What Would St. Francis Say Today?

If you could have a conversation with five different people in history, who would they be? And what would you talk about? In idle moments I sometimes muse on these questions.

My list changes frequently, often reflecting whatever biography I’ve been reading. But there’s one person who is always near the top of the list: Francis of Assisi. I would really, really like to talk with him. I’d love to get into his heart.

The son of a businessman and originally destined for wealth, a youngish Francis suffered some, met a few lepers, heard God’s voice in a vision and ended up following Jesus. The details of Francis Bernardone’s Christian conversion vary from biographer to biographer, but there is one point on which all agree: that he decisively rejected a material view of reality and began living as a devoted Christ-follower. Having made this decision, he never looked back. One biographer, Adolph Holl, called Francis the last authentic Christian.

Francis has been gone for 800 years or so, but if he and I could get together, I’d like to know what is important to him among the issues of the great Christian agenda. I know that he’d cause me to see some things differently and help me to see some unique ways I might reorganize my life and thought.

Let me muse on a few possibilities.

I can hear Francis insisting that the core of the gospel of Jesus is found in the sacrificial event modeled at the cross and reflected countless times in all Christ-centered human transactions.

Francis might say, “In the same way as the Lord Jesus gave himself completely to people (even dying for us all), I always ask myself what piece of ‘me’ can I offer to each person I meet along the way. Sometimes the answer to this question is clear; sometimes it isn’t. But I try to engage every human being with the intention of being more the giver and less the taker.”

Elizabeth Patton Moss must have had this notion of the sacrificial event on her mind when she wrote:

“Saint Francis came to preach. With smiles he met the friendless, Fed the poor, freed a trapped bird, Led a child home. Although he spoke no word, His text, God’s love, The town did not forget.”

A second thing I imagine Francis doing is pointing me toward the larger world around us. “It’s God’s art,” he might say. “Stop treating it dismissively, exploiting it for your own selfish objectives. If you really believe in a Creator and creation, then give dignity and respect to all things he has made. Right now, you and a lot of your compatriots are trashing creation and leaving little of value to your grandchildren. You really think the Creator delights in this?”

I hear Francis challenging me to love beauty as the first iteration of God’s self-revelation. “Rejoice and revel in the splendor of the flower, the bird, the sky, the child, the song,” he’d say. In his wonderful, offbeat craziness, Francis might urge me to sing with the birds; talk to the flowers; shout to the sea. Francis apparently did things like this, and some claim they (the birds, flowers, and the sea) sang and talked and shouted back at him. I half believe it. Sometime, when no one is looking, I may try it myself. I think God might smile.

I’m sure Francis would want to talk about prizing life.

“You will learn to hate what you now love and love what you now hate,” the Holy Spirit once said into Francis’ heart. And this is exactly what happened as Francis came to a new view of humanity.

And that new view might cause him to say to me, “Look beyond beautiful faces and trim athletic bodies. Stop sorting people by their money, their politics, their nationality. Be sensitive to, protect and celebrate the life of the unborn, the prisoner, the rape victim in the Congo, the offspring of the AIDS family, the old person warehoused in a dingy nursing home. Never let these people disappear off of your screen. Never let them slip beyond the reach of God’s love.“

I can’t imagine a conversation with Francis that wouldn’t center on the deeper meaning and implications of simplicity in living.

Francis died, you know, lying on the dirt floor of a shack in the woods wrapped in the borrowed cloak of a fellow monk (which he insisted be returned upon his death) because he didn’t want to own anything or owe anybody when he left for heaven. That’s simplicity to the extreme, but that’s Francis.

For Francis simplicity meant choices of lifestyle, activities, and key relationships. “You’re living much too complicated a life,” he might say to me. “Show me your Blackberry and tell me that your calendar makes sense. You live too often on the edge of exhaustion and weariness. Loosen up. You can’t seriously believe that God delights in all of this busyness of yours.”

Though it might offend the politics of some, I can hear Francis raising the topic of peacemaking and wondering why many modern Christians have so little to say about it. “Ought this not be an essential piece of your faith?” he might ask me.

Francis’s hatred of conflict had an origin. In his younger years he had gone merrily off to war expecting honor and booty and ended up a POW in a hell-hole. There he came face to face with cruelty and disease and discovered that combat was not a game. From that point forward he repudiated war and embraced peacemaking.

Thus, it was not surprising that, when the “Christian movement” of his time (the Crusaders) marched off to the Middle East in hopes of annihilating Muslims, Francis traveled there himself, passed through enemy lines and introduced himself to Malik-al-Kamil, the Muslim sultan of Egypt. While there, the two men spoke extensively of matters of faith and peace and became friends.

Francis’s host listened carefully to the Christian message Francis shared with him. And, not surprisingly, Francis returned the favor by listening to the Sultan’s Muslim convictions, something I don’t ever remember being taught to do when I was younger.

Francis was not successful in his effort to make peace, and he did not convert the Sultan, and, as a result, the Crusaders got their war. But that he tried to avert bloodshed says something significant. At least Francis was known as a peacemaker, the kind of person Jesus praised in the Sermon on the Mount.

If there was time, I’d want to ask Francis why he refused to start an organization. He never launched a Saint Francis Ministries. Today, almost everyone else does this. But the fact is that Francis was wary of institutionalism. The pope himself begged Francis to set up a society of followers with bylaws and buildings and assets, but he refused. Instead, Francis usually sent well-intentioned admirers home. There, he told them, they could best extend Jesus’ vision to seek and save lost people with small groups of people who’d be guided by the Holy Spirit. Sort of like the early church.

Finally, I’d want to ask Francis why he thinks God chose him to become an inspiration for people over the span of eight centuries. Was there a secret to his becoming a saint? Should he answer me, he would probably repeat what he told someone else 800 years ago who asked that question:

“(The Lord) looked down from heaven and must have said, ‘Where can I find the weakest, the smallest, the meanest man on the face of the earth?’ Then he saw me and said, ‘Now I have found him. I will work through him, for he will not be proud nor take my honor away from myself. He will realize that I am using him because of his littleness and insignificance.'”

I really like this guy. Understand what I’m saying?

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership and lives in New Hampshire.