Today we celebrate one of the most beloved saints in the Western Christian tradition, Francis of Assisi. As is traditional in many parishes, we have marked the feast day by blessing some of the animals who share our lives and remembering as well the wild creatures who are our neighbours. However, there is an important distinction worth making here. Francis is said to have regarded animals and elements of creation as his siblings in life and worship, which is why we bless the animals today, but we would bless them anyway because it is one of the ways in which we pause over something that could otherwise become ordinary to us and prayerfully recognize it as belonging first to God.

Animal blessings are consistent with the much larger practice of blessing things, people, homes, gardens, food, ministries, and objects used in worship. At the Baptism of Christ, we even bless all the waters of the world.  When we bless an animal, we take a moment to acknowledge that this creature is alive because God has given it life, that it belonged to God before we got to know it, and that the relationship we have with it carries responsibilities as well as joy.

And there is considerably more to Francis than his regard for animals. Born in Assisi around 1182 into a prosperous cloth merchant family, Giovanni di Bernardone came to be called Francesco by his father, probably reflecting his fondness for and commercial connections with France. He grew up enjoying the wealth and status that his father’s business provided, including fine clothes and parties, as well as dreams of knighthood and ideals of chivalry. This is important because we sometimes imagine saints arriving in the world as fully formed ascetics who knew exactly who they were going to become. But like all of us, Francis had to discern his path, which involved responding to change when the life he initially imagined could not transpire. Francis still envisioned a military future even after participating in the violent conflict between Assisi and neighbouring Perugia, where he was captured and became seriously ill. As such, his conversion unfolded gradually. It was through continued discovery, relinquishment, and even the difficult work of facing those he had learned to regard as “other” that his spirituality developed into what we know as the Franciscan vision.

In his society, as in much of the medieval world, people with disfiguring conditions were profoundly marginalized, and Francis initially shared the attitudes of his time. The first turning point in his discernment came when he deliberately approached and embraced a person with leprosy and encountered him as another human being rather than as an object that inspired fear and revulsion. Francis subsequently became deeply involved in caring for people who were sick and excluded. One story concerns an ill man who was so distressed that the religious brothers who eventually joined Francis could not tolerate being near him. He insulted them and expressed rage toward God, but Francis responded by asking what the man needed before addressing his behaviour. As it turned out, the man simply wanted to be washed, which is what Francis did. Medieval hagiography embellishes the event by saying that the man was physically healed by Francis’ touch. Yet even if we know that such a physical condition could never be removed without modern-day antibiotics, we recognize that compassion can still have a tremendous effect on a person’s spiritual well-being. Today we also realize that rejection and pain may often underlie behaviours that we find offensive.

Another famous development came while Francis was praying in the dilapidated little church of San Damiano outside Assisi and heard Christ speaking to him from the crucifix, asking him to “rebuild my church.” Francis took this literally and, in order to repair the church, sold some of his father’s possessions, which his father did not appreciate. The conflict between them culminated in one of the most dramatic scenes in Francis’s life, when he appeared naked before the bishop of Assisi to demonstrate his renunciation of all claims to his father’s property. Francis never had a restrained personality, and did things with his whole body, from partying to making gestures such as this. Underneath the drama, however, was a question: What truly belongs to me?

Francis eventually understood the command to “rebuild my church” in a much broader way, and the movement that he established grew quite rapidly beyond one eccentric man wandering around Umbria to a community he called the Lesser Brothers. The name conveys that they did not aspire to become important, powerful, or successful. Alongside Francis stood Clare of Assisi, who embraced a similarly radical life and founded the community of the Poor Clares.

One of the most remarkable episodes in Francis’s life occurred during the Fifth Crusade. Francis travelled to Egypt, where Christian and Muslim armies were at war, and crossed the lines to meet Sultan al-Kamil. Far from our modern understanding of interfaith dialogue, Francis went as a preacher who wanted all people to share faith in Christ. What remains remarkable is that al-Kamil received and heard him, and Francis returned safely to his camp.

As such, a man who had once dreamt of military glory now crossed a battlefield unarmed. The man who had once feared leprosy began to wash people with leprosy. Someone who had grown up amid wealth embraced poverty. Someone accustomed to social status sought fraternity with those beneath its notice. His famous relationship with animals makes a lot of sense when considered within that larger pattern. Stories that accumulated around Francis were obviously shaped by hagiography, including stories of his preaching to birds and making peace between people and a terrifying wolf. Yet these stories belong within the same spiritual transformation whereby Francis was learning over the course of his life how much of the world he could stop treating as “other.”

Near the end of his life, he epitomized this theology in the Canticle of the Creatures (aka Canticle of Brother Sun). [Click here to read the text.] This work is important in literary history and spirituality, as it is among the earliest written in an Italian vernacular rather than Latin.

