The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi

Propers of the Day

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for you souls.

I imagine that all of us have had times when we have felt weary, loaded down with heavy burdens. To live within this particular historical era is to be buffeted with economic, social and political concerns that can so easily become wearisome and burdensome. To read the newspaper or to watch the news on television is often a weighty and depressing experience, especially in an age of terrorism and widespread violence and war. In addition, we all live lives that are often replete with other burdens and anxieties: financial concerns, health issues and subtle but insidious pressures from professional and even familial expectations. We all live with myriad sources of insecurity and anxiety that can quickly be exacerbated by the ebb and flow of everyday life, placing a certain pall of weariness and fatigue over our minds and hearts. In the midst of such moments, however, our Lord speaks to us, bidding us to take up his yoke and learn from him. If we do, he promises we will find rest for our wearied souls for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. But what exactly is this yoke that our Lord bids us to put on and what is the lesson he calls us to learn? That yoke is, I believe, love – the love of God in Christ and it would seem that that love is both the yoke we are asked to bear and the lesson we are called to learn. Christ bids us to put on the yoke of his love and to learn how to bear it with faith and grace.

I used to think that loving was an almost innate, instinctual human activity but over the course of my life, I’ve come to think differently. We tend to think, for example, that children are naturally loving creatures, spontaneously reaching out with hugs to grateful parents and grandparents. In truth, however, I think those actions are more the product of need than love, more an expression of learned behavior anchored in a desire to please adults and glean much needed affirmation, affection and attention. As we all know, children are actually a bundle of needs and what adults view and label as “love” is more often than not simply the by-product of deep ties of dependency. Later in life, as we reach adolescence, we begin to experience another batch of emotions that has been labeled “love”. These emotions seem largely a matter of biology and chemistry, deeply rooted in the fertile and complex soil of human sexuality. What we call love in this instance is still an expression of our needs, needs crafted by the activity of hormones and the heady cultural milieu of romanticism. Some adults, of course, never move beyond these fledgling forms of love, entering into relationships that are largely defined by those needs, often grounded in unresolved feelings of dependency left over from childhood or adolescent cravings driven by sexual attraction and hormonal chemistry. Those who wish to move beyond these rather confining forms of love have to learn about what it really means to love and that is a lesson that often requires a life-time of intimacy, experienced within the context of a great deal of grace.

Today, we are celebrating the life of St. Francis of Assisi, a man who certainly had to learn how to love. Francis, as many of you know, was born the son of a wealthy cloth-merchant in Assisi. Gallant, high-spirited and generous, he lived a privileged life, fit for a person of his family and station. His early life was filled with courtly romance, that highly formal and chivalric language of obsessive devotion that was used to channel and control the chemical yearnings of medieval men. As an aspiring romantic, Francis set out to earn glory on the battlefield in a skirmish between Assisi and its neighbor Perugia. There he was captured by the enemy and his illusions of romantic grandeur were shattered as he spent a year as a prisoner of war, during which time he became gravely ill. He emerged from the experience a changed man, driven by a thirst to learn about a different sort of love, one that would fill his soul rather than his imagination. He turned his back on the gallantry of war, risking the accusation of cowardice, and he set out for home. Back in Assisi he began to minister to the outcasts, the lepers and the poor, strange and aberrant behavior that estranged him from his father who ultimately disowned him. In an act of piety and defiance, he stripped himself of all his fine clothes and adopted the simple brown garment of the Italian peasant which later became the mark of the Franciscan order. Francis’s early life had wearied him. The trappings of rank, wealth and romanticism had become unbearable burdens. The emotions that his culture and society labeled as “love” were for him ultimately empty and unfulfilling. Driven by his deep desire to experience a new type of love, Francis put on the yoke of Christ and he learned from him. He learned his lesson so very well that he became one of the most loving and compassionate persons in the annals of human history, a man whom many rank second only to Love Incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth.

In his letter to the church in Galatia, Paul wrote of his own faith in that love which revolved around his experience of the cross: …the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Like Francis, Paul’s life was radically changed through his acceptance of the yoke of Christ in the dust of the road to Damascus. In enkindled in him, as it did in Francis, a passionate devotion to the cross of Christ which crucified his world and shattered his role within it. The world had taught Paul and Francis, as it teaches us, that the purpose of life is to fulfill our needs. One does not really have to look very far to witness the prevalence of that message. We live within a culture and society that is literally saturated with the notion that the goal of life is to meet one’s needs: one’s need to be admired, one’s need to be respected, one’s need to be loved, feared or simply obeyed. In the view of the world, Paul and Francis had both experienced significant success: admired, loved and respected by their friends, family and colleagues. Yet both men were invited by Christ to learn about a new kind of love, a love that was not so much a matter of fulfilling one’s needs and it was about recognizing that their only real need was to learn how to love, passionately and indiscriminately.

In the book of Genesis, we are told that God created birds and animals so that man would not be alone. It is interesting to note that God presented Adam with animals before he gave him a human partner. Why didn’t he do it the other way around? Perhaps God hope that before he entered the deep waters of human intimacy, Adam might first learn something about love from his relationship with animals, something about a love that was not a matter of fulfilling needs but which arose instead out of his need to love.

As Francis learned how to bear the yoke of Christ, he developed a passionate love for animals. As his old world was crucified, he entered into a new world that was not dominated by his needs but by his deep desire to love the natural world that surrounded him. Bearing the yoke of Christ, Francis no longer loved in order to fulfill his own needs but learned that his true vocation was to learn to love outrageously, to open himself up to the pervasive glory of the richness of God’s creation. Francis loved animals not because they met his needs but because he needed to love, to love all of creation, opening his heart and mind to all of reality in a wondrous stance of vulnerability. Such vulnerability inevitably involved being wounded which is why it is not surprising that he received the stigmata as a token of that passionate, all-consuming love.

In an important sense, I believe that our relationship with animals can enable us to learn a similar lesson, reminding us that our only real need is our need to love, to learn to extend our hearts in waves of courageous vulnerability without any expectation of being admired, respected, obeyed or even loved in return. Our relationship with animals encourages us to recognize and engage our need to love but it certainly does not protect us from those inevitable wounds. In fact, loving animals invites such wounds for even as we clutch them to our hearts we know that they will be taken from us, all too soon. To love animals involves extending our hearts to something that needs us and learning to stand within that stream of vulnerability that such a stance inevitably entails. It is a love that often feels like a cross, turning our worlds inside out, yet it is a love that often saves us from ourselves, from the web of needs, expectations and anxieties that so often burden and weary us. Left to our own devices, we could not bear the weight of such vulnerability, but yoked with the love of Christ, we can learn with our brother Francis how to love with indiscriminate passion, with a love that will make us a new creation, bringing rest to our weary souls.

Wendel W. Meyer

St. John’s Church

October 7^th, 2007