St. Francis and Music of Freedom
October 4 is the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, and today’s Gospel reading comes from Luke 9: 57–62. “As Jesus and his disciples travelled along they met a man on the road who said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ Jesus answered, ‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’”
What a perfect Gospel reading for the Feast of St. Francis. He is one who followed Jesus with nowhere to lay his head. He preached to the birds of the air and sang among the ecclesiastical foxes who tried to stifle his evangelistic joy.
Francesco didn’t return to bury Pietro Bernardone. Instead, he removed his clothes and, like Christ, was stripped bare. His clothes were originally given to him by his cloth merchant father, but now Francesco had set his hand to the plough and never looked back. The only things he took with him were faith, hope, and love.
His openness to the Spirit enabled him to live with the courage of spontaneity. In his liberation, Francesco embraced lepers, spoke truth to popes, and marched barefoot through a war zone to seek peace and unity with the Sultan. He fed the wolf that was terrorizing Gubbio and laid the baby Jesus in his crèche.
His contemporaries thought Francis had lost his mind. Maybe he had. Or maybe he had found his mind, his heart, and his spirit. “It was for freedom that Christ set us free” (Galatians 5:1).
During his life, Francis lived with PTSD due to his time in war and as a POW. He also lost his physical vision. Nevertheless, he lived with joy and witnessed God infused in all of creation’s opposites — Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Sister Water and Brother Fire — in his Canticle of the Sun. He even gave praise “through our Sister Bodily Death” because he knew that in freedom of Spirit “the second death shall do them no harm.”
No wonder Francis was so beloved in his day and maybe even more so in ours. Francis, though, is more than a revered figure to admire him from afar. He is a model for us to follow. Not that we’re to become Franciscans. We’re to open our hearts and minds to the Spirit in order to become who we have been created to be.
Francis was no ethereal being. He was grounded in real life — an ordinary person who listened to the whisper of the Spirit. He opened his heart, mind, hands, and feet to the deeper truth that we are all connected in the deepest ways possible. That’s why he received the stigmata — the wounds of Christ in his hands, feet, and side. As the Son of God was wounded with the wounds suffered by all creation, Francis was also tangibly wounded.
No one is expected to be another Francis. You are called to be you. I am called to be me. This is a unique calling, so we can’t judge others for being who they we’re created to be.
We can, however, hear the symphonic harmony of us all together, for it will sound like “love, joy peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things” (Galatians 5:23).
In our age of ecological emergency, we join the chorus of Brother Sun, Sister Moon and God’s troubadour in a song of interconnectedness.
Sadly, though, today’s song includes notes of sorrow and suffering due to climate crisis and inequality. We have misused what we mistakenly consider freedom. The selfish acquisition of consumer goods and destruction of our common home are expressions of rapacious avarice based in the illusion that we are isolated from one another and all that is.
The song of freedom isn’t a one note solo. We sing together in unity — not unison — with all other voices in a cosmic chorus praising the Creator. St. Francis wasn’t preaching to the birds as much as he joined with their song.
On this Feast of St. Francis, may you and I be open to the Spirit in us and all creation — the one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:6).
