Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Happy Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi! While we’ll be celebrating Francis’ Christ-like example this Saturday at 11am with the Blessing of the Animals, a pet food drive, lunch, and more, today’s his actual Feast. I’d like to invite you today (and Saturday, too!) to reflect on why it is that we celebrate Francis’ witness.

Francis preached nothing but the Gospel, with a particular focus on and devotion to lifting up and living into the poverty of Jesus, revealed most completely on the holy cross. Indeed, Francis’ devotion to and identification with the Passion would bear it’s clearest fruit in his own reception of the marks of the passion, the stigmata, as a particular gift and grace from God. Francis modeled for us a desire that the cross of Christ should be our only glory and strip us of all pride and presumption as we learn to follow more closely the God whose glory was disclosed in the nakedness of the crucified Jesus in which we see most clearly both the reality of the human condition and the loving condescension of God in entering into that reality so completely. In his Admonitions, Francis writes:

“Consider, O human, how great the excellence in which the Lord has placed you because He has created and formed you to the image of His beloved Son according to the body and to His own likeness according to the spirit. And all the creatures that are under heaven serve and know and obey their Creator in their own way better than you. And even the demons did not crucify Him, but you together with them crucified Him and still crucify Him by taking delight in vices and sins. Wherefore then can you glory? For if you were so clever and wise that you possessed all science, and if you knew how to interpret every form of language and to investigate heavenly things minutely, you could not glory in all this, because one demon has known more of heavenly things and still knows more of earthly things than all people, although there may be some person who has received from the Lord a special knowledge of sovereign wisdom. In like manner, if you were more handsome and richer than all others, and even if you could work wonders and put the demons to flight, all these things are hurtful to you and in nowise belong to you, and in them you cannot glory; that, however, in which we may glory is in our infirmities, and in bearing daily the holy cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Here we have some insight into Francis’ special attention towards- and care for animals and the natural world: he doesn’t see nature as instrumental to his own happiness, but recognizes in it a still-rich and vibrant example of what it means to be in relationship with God simply by being what God made it to be. He rejoices in the faithfulness of the natural world and sees it as a model for his own faithfulness. He sees God in and through nature, loves God in and through nature and loves nature for God’s sake. And he sees in the natural world a guileless and holy simplicity that humanity has, in itself, obscured through ostentation, pride and sin. Only by taking our infirmities and our weakness as our glory, only in repudiating wealth and power, only in taking up the cross and following Christ in his own poverty and simplicity can we rediscover just what it is to be truly human.

And this is why, I think, we celebrate Francis’ witness—not because he preached to birds and reconciled wolves to cities; not because he loved and rescued turtledoves. He did those things because he knew, by grace, the counter-cultural and revolutionary power of the Gospel, and he lived that revolutionary power, that LOVE, as best he could, as simply as he could.

May God give us grace to do likewise!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+