A GLORIOUS FLOWER FESTIVAL TO CELEBRATE THE EIGHTH CENTENARY OF THE FRANCISCAN ORDER
Several hundred people enjoyed the weekend of 9th/10th May at the Flower Festival in our International Franciscan Study Centre at Canterbury, contemplating the beautiful displays which told the story of St Francis's life. Home baked refreshments went down well, and many people found out more about both the Study Centre and our Province by watching the new DVD produced by the Province. The event was a great success and even managed to raise money to help students from the developing world attend courses at the FISC, and support activities for current students.
What follows will allow you also to share this experience in some way.
FRANCIS OF ASSISI- A Life of Conversion in Flowers
We are wary of those who claim to have changed, but we should be open to the possibility of change in others. For too often we hamper the conversion of others by not wanting to believe that change is possible, we don't allow them to emerge from the boxes we have put them in and the categories to which we have assigned them. People emerging from prison so often find it hard to go straight because the world will not give them a chance to prove themselves and, driven to despair by the cynicism of a world that rejects them, they return to the world they knew before prison and reconnect with those who are content to encourage them in crime.
So, in order to counter our cynicism with a realistic understanding of the possibility of change, it is important for us to listen to stories of conversion so that we can recognise its characteristics and its motivation.
On the 10th May 2009 in the flower display that celebrated the life of St. Francis of Assisi, we journeyed through the story of the conversion of a remarkable man.
Battle of Collestrada
Francis was a man who as a youth sold cloth for profit and dreamt of glory as a knight. He went to war for his city Assisi against their enemies in Perugia.
He was stricken by what we might call post-traumatic stress disorder after the battle of Collestrada proved to be, not the glory filled field of romantic legend, but the bitter, ugly, gruesome carnage that war truly is.
He sought out a meaning in his life that could not come from the common platitudes that so often appease us in our search for meaning.
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Christ Speaks to Francis from the San Damiano Crucifix
Francis gradually found his life centring on one reality – that Jesus Christ had saved him and was calling him to help save others by rebuilding the church.
Not just the physical Church but the Church of men and women whose hearts had grown cold and who had forgotten that the key to the gospel is to love one's neighbour.
Francis Kisses the Leper
Francis realised that love needs to be not just words or mere talk but something real and active.
So when he met a leper on the plains outside Assisi, he greeted him not as an outcast who was banished from polite society, but as a brother in need of his love and care.
The reaction of the leper isn't known but it would not surprise me if he disappeared quickly from sight because he was afraid of the warmth of Francis' embrace and feared that it might just be a joke or the reaction of a madman who could easily turn and abuse him.
For the leper would have found his kiss so strange as to have been unsettling.
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Approval of the Way of Life in 1209
Francis persisted and others came to see that putting Christ at the Centre of ones life and giving up everything to follow him was not such a strange existence – but was indeed the life to which all are called in one way or another.
They came to him and when they had reached the number of twelve, he thought it was time to gain the approval of the Pope so that he could spread this gospel way of life throughout Christendom.
The Lord Pope agreed for he could see the power of even a small number of men dedicated to following Christ with all that they had and all that they were.
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Clare Joins Francis and his Brothers
Not just men, for the Lady Clare, a beautiful aristocrat, joined herself to the group and began the life of the Clares that gives a female inspiration to the Franciscan movement.
Francis Preaches to the Birds
The Pope gave the friars the call to preach penance – to call their fellow human beings to conversion and Francis and the early friars carried out this call with enthusiasm.
With enthusiasm, but not always with success, for when they were near Rome one day and sought to preach, they could find no-one who had the time to listen.
So Francis turned aside to the flock of birds of all kinds by the roadside and preached to them – and such was their attentiveness that it melted the stubborn hearts that had refused to listen and the people came to hear the message that had enchanted the birds.
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Francis Encounters the Sultan
Francis reached out not only to those who were familiar but also to the stranger – and so, when he learned that the Christians were fighting Muslims in the Holy Land, he determined to go and speak with the Muslim leader and try to draw him to the joy of the gospel that had transformed his own life.
Sadly the Sultan remained unmoved but Francis learned that the preaching of the gospel has no boundaries of class or race or culture.
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Francis Builds the First Crib
Not all could hear the word and be transformed, for many an image was needed, and so Francis built a crib at Christmas at Greccio so that all could see and feel the reality of the life that the Lord Jesus Christ, who came among us as a vulnerable baby, had lived in his first hours of life on earth.
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Francis Receives the Stigmata
Two years before the end of a life lived in continual search for the one who had called him out of his ruin and isolation, Francis was granted a vision of an angel who answered his prayers to know the love and the pain that Christ had felt, by imprinting on his body the sacred marks of the crucifixion.
From then on he identified with the Lord who he had loved so much and served so faithfully, not only in mind and soul, but in body as well.
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The Death of Francis
At his death Francis asked to be laid naked on the naked earth – poor to the last – for what need has a man of riches if he possesses that greatest of wealth, the Lord Jesus Christ?
He shared with his brothers one last breaking of bread – calling to mind the bread that Jesus broke with his disciples in the hours before his death.
And on the evening of the 3rd October 1226 Francis passed to his eternal reward – aged just 44.
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Our Conversion
What a remarkable story of a self-absorbed young dilettante who learned to be the most selfless of men and gave up his very health and strength for the one he loved, and loved to the end those beloved of his lord.
When we hear of the conversion of Francis, we notice that there was one central theme: the person whose passion and death we celebrate each time we come to the Eucharist.
For Francis encountered the living Christ and could not live again the way he had lived before.
No wonder of it – for the gospel tells us that this Christ is the true vine and we are called to cleave to the vine whose branches we must be if we wish to bear fruit.
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- Visitors are met with a cheery greeting
- and with home-baked refreshments
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To return to the reports of all the celebrations of the Jubilee Year 2009-2010 in Britain click here
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