The oldest surviving depiction of St. Francis is a fresco near the entrance of the Benedictine abby of Subiaco, painted between March 1228 and March 1229.
Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
Luke 12:16-21 NRSVue
Today is the Feast of St. Francis in the Christian Calendar and this marks the final day of the Season of Creation/Creation Time/Creationtide. This was deemed a fitting conclusion to these five weeks of reflection upon and celebration of Creator and Creation because Francis, the 12th century Italian ascetic and mystic, loved creatures and what we often call the natural world. There are stories, some of them fanciful, about Francis communing with birds and convincing a wolf to stop preying on the flocks of a small village. Francis is credited with staging the first Living Nativity, likely creating the picture of adoring farm animals as well as the shepherds and angels actually mentioned in Luke's gospel. In many congregations this is the day for a Blessing of the Animals.
I have been pondering this blog entry for a couple of weeks and wondering what I might say. It occurs to me that while we might prefer the warm and sometimes maudlin images of Francis and the critters another essential aspect of his preaching and witness was radical simplicity. He came from a life of privilege and gave this up, to his family's dismay, charismatically attracting young followers who soon formed the Franciscan and Poor Clare religious orders.
Francis is specifically the Roman Catholic patron saint of animals and ecology but he has been embraced as an examplar for Christians of many traditions. Are we willing to heed Francis' call to simplicity, particularly in the nations where the gospel of more and more outweighs any other conviction? In the past week we've watched with dismay the movement of Hurrican Helene through six American states, followed by the frantic search for survivors and the dead.
The unprecedented devastation far inland has stunned officials, even though climate scientists have warned of an increasing number of storms supercharged by climate change. The city of Asheville, North Carolina, population 95,000, has been hard-hit, with the trendy downtown swept away by flood waters. There is a grim irony that the US National Climatic Data Center is in Asheville. The center maintains the world's largest climate data archive and provides climatological services and data to every sector of the United States economy and to users worldwide. It was shut down temporarily by Helene as power was knocked out for millions.
If the wealthiest, most scientifically advanced country on the planet can't adequately prepare for the acceleration of the climate emergency, who can? Helene made landfall in Florida, a state where government employees are not allowed to use the term "climate change" and it has been expunged from its documents and online presence.
Jesus was clear that wealth and hoarding imperils our souls. He and his disciples lived a life of simplicity. Francis and his counterpart, Clare, chose to follow his example. Will we continue in the idolatry of wealth, gobbling up the planet's resources, destroying biodiversity, or will we reorder our lives for the sake of generations to come and all creatures?
St. Francis of Assisi -- Sergo Tbileli
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