St. Francis – George Yandell
Often our religious leaders play a game with us- “activate your faith.” They extol, berate, confront us, saying, “If you had stronger belief like others, you could do marvelous things, create peace, bring world hunger to an end,” and so on. They make religion out to be a list of do’s and don’ts, and set up hierarchies of achievement. And they insist that there is only one correct system of belief, obtained by practicing their brand of religion.
Jesus said something powerfully different. In the passage just preceding our Matthew reading, Jesus tells about the difference between John the Baptist and the powerful people John upbraided, who refused repentance: “Father, you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants, for such was your gracious will…I am gentle and humble in heart: my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus suggests a big difference between the religion of the many, & faith in the simple things.
Religion is the human group endeavor to make faith both memorable and manageable. On the other hand, faith will have none of it, is always testing religion’s boundaries. Religion wants to make molds out of which it can reproduce faithful people; religion murders faith, but the irony is the two are such as to require one another. (This definition works with any institution, eg, government and justice, marriage and love, schools and truth, hospitals and health, etc, etc.)
Religion means “to re-connect us to God”. Church often interprets its role in re-linking people to God as providing forms, organization, new programs, challenges, oaths of loyalty to get adherents to believe and act the right way.
Faith is something else entirely. Trust is the result, the product of a process of growing faith. The Letter to the Hebrews defines faith- “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Trust comes from living in faith, without proof.
Francis of Assisi exemplifies simple faith. His life demonstrated his complete trust in God’s generous Spirit. He grew up the son of a prosperous merchant. Various encounters with beggars and lepers pricked the young man’s conscience. He decided to embrace a life devoted to poverty and serving the poor. The Pope confirmed the simple Rule of Order of Friars Minor, a name Francis chose to emphasize being among the “least” of God’s servants. The order grew rapidly over all Europe. Five years before his death, Francis had lost control of his order because his ideal of strict and absolute poverty was found too difficult. Francis’s last years were spent in much suffering of body and spirit, but his unconquerable joy never failed. [Above adapted from Holy Women, Holy Men, p. 622]
The Galatians reading includes Paul’s provocative statement: “I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body.” These are thought to be scars from Paul’s sufferings and beatings as Christ’s missionary, like the brand marks of a slave. Not long before his death during a spiritual retreat, Francis received the marks of the Lord’s wounds, the stigmata, in his own hands and feet and side. Strangely enough, that day was Holy Cross Day, Sept. 14, 1226, just two and a half weeks before his death. Francis was canonized just two years later, and Pope Gregory the 9th began the erection of the great basilica in Assisi where Francis is buried. [Above adapted from Holy Women, Holy Men, p. 622] Had he still been alive, he’d have been horrified and grieved at that basilica’s creation.
It is critical for you and me to recognize the difference between religion and faith- and to recognize that being faithful is all that’s required. Being faithful is all God asks of us. Being faithful requires us to yield ourselves to the encounters we have with God. Those encounters may come through the established forms of our faith-group, our religion. God-encounters may come from tragedies that help us to fall into God’s loving arms, finding God loves us. God-encounters may come through friends who live in such ways that they inspire us to learn the sources of their faith. God-encounters often lead us to living from our best selves, while accepting our failings, shortcomings.
Being faithful in small ways leads us to be faithful in larger ways. Faith can become the bedrock of our days, giving ourselves to God, caring for our family, our friends, our colleagues at work. Caring even for our enemies, with awareness that they too are God’s own. Practicing prayerful listening and responding to God becomes a normal pattern in those being faithful to God. People being faithful intend more and more, as God grows in them, to be Jesus to those around them, as much as it is possible. A wise man I sought out years ago to help me in praying said, “George, long-term practice of prayer and reflection with God always makes the pray-er yearn for God’s justice. Pray-ers always end up desiring God’s love to inhabit the whole earth.”
Faith yields trust, the fruit of balanced living, oriented to God. Faith only rarely generates by red-faced men yelling at us to “get it right, get it right, for once!”
I want to offer you a thoughtful prayer that may assist in being faithful, becoming trusting of God. It was created in honor of Francis: A Franciscan Blessing
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. Amen