suspect that he knows already in his heart what Jesus will tell him is required of him. But he persists in asking — why? Because he hopes for a different answer, an easier answer? Or rather, because of his deepest longing, because his spirit longs to be set free? His search for eternal life leads him to Jesus. And what he is to do is that which will make him ‘perfect’ — I seem to remember picking up from somewhere that the original Greek word means ‘whole’— that which will heal him, satisfy his yearning, make him complete. He is to let go of all that stands between himself and freedom. We are not told what happened to the young man except that he ‘went away sad’. But we may imagine that this may have been for him the start of a gradual, maybe painful, process of following his heart and letting go, as it was for Francis. Our letting go may be voluntary, chosen. Or we may be pruned by the events of our lives. By ill-health, losing someone we love, the enduring sadness of seeing the suffering of those we love, by injustice, by a betrayal of trust. We may lose our home, our security, our job, our position in society. We may be forced to let go of so many things we value, kicking, screaming, cursing, feeling torn apart by pain and loss. If we do not run from pain, or bury it, or cling to it — if we embrace it and let it be, pain will empty us. It will scour us out, and carve a deep place inside us. For a time we may walk with that deep, empty hunger unfilled. But we may then be ready to become vessels of beauty. Listen to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: Oh tell us, poet, what do you do? I praise. But the deadly and violent days, How do you undergo them, take them in? I praise. But the namelessness — how do you raise that, Invoke the unnameable? I praise. What right have you, through every phase, In every mask, to remain true? I praise. And that both stillness and the wild affray know you, like star and storm? Because I praise. And for the very same reasons, Meister Eckhart, the great mystic, can say this: ‘Everything praises God. Darkness, privations, defects, evil too, praise God and bless God.’ Francis composed his great canticle of praise to Brother Sun and Sister Death when he was suffering great physical hardships. So, from our poverty, beauty and truth may be born. We pick up our pain like an armful of dry wood, walk with it, and when in due time we let it go into the fire it is consumed, releasing the heat of energy and life. A wealth of compassion, awareness, connectedness, understanding may be created. The energy of a passion for justice. Beauty. ‘God is beauty’, says St Francis. ‘Speak to me of God’, says Francis to the almond tree and in the depths of winter it bursts into blossom. In his remarkable book, Original Blessing, Matthew Fox writes: ‘Jesus is the one who shows us what it means to be beautiful and make of our lives a work of art and beauty. How harmony, compassion, care, passion, freedom, relating are the essence of the beautiful. Cleanliness, money, possessions, honor, prestige, security are not where beauty is to be found. Jesus died confused and dirty, ugly, bloody and naked. But beautiful.’ (Original Blessing, p243) And our pain has the potential to make us beautiful, to make us compassionate, to enable us to see the preciousness of things — over and over again we see these qualities in people who have suffered much — well-known people, but also people around us, people in this church, in this community. Vessels of beauty. We are called to be co-creators with God. We are called to make of our life a work of art. Tim Gorringe put to us, during our Food for Thought weekend, that we must reap what we have not sown. We must create something beautiful with materials not of our own choosing — we must be creative within constraints, as we did in our painting on our retreat, when we made ‘creation’ from what others had done before us. And as Matthew Fox says, this is not a matter of prettiness, of ‘tiptoeing through the tulips’. It’s no rose garden. Beauty demands a more arduous process. (Susan Griffin) The glory of the autumn is a result of the death of the leaves, the tree letting go so that new life can be born. And it can be that coming to a realisation of our own beauty enables us to see the beauty of all creation — of other people and of all created life. And to recognise the sacredness of life, that it has the right to exist in itself, not according to how useful it is to us, or whether it benefits us. Poverty — Ray brought to us the other week the words of Archbishop Oscar Romero — ‘aspire not to have more, but to be more’. Having is nothing, being is everything. Making that being what we truly are, what we were born to be. How do we find that? What evokes our passion, our deepest response? Not what should we care about. Not where should we focus our time, energy, money, compassion. Fritz Perls, the originator of Gestalt therapy, observed that ‘the organism does not move by will, but by preference.’ If we do not follow our heart, we suffer burnout and lethargy, joylessness and weariness of spirit. Remember the response of Francis: ‘This is what I wish, this is what I seek, this is what I long to do with all my heart!’ This is what we are called to. What moves you, fires you, delights you? Go towards that, turn your face to it, like the sunflower tracks the path of the sun through the sky. Give it room in your life and your heart. Give it time and space. However small, fragmentary, trivial, insignificant it may seem. Be silent, breathe in and out and listen to what is calling you. St Irenaeus said ‘The glory of God is the glory of people fully alive.’ Let us remember we are beautiful in the sight of God. So let us walk free, and open our hearts to life, for Christ walks with us into each new day. Copyright © 2003 Julie Greenan This page was last updated on Sunday, 26 October 2003home | about all hallows | what’s on | worship and prayer | discussion and reflection | action in the community | projects | an open, welcoming … | weekly bulletin | site map | search site | admin | |