Brother Sun, Sister Moon: A Tribute to St. Francis of Assisi

Watching a child at play is fun. Children live in their own little world and to them it is serious business, and in their minds it all makes sense. We smile at them. We can look at it from a distance, see the joy and adventure that flows with such spontaneity from a child’s imagination, but we can no longer enter into that world. It is lost to us forever. We were once there but somewhere along life’s path have lost the key to the door that unlocks that world for us. We might be tempted to call the child’s world a world of make-believe. But that would be a mistake. It is make-believe to us who have found another world which we never dare to call make-believe. That child’s world is no more fantasy to the child than our unhealthy world is to ourselves. ~ Joseph Girzone, foreward to Saint Francis of Assisi

With this paragraph, we enter into the world of St. Francis. It is as if we have entered a child’s world; a world of make-believe… he saw things that none of us would have seen. He preached to animals as if they could understand every word he said. His thoughts were simple, even child-like – a prime example of the child-like faith that Jesus talked about. Who would use terms like ‘Brother Sun’ and ‘Sister Moon’ to refer to the heavenly bodies? Who, when about to have his eyeballs burnt out with red-hot iron, would say, “Brother Fire, God made you beautiful and strong and useful; I pray you be courteous with me.” Who would attempt to end the Crusades by speaking to the Muslims and trying to convert the Saracen Sultan? Who would sell off his father’s belongings to donate to the rebuilding of a church? Who would intercede with the Emperor on behalf of birds?

His life was a collage of the weird and ridiculous. Many of us will find it difficult to understand such a character. Who in his right mind would dance around half-naked in the snow? Which son of a middle class merchant would give up his riches and clothing to live life as a beggar? Which beggar will only wear the worst clothes that he could find, eat the worst food that people would offer, and stay in the worst place he could get? Which person would teach another to run after a thief who has stolen his shoes so that he could give the thief his socks as well? Who would go around searching for a martyr’s death so that he could fully emulate his Lord Jesus Christ? How can we explain why a man who loved a woman so much would help her to run away from her parents not to become his wife, but so that she could fulfill her dreams of becoming a nun? Most of us would look at him as a crazy lunatic. Only lunatics would do such things… lunatics… or lovers…

We do not see anything wrong with men who would willingly gather flowers in the rain for the woman of their dreams. We are accustomed to seeing knights in their shining armor, prepared to die for the princesses they would rescue. We regard young men who would give up everything for their beautiful maidens as noble. For it is when we start to look at St. Francis in this light, according to G. K. Chesterton in his book Saint Francis of Assisi, that we come to truly understand him. He was a man in love… not with any fair maiden; he was a man in love with God. No doubt he was child-like, maybe even childish, but St. Francis was a Troubadour.

Even in the final moments of his life, he requested that his friends carried him off his already rugged bed so that he could die naked on the bare, hard ground – to prove that he was nothing and had nothing. But G. K. Chesterton wrote beautifully about St. Francis’ death: the stars which passed above that gaunt and wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once, in all their shining cycles around the world of laboring humanity, looked down upon a happy man…

We think of him as living in his own innocent world of childish make-believe, but indeed –St. Francis died a happy man… and we all long for it…