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2. God with Us

Chiefest of all forms of service that the brothers and sisters can offer must ever be the effort to show others in his beauty and power the Christ who is the inspiration and joy of their own lives.

(The Principles of the First Order of the Society of Saint Francis, Day 22)

One of the chief hallmarks of the Franciscan way of life is its down-to-earth quality. The very phrase ‘down-to-earth’ sums up an essential element of Franciscan belief and practice. It is no longer possible to see God as remote, somewhere ‘up there’ out of the way. Since the birth of Jesus Christ, we have become aware that God’s willingness to become incarnate connects him intimately with the life of every creature. God has walked this earth as one of us. This is the heart of the Christian mystery: God, limitless Creator of all things, submits to the limitation of human existence in order to demonstrate the truth of his love for us.

A Christ who is both truly God and truly human illumines our humanity by showing us what it is possible for a human to become. Saints are made when a human being accepts the challenge to grow beyond what we normally think of as the limits of human possibility. Each of us is called to take seriously our status as creatures made in the image of the Creator. Each of us is called to reflect that image back to the world in which we live. Christians inherit the truth that in Jesus, God did not become flesh to live and die only once in a finite time and place, but for all time. Our flesh too contains the seeds of that mystery. We too can become more nearly like our Creator. We only have to want to. In striving to reflect God more perfectly, we become more perfectly human. Francis’ life and spirituality are a potent example of this process at work.

Incarnational Presence

Since Francis’ own time, two elements at the heart of the Franciscan life have been held in tension: the call to affirm the world by active, loving presence within it, and aloneness with God in contemplative withdrawal. Both elements are essential to any attempt to approach life as Francis did. When Francis withdrew to pray, he took with him the needs of those who might have no other access to God. And when Francis himself was praying alone for the world, his brothers and sisters, and those who came to be inspired by his message, were still in the midst of it, tackling with their presence the magnitude of human need. Both are important ways of living out the Franciscan vocation to be an incarnational presence in the world. For in both activities, prayer and work, Christians seek to do as Jesus did and to be, as nearly as they can, as he was.

All Christians are signs of God’s presence, whether or not it is recognized and interpreted as such by those among whom they live. Wherever someone of faith is, there is a reminder that people still seek to love and serve their God, and that God has not gone away. As in Francis’ own time, though arguably for different reasons, the institutional Church today has in many places become remote from everyday human concerns. It can be perceived, rightly or wrongly, as having very little to do with the loving message of the gospel. People still need to know that they are loved, as they always have – but they no longer automatically trust the Church to be the bearer of that message. So people who live out their faith in an undramatic, down-to-earth way, communicating genuine love and humility, still have the capacity to reach hungry hearts, minds and souls with a sense of God’s presence.

The leper who challenged Francis has never gone away. There are still people, existing rather than living on the margins of society, who desperately need someone to reach out to them in their isolation. Franciscans across the world continue to engage, together with others, in trying to communicate to them the reality of God’s love. The materially secure ‘post-Christian’ citizens of the affluent West also need to hear that message of love. Modern life in the West has become so complex that there are signs of a renewed yearning for simplicity. There is growing recognition that a sense of purpose does not always accompany success. People want to be assured that their lives have meaning and worth. In the intense questioning that arose out of the events of 11 September, many who had never considered themselves religious came to ask whether there might be more lasting values than possession, accumulation and achievement. The ‘little poor man’ of Assisi, who called all people his brothers and sisters, is ideally placed to speak to our search for a solid base from which to live.

The Word Made Flesh

The birth of Christ is the most powerful reminder we have of God’s reality. Every Christmas we are reminded that God loves us so much that he chooses to become known by us in a new way, by becoming one of us. The presence of God among us is made concrete, given a shape. Yet, despite God’s terrifying power and majesty, the shape in which he chooses to become known as a human being reflects not might, but vulnerability. The defenceless child in the manger foreshadows that terrible human death at the hands of an occupying power. Yet this child, utterly dependent, is nevertheless truly God. H. R. Bramley’s hymn sums it up beautifully:

O wonder of wonders which none can unfold;

The Ancient of Days is an hour or two old.12

Francis brought home this reality to the congregation of the church in Greccio, a village in the Rieti valley some way south of Assisi. One Christmas, he sought to recreate the scene of the stable in Bethlehem. Francis had brought into church all the props we associate with the Nativity: a cow, a donkey, hay, a manger, a real baby. To us, familiar with cribs of all varieties, this action has lost much of its impact. At least once a year these things become part of the paraphernalia of church or home; we are not surprised to see them, and may in fact have become so familiar with the sight that we stop really seeing it at all. To the people of Greccio, seeing it for the first time, it was a revelation. The everyday things of the world were invested with new holy meaning; these ordinary, everyday creatures were part of the story which God wants us all to hear and participate in. To them it was not a remote symbol to be grasped only through the powers of the intellect, but a visible, instantly comprehensible reminder that God is present with us everywhere, willing to be continually reborn for us and in us. Showing and preaching Christ’s continued presence in the world in this very concrete way was central to Francis’ ministry. His mission to rebuild the Church included making the faith real and accessible to its people.

