When I, as a 19-year-old I met a friend in college whose aunt, Sister Celine, was a nun.
I would visit Sister Celine from time to time with Doris, and came to know the small collection of nuns in that suburban Kansas City convent.
The idea or calling (some would say) to become one of those nuns, began to take hold within me not long after those visits began. The kind of a convent it was played no role in my decision to join, but rather the people, coupled with an overarching call to devote my life to things of the spirit.
As fate – or life – would have it, the lovely sisters and their convent fell away, as did that particular way of living out ‘the religious life’ and the entire faith tradition of Roman Catholicism.
Ironically, the one thing from that part of my life that has remained all these years later was the thing that didn’t matter at the time…the type of convent it was.
Or more specifically, the individual after whom the convent was established.
That would be one Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone. At least that was his original name. You might know him better as St. Francis.
When Francis was born in the small Italian town of Assisi, his mother Pica named him Giovanni (the Italian name for John), after John the Baptist. She was tasked with the naming because her husband Pietro was away on business in France.
But when the headstrong father returned he decided the name wouldn’t be Giovanni, because he did not want his son to be a man of God. Instead, the name would be Francesco (“the Frenchman”) to honor the commercial success this wealthy cloth merchant had enjoyed in France.
Clearly Dad’s aspirations did not work out well in that respect.
My aspirations to be a nun in that, or any convent also didn’t go as planned. What is left from that period, now embedded deeply into my spiritual DNA, is the example of this man’s life.
One of the reasons that Francis rose to notoriety is because the Catholic church was filled with corruption and needed to be turned upside down (or right side up) through the cleansing of authenticity.
It’s not a far cry from what’s happening in our country right now. We could use a reset, Francis-style, but what that looks like might surprise you.
Here are two examples in which Francis said something so far off the beaten path that it was incorrectly corrected or dismissed outright.
One is when he said: You can show your love to others by not wishing that they would be better Christians.
This was at first considered to be so impossible that Francis would write such a thing, that for centuries the word ‘not’ part was deleted…erroneously ‘corrected’. Of course we want people to be better Christians, right?
We want people to be better according to our version of what ‘good’ is because it appeals to our sensibilities. But underneath that it appeals to our ego and self-illusion that we’ve got the corner on the religious market. It could be referred to as religious superiority.
Put that way it sounds rather harsh, doesn’t it? Being religiously superior. The two words really don’t gel.
And yet, it’s rampant because religious pathways are often chosen. That’s especially the case here, given that many of us are migrants from other faith backgrounds.
A value to what is chosen gets assigned, and a sense of better-ness naturally follows.
My way is the best way. My 88 year-old mother, bless her heart unapologetically subscribes to this. She’s happy to say (and has many a day) that the Roman Catholic church is the ‘one, true religion.’
My Catholic roots brought me to Francis, and through his example I see the wisdom in the adage that… You show love to others by not wishing that they would be better, but instead recognizing their holiness just as you find them, ‘sinfulness’ and all.
There’s another Francis quote that falls in line with this… We must bear patiently not being good…and not being thought of as good.
For this quote, people didn’t arbitrarily delete words such as ‘not’ to make it more comfortable or believable. Instead, the entire point, seen as so outlandish, was just disregarded or denied until the very same teaching was introduced again by a 19thcentury theologian.
In a nutshell he’s saying, there can be value in our imperfections…God can work with this!
This is counterintuitive to practically everything we’ve been taught religiously…good is God and bad is to be avoided. But this guy is telling us to embrace the idea that God welcomes and utilizes our flaws…the things within ourselves that we avoid, fear, and often deny.
These ways of seeing and being, such as what the Beatitudes teach, don’t jive with what we’ve heard here in the West. But we know they get at the heart of love, because when we have an example of this other way, it speaks to us. This is why someone like Francis is so beloved all these year later.
There’s one particular story in Francis’s life that underscores this.
All his life Francis had panicked when he met a person with leprosy. Then one day he came upon one such person as his rode his horse outside of town.
