Today, as much of the world knows, is the Feast of St. Francis, il poverello, the little poor man of Assisi. Francis died October 4, 1226 and so this day is a commemoration and celebration of his transition into the afterlife. Francis is generally considered the most beloved of all saints. Nearly 800 years since his death, he is revered worldwide and dear to Christians and non-Christians alike. Why is this? Why has Francis who was a Catholic Christian who deferred to the authority and guidance of the Pope, been able to transcend religious affiliation and be embraced by so many?

I suspect, like many great religious figures of modern times — Mahatma Gandhi (Hindu), Martin Luther King, Jr. (Baptist Christian), Thomas Merton (Catholic Christian), the Dalai Lama (Buddhist), Thich Nhat Hanh (Buddhist), and Amma Mātā Amṛtānandamayī Devī (Hindu) — Francis was able to drop down and through the portal of his own religious tradition to the deepest truths that belong to no one single religious tradition or spiritual path but ones for which we all yearn: fertile silence, real community, abiding contentment, intimacy with the Divine, a natural inclination for gratefulness, deep sympathy for all things, all people, all creatures great and small, radical freedom, no holds barred joy, hope and radical trust, and the transposition of love into the context of his or her time and place.

Francis turned his back on the values and plans of his father and traded in the dream peddled, celebrated, and rewarded by the dominant culture for the gospel of Christ. In so doing, he made the Christ-life credible and the spiritual life present and potent. But not just that. In his chosen life of downward mobility, in and through the paradox of his radical simplicity, solidarity with the most vulnerable and devalued, sacred kinship with all creation, awareness of the blessed tension of death and life, and a vibrancy rooted in the gratefulness and sheer joy of the “quotidian mysteries” of daily life, he became a living sacrament of the human person fully alive. Francis is a symbol of the human person remade by relearning his own belovedness and by encountering the Divine Lover from whom his loveliness comes.

Francis is not someone to whom people were drawn only after he died and the hagiographical legends grew hyperbolic or quaint as a backyard birdbath. People of his time were drawn to him as well, even while others thought he was a bit “touched” after returning ill from the war. And of course, he was touched, as are all holy fools and jugglers of God, as are all mad men and women inebriated with Divine gratuitousness and love of life. Touched by the lavishness of God’s love, the extravagance of creation, and the inherent beauty of each and every human person, Francis had the rare capacity and generosity of spirit to touch others in the most secret and sacred orphaned place of their heart. Those who joined his band of brothers, his “festival of friends” including Clare, and those broken and bruised individuals he welcomed into the unfinished circle of God’s tender embrace, had returned to them, like the sow in Galway Kinnell’s poem, their divinely-given loveliness and their indigenous capacity to flower from within as a blessing,

Saint Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

This holy work of retelling a thing its loveliness “in words and in touch” is no warm-fuzzy pablum, no one time service project, but rather the conscious, ongoing, incarnated expression of the gospel of Christ. Sometimes it is difficult to offer and receive self-blessing unless there is someone there to help us remember, unless there is some proxy of the Divine to mirror to us our loveliness.

Whether we are helping a pig remember “the loveliness of sow,“ or reteaching the awkward, self-conscious teenager, the successful but spiritually empty businesswoman, or the isolated widower of the loveliness of human and of who they are in God, it is our vocation, pleasure, and mutual responsibility to support one another discover the inner permission and courage to flower from within. To flower! Flower!