Francis of Assisi and Sister Death

 

A few years ago I was asked to give a reflection at the celebration of St. Francis’ transitus into eternal life. As I reflected on what I wanted to say, I recalled Francis’ line in the Canticle of the Creatures in which he says,

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,
From whose embrace no mortal can escape.
How dreadful for those who die in sin!
How lovely for those found in Your Most Holy Will.
The second death can do them no harm.
Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks,
And serve him with great humility.

Whenever I read this portion of the Canticle, I was less then convinced that sister death was in fact my sister. I related to the congregation how I had experienced my mother’s death, how angry at God I was that she was taken from us. A few days after she died, I went to my favorite place at the lake near where I grew up. I railed against God, cried, and just felt so empty.

A told the congregation how I could not see death as a positive, because it was so ugly in my experience. I found death to be a violent reality that hides around the corners of our lives. While we don’t always have it in our immediate vision, it is always there in some form or fashion. It manifests in the many conflicts we experience, bringing about a death to relationships. It lurks in the shadows of our hopes and vanities, bringing a temporality to our dreams and our fantasies. All our strivings – to love, to reconcile, to forgive, to risk, to start again – all fall in the end to the violence of death.

It is the violence of death that has not only haunted humanity for millennia but has been the foundation of social and cultural structures meant to keep the specter of violent death at bay. Rules and regulations, prohibitions, taboos, conventions, and mores have grown from the seeds of human violence. Archaic religion originates from this violence. From this blossomed a vision of the divine that participated in this violence. In time death became a doorway to judgment. The gods would balance the acts and intentions of our lives, and if found wanting, we would find ourselves condemned for all eternity, and in some belief systems, tortured. Death truly became something to fear, God truly someone to fear.

But Rene Girard, and those who have been illuminated by his insights, have come to see that this god of fear and retribution is in fact one of human construction. It is the projection of our own vengefulness onto a divine absolute. But the God of Jesus Christ is not this god. Jesus came to reveal to the world a God of love, WHO IS LOVE, who seeks to reconcile us through love, who welcomes us with open arms into his paradisal graced infused compassion. Once I began to see this, I began to see that death has indeed lost its sting, its power to terrify, its violence. But, like Francis who, being a man of his religious culture, there remains fragments of the violent deity of human construction in the recesses of my emotional makeup. The god of vengeance I learned to imagine as a child awakens in those moments when I have done or thought something that induces guilt. The remenents of this god makes its appearance at times in the life and writings of Francis as seen in this line of the canticle: 

How lovely for those found in Your Most Holy Will.
The second death can do them no harm.

The god of vengeance, of retribution, infiltrates aspects of his vision. Despite this, his intuition that the God of love awaited the beloved gave him the assurance that death was not the final act of a life filled with threats of violence and vengeance. Love is the end and the beginning. Death, our sister, beckons us to the cosmic courts of love.