The odor of rotting flesh nauseated him. Tears began to slide down his cheeks because something in him was compelling him to do physically reach out to this person, but he doubted that he’d be able to do it.
And yet he willed himself forward. Trembling, he dismounted his horse, approached the shy sickly man standing before him, put his arms around the leper’s neck and kissed his cheek.
In the instant of that kiss a moment of profound and liberating grace occurred. It was abundantly clear to Francis that he had received far more than he had given.
In the lives of the saints there are always stories that make them models for the rest of us.
Francis certainly has his share, and this one makes his top 10.
This kiss was far more than a normal kiss. It was a catalyst of transformation, a portal from what was to new and very different things to come.
This previously despised person symbolized all in Francis’ life that he had feared,
regretted, and found loathsome, including within himself.
His perspective on human suffering would never be the same.
Additionally, there was a new level of intimacy…yes, with another person, and also with God….intimacy with God when you truly recognize divinity in someone.
The artificial boundaries that we allow to form between ourselves and all of creation fell away for Francis, allowing him to embrace everything as his brother and his sister, calling even death his sister.
It’s a great story, isn’t it? The stuff of religious legend.
But how, if at all, does it translate to 2025? We are far, far removed from a small medieval Italian town. Or are we?
Let’s rewind to see if and how we personally fit into the story.
Do we have fears and regrets, and things we find disjusting that we wrestle with?
Is there human suffering in our world that we’re called to address?
Then there’s intimacy, including with God. How often does the word ‘intimacy’ come up when you think about your relationship with God?
There is far more overlap than not, far more relevancy.
This makes me think of a person I met in Louisville named David. He, a private citizen (not a worker or clergy), has a ministry among people who live outside.
He told me one day that the first step in building a relationship with unhoused people was to accept their situation, not to try to change them, fix their problems, or give them answers to questions they weren’t asking.
Just true acceptance, which he said was the most difficult thing to offer initially.
It wasn’t always easy for him to have that acceptance, because he had to wrestle with resistance that he came to recognize as fear.
He said that being among those vulnerable people revealed his concerns that he too could potentially lose his health and shelter…his security and status.
He had an experience in the hospital with a friend that helped change that.
His friend had been in a motorcycle accident and was paralyzed from the waist down. He recalls that soon after the accident when his friend spoke, his speech hesitant and slow, and hearing it filled David with fear, which his friend saw.
Finally, his friend said, “I’m the one who was in an accident, why are you so afraid?”
In that moment, not unlike the moment of Francis’ kiss, David’s heart was broken open, allowing him to more clearly see the role of his own fears, and how it kept him from appreciating the divinity in this person before him, and subsequently the many more he would visit in tents by the highway overpass.
David had to confront his own fears and resistance to ‘different’ people just as Francis did.
It’s a challenge for each one of us, and the difference takes many shapes.
I know that many of us are now struggling with offering simple acceptance to people who are ‘the others.’ We wonder what our world is coming to, and what, if anything, we can do about it.
There aren’t simple answers to this, but there is an overarching awareness that does bring peace, if our minds and hearts can be open to it.
The story of Francis is an example that all we need is right here and right now—in this world. Heaven includes earth, if we would only appreciate the clear doorways of time and space between them.
Many people of faith are colored blind, thinking in black and white terms that there is the sacred and inherently sacrilegious, instead of recognize that there is only the sacred, which sometimes becomes desecrated by our blindness and irreverence.
But if we see in color, we know that there is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it. Francis got this.
Do you remember fun song I Love You and Buddha Too? “Oh Jesus, I love you, and I love Buddha too. Rami Krishna, Guru Dev, Tai de Ching and Mohammed.”
All these people, spanning all their times and places and religious leanings, embraced this wisdom. Each with hearts and aspirations and fears just as we have today.
So, when we see statues and images of them look more closely, and appreciate how this person must’ve lived that we see them here among us all these years later, their examples still inviting you, and me, to dismount our fears and more fully embrace the ways of love.
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