St. Francis: A Man for Our Times

I know but little about St. Francis of Assisi (though, of course, I could easily get to know a great deal more by the mere click of a few buttons on my phone). But what I do know about him is enough for me to regard him with love and respect—not just as a figure from the distant past but as someone whose spiritual vision is of immense contemporary relevance, for our times today.

Among the few things I know about St. Francis are: that he was a man of God; that he loved animals and delighted in Nature (as is evident in his well-known ‘The Canticle of the Creatures’); and that he strove to build bridges between people of different persuasions even at the height of conflict between them, as exemplified by his visit to the Sultan of Egypt while the Crusades were underway. These three aspects of St. Francis suffice for me to hold him in esteem: he, a man of God with a universal spiritual vision that embraced all of Creation, going beyond boundaries of religion, ethnicity, political affiliation, and even species!

This is precisely the cosmic vision that we need to move towards in our present globalised age, and in this respect, St. Francis can truly be considered to be a beacon for our own times. Today, we need to a deepening and a widening of a vision that is truly universal; that seeks to promote peaceful relations and mutual understanding and goodwill between people from different backgrounds (be their differences in terms of religious belief, ideology, geographical location, culture, class, political affiliation, ethnicity or any other such factor); that is concerned not just with human wellbeing but with the wellbeing of all creatures (including animals, birds, aquatic beings, plants, trees and the rest of Nature); that goes beyond Earth-centrism to awe-filled appreciation of the  vastness of the infinite Universe; and that is rooted in awareness of, faith in, love for, and devotion to the One Creator of the entire Creation.

It is a cosmic spiritual vision that we need to cultivate and deepen, and the three basic facts that I know about St. Francis mentioned above can be seen as providing, in a sense, the basic ingredients of this vision. And so, one can say that St. Francis is a man whose message, as embodied in the life he lived, is of immense practical relevance for us, today, centuries after his passing, just as it was in his own times.