The story of the crib at Greccio, as told by Francis’ early biographers, highlights one more interesting fact about him: that he appears to have been ordained as a deacon and sometimes took the role, appropriate to the deacon, of reading the Gospel in the liturgy as he did at that particular Christmas service. We do not know when or by whom he was ordained; it is clear from the way he spoke and wrote about priests that he never aspired to become one himself. Instead, he again mirrors the calling of all Christians to follow in Jesus’ footsteps. The Greek word diakon can be translated as ‘servant’. The Jesus who took the role of a servant and washed his disciples’ feet, despite their objections that this was unsuitable work for the Son of God, is the same Jesus who inspired Francis to humble service of the outcasts of his time. The Acts of the Apostles spells out in more detail the role of deacons in the early Church, including making sure that the poor of the parish were included and fed. Today, the Church of England requires that deacons should be ready to share in the Church’s work of caring for the poor, the needy and the sick. ‘They are to strengthen the faithful, search out the careless and the indifferent, and to preach the word of God’;13 in short, to act as an incarnational presence in the world. Thus it is clear that Francis did exercise a diaconal ministry, in the pattern of the Servant Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.14

Mind, Body and Spirit

In order to speak with any kind of integrity to people who have no conception of what God is like, people of faith need to live it honestly and openly. Our beliefs must be consistent with everything we do, say or think; they must influence every aspect of our lives and relationships. The tremendous reality of incarnation means that there is no part of our human existence that cannot be touched by God. There is no need for shame or evasion. Jesus has been there before us. Every human emotion and experience is infused with the presence of the divine. Yet this approach, rooted in a sense of the goodness and integrity of all creation, has not always been evident in the teachings of the Church.

Today we are beginning at last to come to terms with a different concept of bodiliness from that which would have been understood in Francis’ time. It is not always easy. Much Christian theology, from the time of the Desert Fathers onwards, had spoken of the body as inferior to the soul or spirit – it was messier, less easily controllable, constantly demanding. In much Christian thought, our bodies have been rejected as at best a distraction from the life of the Spirit, and at worst completely divorced from it. The spiritual realm was consistently portrayed as somehow higher than the physical; the spiritual body would be perfected only after death, and this life was merely a preparation for the life of the spirit. We are still living with the remnants of this attitude today. Yet it was into the physical form of a human infant that Christ was born. He did not reject the limitations of the human body. A fully incarnate Christ must necessarily have been physical, and sensual. From the Gospel accounts we know that he ate and drank, walked, rode donkeys. Touch was a vital part of his ministry of healing. He loved, wept, got angry. He died.

What does it really mean, then, that God created us physical beings? How do we live out to the full our call to become the Body of Christ today? A healthy Christian approach to our humanity should happily recognize our spiritual and physical reality as equally valid expressions of our Christlikeness. It could be argued that, despite the example of the incarnate Jesus, Christians believe what has been absorbed from Pauline theology about the opposition, rather than the integration, of body and spirit. Many of us are still uncomfortable with having bodies at all. This discomfort has become all too clear through the sorry mess we make of discussing anything to do with gender or sexuality, for example. We attempt to argue that Jesus was somehow exempt from that one area of human embodiment; if he was a sexual being, even in the broadest sense, we would really rather not know about it. In fact, we secretly doubt that Jesus could really have been flesh at all; if he truly was heir to the same range of weaknesses and temptations that we are, we would then have to be able to face up to them in ourselves rather than write them off as bad and not really of God. In the same way, the fact that he was able to come through human temptations without sinning forces us to confront our own failures. So our vocation to be the living Body of Christ is impaired, because we do not want to envisage what that body might be like. It is all too painful, and we find it easier to reduce the Body of Christ to a picturesque symbol. However, the mystery of the Incarnation calls us to contemplate the truth that God became flesh, and that we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’15 in his image. Wholehearted membership of the Body of Christ begins with the call to accept our own physical embodiment, and rejoice that Jesus shared it. It was our own human reality, however far from ideal, that Jesus accepted and shared in his own body. Flesh cannot be separated from mind or spirit if we are to see ourselves as whole beings, and dedicate our whole selves joyfully to God’s service. Our human life and the physical world in which we live can be the vessel for a profound encounter with the love of God. In order to become accurate reflections of the incarnate God, we need to put every aspect of ourselves at God’s disposal. According to the Principles of the Anglican Society of Saint Francis, for example, the balanced Franciscan life is made up of three ‘ways of service’:16 prayer, study and work. Thus mind, body and spirit all find a place of equal value in the service of God.

