The congregation I attend, like many others in North America, I imagine, did it up well. This past St. Francis Sunday, or what I took to be that Sunday, we sang many of the Church’s great creation hymns robustly and we blessed a bunch of pets enthusiastically. Still, I was thinking: what happened to what might be called the dark side?
I know. I know. You can’t do everything every Sunday. And Francis himself was indeed preoccupied with things like singing with the birds (also, perhaps, taming a wolf!). I imagine that Francis even gave some of those birds personal names, as if they were his pets. So let us have Francis just for himself, at least one day a year, okay? And in his spirit, let us have our joyful blessing of the animals.
Granted, to be sure. On St. Francis Day, you are probably not going to hear about the snow leopards and the snow rabbits high in the white-clad mountains, locked in a bloody struggle, without which neither species will survive. Nor are you going to hear about caustic black holes sucking whole galaxies to their deaths. I suppose, as a matter of liturgical propriety more generally, that it would probably not work for the Church to celebrate a Struggle for Existence Sunday or a Cosmic Death Sunday.
But think about it. Does St. Francis Day really make real sense apart from the other two Sundays that I’ve just postulated? To the point, more generally, does Easter Sunday make real sense apart from Good Friday? Now St. Francis himself knew all about those two great Christian theological themes, not just life, but also death. And St. Francis profoundly identified himself with both.
What does all this teach us, then, if anything, about how to commemorate St. Francis with historic, theological authenticity?
I have an idea. The other day, while I was organizing still more of my own library books in order to give them away, I came across the thin volume by George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant (2004). He’s interested in political debates for the most part, but I think that his simple idea works well for theological discourse, too. You’ve got to frame the discussion, according to Lakoff, and frame it for your own purposes. Otherwise somebody else will do it for you; and you won’t be able to make your point.
Brace yourself, then. I believe that we should frame our narrative of St. Francis and the animals – eschatologically. Claim and celebrate the Francis story as one image of the New Heavens and the New Earth that’s proclaimed in the Book of Revelation, a day when the lamb will lie down with the lion, a day when humans may well sing with the birds in the gardens of the Heavenly Jerusalem, a day when pets will be celebrated even more intensely than they sometimes are today, as the dearest of friends, who have rich lives of their own.
Meanwhile, back here on planet Earth, as we know it today – Earth, this rare if not unique jewel of variegated vitalities and this anguished arena of death and destruction – every October, the faithful may and probably should ponder the “realized eschatology” of St. Francis’ remarkable life and his revelatory death, as he lay prone on the earth itself, which he considered to be his mother, and kept singing his “Canticle of the Creatures” until his last breath.