Novena of Saint Francis of Assisi Day Two

Going out to the margins 

 In The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis laid out his vision of our call to be disciples-missionaries. This means a church that “goes out” even to the peripheries, to the margins. In paragraph 20, he wrote:

In our day Jesus’ command to “go and make disciples” echoes in the changing scenarios and ever new challenges to the Church’s mission of evangelization, and all of us are called to take part in this new missionary “going forth”. Each Christian and every community must discern the path that the Lord points out, but all of us are asked to obey his call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the “peripheries” in need of the light of the Gospel.

Saint Francis of Assisi went out to the peripheries in many ways, going beyond his comfort zone.

Francis enjoyed a comfortable existence as a young man. His father was a fairly prosperous merchant in fine cloth. He enjoyed a social life with other young people of his social class.

But after his experience as a prisoner of war something happened. My guess he may have been somewhat fastidious. He tried to avoid any encounters with lepers, but one day, moved by the Spirit, he embraced a leper. That was for him a moment of real conversion – what appalled him became a source of joy and peace. As he wrote in his testament:

The Lord granted me, Brother Francis, to begin to do penance in this way: While I was in sin, it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them and I had mercy upon them. And when I left them that which seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body

He then began to attend the lepers – not as one who comes in, does a good work, and then leaves. He began to accompany them and to be with them. Soon after, reflecting on the Gospels and the call of the Lord in his life, Francis embraced holy poverty and mingled with the marginalized. I am sure that he shared the smell of the sheep, that Pope Francis has recommended.

For Saint Francis being poor and being with the poor were central elements of his calling. It wasn’t easy at first, but he embraced it and shows us the way to embrace the poor and marginalized not as objects of charity, but as our sisters and brothers.

As Pope Francis said in Havana Cuba, in 2015:

Service always looks to their faces [the faces of the most vulnerable], touches their flesh, senses their closeness and even, in some cases, ‘suffers’ that closeness and tries to help them. Service is never ideological, for we do not serve ideas, we serve people.

Saint Francis gives us an example of seeing the face of Christ in the face of the poor. Recalling his life and the admonitions of Pope Francis we can begin to bridge the gap between peoples and live as witnesses of the Reign of God, of the life filled with love and joy. As Pope Francis noted in The Joy of the Gospel:

We achieve fulfillment when we break down walls and our hearts are filled with faces and names!

We know the poor - by name.

Sculpture outside San Damiano, Assisi