The place of the mind in Franciscan life, however, has also given cause for dispute over the years. Although study quickly did become an accepted part of the ministry of the friars, and there were many learned Franciscan scholars, it is arguable that Francis himself was somewhat anti-intellectual. Certainly he was, at best, ambivalent about the benefits of academic learning. It played no part in the life he envisaged for the early brothers. The only book they needed to learn from was the Gospel. This attitude might in part be explained by the fact that literacy was then restricted to those who could afford it. Education was often available only through the very monasteries which had come to symbolize the Church’s arrogance and detachment in their apparent rejection of the real world. To be ‘unlettered’, as Francis himself always claimed to be, was to be closer to the poor majority. Jesus and the disciples were simple people with little or no formal education. Francis knew that his Little Brothers would reflect that, coming as they did from a society in which the majority had no access to learning. From the start he was determined that they should be Little, or Lesser, Brothers. That acceptance of poverty and littleness affected every aspect of their life, both corporately and individually.

It is of course true that, even for academic theologians, writing, thinking or theorizing about God is no substitute for a direct personal relationship with him. Francis was right to distrust the glib games which can be played with truth, thus keeping it safe and manageable, unable to work its transformation. Having said all that, Francis himself displayed an unusual knowledge of Scripture. His writings also betray a familiarity with authors of the early Church, such as Jerome and Ambrose. In this too, of course, he resembles the Jesus who was able to argue with the learned men in the temple at a very early age. He also knew the Divine Office of the Church, presumably required of a deacon, and was able to marshal theological arguments of some complexity. His claim to be ‘unlettered’ is therefore somewhat disingenuous if taken literally. It was, however, entirely consistent with his desire to know God rather than know about him. The truth and reality of what is revealed about God in Scripture is paramount. God is real and knowable, not as arcane theory but as lived reality in relationship.

Francis’ concern, with study as in all things, was that we need to rid ourselves of all the props that can shield us from living that reality ourselves. Poverty was about stripping off every cause for pride or self-absorption, everything that might draw the consciousness back from God to self. We are to become ‘instruments of God’s mighty working’:17 whatever we do is to be directed by God and to direct us back to him. In an article on Francis and poverty, an Anglican Franciscan brother tellingly remarks that as Francis saw it, a life of poverty ‘must be a habitual reference to God, and such a life then really has no limits, because its dimensions are the dimensions of God’.18

All three of these ways of service, then, if held in healthy balance, can become pointers to a Franciscan way of living in the world. Mind, body and spirit all need to be dedicated to the loving service of God. So, by persisting in prayer we learn to love the world and its people, by study we can aspire to understand it (which helps us in turn to love it more honestly), and by works we seek to do what we can to improve it, so that it mirrors more exactly the will of its Creator. Some brothers and sisters may find themselves drawn more to one aspect than another. There have been endless debates within the Franciscan movement, as in most other branches of Christianity, as to whether it is better to ‘be’ or to ‘do’. The answer, is, naturally, both – but never to lose sight of God in attempting either.

Francis and ‘Brother Ass’

Francis himself is not always the most obvious model for healthy ways to integrate body, mind and spirit. If there is one aspect of Francis which is hard to grasp today, it is his apparent thirst for self-mortification and self-denial. This typically medieval approach, so admired by his early biographers as a sure sign of his holiness, can seem exaggerated, or even neurotic, to the contemporary mind. ‘Denying yourself’ seems to go against the grain of all current wisdom. We have got used to assuming that our rights should be respected and our needs met. It is, fortunately, commonplace now for Christians to employ the insights of psychology, along with theology, in the quest for maturity as complete persons made in God’s image. We are thus aware that in order to grow and flourish as full human beings, we must recognize our needs and desires, for it can ultimately prove damaging not to do so. In what way, then, can it make sense to embrace a Franciscan path of self-denial?