Today is St Francis Day and the last day of the Season of Creation. A simple reflection for your day — take some time and remember an extraordinary Christian, a humble follower who changed the world. His vision and work seems more relevant and beautiful than ever.
We say that the world that surrounds us is not an object of exploitation,
unbridled use and unlimited ambition.
Nor can we claim that nature is a mere “setting” in which we develop our lives and our projects. For “we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it,” and thus “we [do] not look at the world from without but from within.”
— Pope Francis, October 4, 2023
When I was a college student in Santa Barbara in the late 1970s, a local theater periodically offered up an odd double-feature: My Fair Lady (1964) and Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), the Lerner and Loewe award-winning musical about Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle paired with Franco Zeffirelli’s lush, poetic meditation on saints Francis and Clare.
The two-for-the-price of one show was, not unexpectedly, popular with students. For less than $10, you could have a great date (including Cokes and popcorn). Nearly everyone I knew had gone at least once — I think I saw the twin bill three times!
Among my friends, it became kind of a sport to try and figure out what point the theater owners were trying to make with this weird twofer. We came up with all sorts of geeky philosophical and theological analyses in the process. “It is quite the contrast,” pronounced a religion major, “a rags-to-riches tale and a riches-to-rags story.”
Not a bad summary — and one that has stayed with me ever since. Both were stories about money, social status, and the search for identity and meaning in the world.
Whatever happened to Eliza Doolittle, the heroine who was lifted from a life of poverty to a genteel upper-class existence, after the final line of My Fair Lady when Henry Higgins orders her to fetch his slippers, we don’t know. Truth is, I adored My Fair Lady but its ambiguous ending always worried me. The moral of the tale? Misogyny will always be with you?
The Francis film, about a wealthy young man who, 800 years ago, abandoned riches to pursue “holy poverty,” ends with far more clarity, with one reviewer saying of it: “The movie’s humane take on brotherly love, so generous that it even forgives the Catholic Church, ends with the meeting of Pope Innocent III (Alec Guinness) and Francesco (Graham Faulkner), wherein the Pope blesses Francesco and supplicates himself before him.” The final image is of Francis, with bare feet, walking down a hill toward an open field, singing his canticle Brother Sun, Sister Moon.
At 19, I sat in the theater and wept. No ambiguity there. The film drew me into a vision — an experience, really — of the interconnected world and St. Francis’ passionate obsessions: poverty, humility, and creaturely care. It has spiritually haunted me ever since.
On this day celebrating his memory, the saint’s namesake Pope Francis released an apostolic exhortation, “Laudate Deum.” The letter is a brief follow-up to the Pope’s 2015 encyclical on the environment. With urgency, he identifies a different kind of “obsession” underneath our current crisis — “To increase human power beyond anything imaginable, before which nonhuman reality is a mere resource at its disposal. Everything that exists ceases to be a gift for which we should be thankful, esteem and cherish, and instead becomes a slave, prey to any whim of the human mind and its capacities.”
The papal exhortation reminds the world that St. Francis’ vision was opposite the world we now have — a planet suffering under the weight of greed, hubris, and abuse, bearing physical and ecological scars from them. We don’t attend to the web of creation in which we live; we continue to seek to make it in our image, to profit from its destruction. Instead of dancing with delight across Earth’s fields, we find ourselves skating on thin ice.
“We need,” declares Pope Francis, “to rethink among other things the question of human power, its meaning and its limits.”
Yes, we do.
And so, on this St. Francis day, I find myself wondering again about that odd twin billing at the theater. That quirky double-feature was, ultimately, about power. One film, a story of a strong man who used his power to create and control those around him; and the other, a story of a humble man who surrendered his power to be in community with Jesus, the poor, and all creatures. It wasn’t hard to figure out which one had the happy ending.
Rags-to-riches; riches-to-rags? One made me uncomfortable, oddly puzzled, and a little angry; the other made me sob, tears still unforgotten.
The first shall be last and the last first. Blessed are the poor. Behold the lilies of the field.
Happy St. Francis Day.
The creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise,
because the risen One is mysteriously holding them
to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end.
The very flowers of the field and the birds which his human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence.
If the universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely….there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face.
The world sings of an infinite Love: how can we fail to care for it?
— Pope Francis
INSPIRATION
Would I might wake St. Francis in you all,
Brother of birds and trees, God’s Troubadour,
Blinded with weeping for the sad and poor;
Our wealth undone, all strict Franciscan men,
Come, let us chant the canticle again
Of mother earth and the enduring sun.
God make each soul the lonely leper’s slave;
God make us saints, and brave.
— Vachel Lindsey
TODAY IS THE FINAL DAY:
The Cottage is celebrating turning leaves and sweater weather with an autumn equinox surprise subscription offer: THE PUMPKIN SPICE SPECIAL!
New subscribers (and those upgrading from free to paid) receive an extra 10% off a regular yearly subscription (which is already a really good deal). You can use the extra cash to put toward a Pumpkin Spice Latte (everybody’s favorite drink to hate). This offer ends at midnight (eastern) OCTOBER 4 — St. Francis Day.
JUST FOR FUN
Diana, you bailed me out this morning. I got a call this morning at 6:15 am from our rector--he had a miserable cold/flu and asked me, a retired deacon, to take the two services this morning--we were celebrating St. Francis. Knowing there was no time to cobble together a sermon, he suggested the snippet on Francis' life in Lesser Feasts--but I remembered your Professor Higgins/St. Francis piece from last Wednesday. I read it at each service--it was very well received. So THANK YOU for all you do and are. Keep up the important work you do!
Thank you for your beautiful insights into this two contrasting movies.