The Canticle draws upon the biblical tradition of all creation praising God, particularly Ps. 148 [read it here] and the song from the apocryphal section of Daniel associated with the three young people cast by the king of Babylon into the furnace [read it here]. Francis takes this imagery further by calling animate and inanimate elements of creation his siblings. Yet the creatures remain creatures; Francis does not worship them or place them nearer to God than us. His language nevertheless goes much further than our usual appreciation of scenery, gardens, sunsets, or food because he speaks of kinship with the created world. Of course, Francis was neither a medieval Dr. Dolittle nor a twenty-first-century eco-warrior. He had, however, ceased to imagine humanity as standing at the centre of creation with everything else arranged around us according to its usefulness. Animals and elements were creatures before they were commodities, property, or resources. 

We cannot love the Creator while treating creation as though it were disposable or owned by us. But if the movement that characterizes Francis is from possession to letting go, what replaces possession is relationship. The person with leprosy becomes a neighbour, Saint Clare – a sister in faith, and his companions – Lesser Brothers. The Muslim across the battlefield becomes someone with whom he wanted to share the Gospel. The creatures become siblings, including even “Sister Bodily Death.”

Nature is not sentimental. Animals eat each other, and all living creatures die. Forests burn. Bodies become sick. Francis knew that very well. He had experienced imprisonment and serious illness, and toward the end of his life he suffered greatly. His own body was failing: he had chronic ulcerated wounds traditionally viewed as the stigmata, dropsy, malaria, and trachoma, a severe infectious eye disease causing near blindness that he may have contracted during his travels in the East. The physicians of his time could offer little help beyond brutal treatments such as cauterizing his face with a red-hot iron. The reported absence of pain during the procedure suggests previous neurological damage. Taken together with his whole cluster of symptoms, it has contributed to the speculation that Francis may also have suffered from leprosy, perhaps contracted through his ministry.

And still he said Sister Bodily Death. He surrendered his own body to her in the late evening of October 3, 1226, only in his mid-forties, having spent his life learning to let go of possession and control. “Bodily” Sister Death, of course, because Francis believed that relinquishing this body was not the end of life, as the closing section of the Canticle clearly reveals. Nonetheless, it was to be received as part of the family of creation “from whom no man has escape” and as the necessary passage into eternal life with God. Almost eight hundred years later, Francis’ life continues to bear fruit among people he could never have imagined, as we are still speaking his name, telling his stories, singing his words, and learning from his vision.

Which brings us back to the animal blessing we performed this morning: one of those charming things that churches occasionally do, where dogs go crazy with exuberance, cats resent the entire arrangement, and guinea pigs do exactly what they would be doing at home, which is sit in a “hidey” and eat. We bless even the pets who sensibly stayed home, and remember beloved animal friends who have died. It is all allowed to be joyful; yet Francis invites us to turn around the idea that we bring animals into our worship, and remember that our worship always takes place within a creation already praising God. That is, in fact, the vision of Psaln 148: sun, moon, stars, heavens, weather and mountains, trees and animals and human beings together praise their Creator.

How does a guinea pig praise God? How does a tree, a mountain, or water praise God? Perhaps there is one form of praise that every creature offers continually and together: that is, existence itself; particularly existence that retains its integrity with God’s design for it. The bird praises God by being completely bird. The guinea pig, with impressive Franciscan discipline, praises God by remaining a guinea pig. Our own calling is to be completely the kind of beings God made us to be: beings whose every facet of life reflects the image of our Creator in perfect congruence with our own creatureliness. As embodied spiritual beings, we live within creation and depend upon it for air, water, and food. Our bodies are made from all the same elements. We are born, grow, flourish for a time, suffer, depend upon one another, and die; yet our creatureliness neither diminishes nor humiliates the Image of God according to which we are made.

We are surrounded by siblings who are both beautiful and frightening: Sun, Moon, Water, Fire, Earth; predatory animals, marginalized “others,” and strangers. Nothing belongs to us as completely as we imagine, and we belong to one another more deeply than we tend to acknowledge. May we have the grace to move, as Francis did, a little further from possession toward relationship, from fear toward encounter, from control toward kinship. May we learn to recognize this extraordinary, complicated, beautiful creation as the great company of creatures among whom we have been given the privilege of living, loving, serving, and praising God. Amen.

Questions to Consider

1. St. Francis called other creatures his brothers and sisters. By this, of course, he did not mean that humans and animals are the same; but what might change if we intentionally began to think of other creatures as fellow members of creation rather than resources that exist for our use, companionship, or enjoyment?
2. Some animals are loved as pets, while others are used for food, work, research, clothing, or entertainment. Does our responsibility to care for animals apply differently in these situations? Why or why not?
3. What responsibilities come with our intellectual power, even as some animals and many natural phenomena are much more physically powerful than we are?
4. In Genesis, the first task that God gives Adam is to encounter and name the animals. How is knowing the name of another living creature different from simply thinking of it as “an animal” or “a thing”?