It will be Easter on March 31, the anniversary of the resurrection of Jesus, which is the foundational event of Christian belief. After Jesus, his parents and his apostles, the Christian figure arguably best-known to educated Indians is St Francis of Assisi, the Italian mystic and poet. It was he who invented the first-known nativity scene, depicting the birth of Jesus in a manger. He first set it up at Greccio near Assisi around 1220 CE to celebrate Christmas. Most of us in India have seen such tableaux and have found them sweetly similar in spirit to the jhanki or cradle tableaux set up in homes and temples for Sri Krishna’s birthday on Janmashtami. A famous prayer attributed to St Francis has admirers from other faiths for its universal message. It goes:
Lord make me an instrument of your peace/ Where there is hatred let me sow love/ Where there is injury, pardon/ Where there is doubt, faith/ Where there is despair, hope/ Where there is darkness, light/ And where there is sadness, joy.
O divine master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console/ To be understood as to understand/ To be loved as to love/ For it is in giving that we receive/ It is in pardoning that we are pardoned/ And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
He is venerated by different denominations of the Christian church such as the Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans. The present Pope chose to be named after St Francis, who has been declared the patron saint of ecology by the Catholic church because of his love for Nature. He regularly talked to birds and animals; even, apparently, taming a fierce wolf. His ‘Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon’ praises God’s creation.
The life of St Francis reminds us of that of Indian saints who embraced poverty in God’s service. He was born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone to an Italian father and French mother in 1181 in the small town of Assisi in the Umbria province of Italy. He died at about forty-four.
St Francis grew up as a rich and spoiled young man who lived a life full of fun and frolic. But something drastic suddenly happened one day. He was, as usual, selling silk and velvet for his father in the market when a beggar came by asking for alms. The story goes that St Francis left everything and ran after the beggar. When he caught up with him, he gave the beggar all that he had in his pockets. His friends made fun of him and his father was very angry.
St Francis signed up twice as a soldier and even spent a year in captivity, returning to the good life between expeditions. But one day, he had a supernatural vision–we don’t know what–that made him give up the pursuit of pleasure. A friend asked him if he was considering getting married, to which St Francis retorted, “Yes, to a fairer bride than any of you have ever seen,” meaning ‘My Lady Poverty’.
He wandered around to lonely places in the Umbrian countryside after that, seeking direction. He dreamt near a derelict old church that it was asking him to restore it. St Francis sold cloth from his father’s store and gave the priest the money. But the priest refused to take it since it was not honestly obtained. St Francis angrily threw the money on the floor.
He was dragged home and locked up by his father but his mother set him free. His father then filed a case against him, demanding he give up any claims to the father’s wealth. So, St Francis publicly renounced his claims before the Bishop of Assisi and took off his fine clothes. The bishop reportedly gave him a cloak to cover himself with.
St Francis wandered around again in the hills behind Assisi. By and by, he wholly embraced poverty as a lifestyle, wearing a rough woolen robe. He attracted a few followers who spread his message of serving the poor as a service to God. But preaching required permission from the Pope. The Bishop of Assisi obtained an interview for St Francis and he was eventually given permission to officially preach his message. He set up three orders–the Franciscan order, the order of the Poor Clares for women after a young noblewoman named Clare sought to join him as a nun, and an order for the laity now called the Secular Franciscan Order.
In 1219, hoping to convert the Sultan of Egypt, St Francis went there during the Fifth Crusade, where a Crusader army had been besieging the walled city of Damietta for over a year. The Sultan, al Kamil, a nephew of the great ‘Saladin’ or Salahuddin, had succeeded his father as Sultan of Egypt in 1218 and was encamped upstream. Both sides agreed to a month’s ceasefire. It was perhaps during this interlude that St Francis crossed over to the Muslim camp and was brought before the Sultan, staying for a few days. No Arab sources are said to mention this and nobody really knows what happened. But Franciscan friars have apparently maintained a presence in Jerusalem ever since.
St Francis returned to Italy and reorganised his rapidly growing orders, making rules for poverty and service. He died one October evening in 1226, singing Psalm 141 from the Old Testament that goes, ‘I call to you, Lord, come quickly to me/ Hear me when I call to you/ May my prayer be set before you like incense/ May the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice/ Set a guard over my mouth, Lord, keep watch over the door of my lips/ Do not let my heart be drawn to what is evil so that I take part in wicked deeds…’
He was declared a saint in July 1228 by his old friend, Pope Gregory the Ninth, who also built a basilica for him, ensuring St Francis’s long-lasting fame in the tradition of Christ.
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