The Truth about the Birdbath Saint

Francis of Assisi is noted for his voluntary renunciation of worldly wealth. He turned from a life of privilege and embraced poverty like a bride. In his radical embrace of poverty, Francis was actually making a radical embrace of charity, that is, of love, unselfish, even self-denying, love. 

When he set aside his family’s expectations, including his father’s ambitions for him to join the family cloth-selling business, and when he set aside his social circle’s expectations that he would continue to be the life of the party and the engine of merriment, he set them aside not for a simple selfishness, a self-denial of negative ambition. 

Francis set aside worldly expectations, his own and others, to be transformed by love, and in that love to transform the world around him. 

Francis had all the gear for a successful career: he even had the armor of a crusader. But in the course of his conversion to a higher purpose he gave that very weaponry to a poor knight, a passer-by on his way to the crusade (or to a more local quarrel).

In some ways of course Francis never ceased to be a crusader or the life of the party. But in his conversion, in his embrace of radical charity, he became the host of a different celebration than his old friends, and family, had at the outset expected.

Francis, whom we remember largely for his love of the non-articulate parts of creation, wolves that give up wolving, and birds that flock to his shoulders, was more challenging than that. He invited human predators to end their predations, and human lions to make safe space for lambs.

We remember him this fall at the culmination, or kick-off, of the creation season in many churches. Around us it is harvest-time, or a cooling from a hot summer. It is a time of revival or relief. But it is also a time of remembrance, of the world that was not made for our exploitation, but invites us  for our pleasure in its care and our enjoyment of something beyond our making.

October 4th is Saint Francis of Assisi Day. It is our day to celebrate the goodness of creation, and the goodness of caring for that creation, of loving it with a selfless love, not for negative reasons, but out of gratitude and a radical embrace of love, that is, of charity.

Father John Leech is a priest associate at the Episcopal Church of Saint Matthew in Tucson, and a frequent guest preacher at other churches throughout southern Arizona.