Galatians 6:14-18
Psalm 16:1-11
Matthew 11:25-30

"The Wounds that Bind"

What child does not look out upon the world and see a beauty of harmony? Long before dwarfs and forest animals reveled and danced with a princess to melodious accompaniment, long before Disney or Beatrix Potter or ancient fables, children looked out on the world and instinctively saw beauty and friendship. I remember as a boy rescuing ants from the cold and putting them in my bed anticipating that my little friends would sleep beside me just as surely as they had dug in the dirt beside me earlier that same day.

We might be certain that St. Francis viewed a world through just this lens seeing the exchange of decent affections within the frame of well-ordered seasons and beneath the dependable motions of the stars. Yet, as Francis grew older, the heady brew of testosterone and epinephrine, which propels every boy into manhood and grows hair on his chest, sent him dashing off lustily to knightly deeds and glorious battles. And here his dreams would be shattered. For instead of colorful banners and glittering armor, he surveyed fields heaped with his friends' bodies, their wordless mouths gaping and their blood flooding the soil. And he took his first steps toward seeing the world as an adult sees it. Far from being a place of amity and infinite goodness, the natural order is a food chain. Plant strives to choke plant with the fiercest chokers stamping out all rivals. The ants nearby overcome geckoes and toads spitting acid at them. And the struggle amongst mammals, our nearer relatives, bring home the truth of our world more vividly. As Jeremiah (my partner in daily labors) and I sorted through bones in the jungle boundaries of the Hermitage, examining femurs and ulnas not so unlike our own, we agreed that it was a pig-eat-pig world. Even the gentle life of the Hermitage has been bumped and bruised by the ferocity of the human lifeworld surrounding it, with neighbors reminding us that Polynesian history, and Hawaii's in particular, has always been a warrior culture.

The biblical view is precisely that the brokenness of the human lifeworld and the foodchain ferocity of nature are inextricably interwoven. As I lay in bed last night pondering the life of St. Francis, this was the theme that was on my mind. And I had no idea as I fell asleep that the Anglican Office lectionary would take up these very strands the next morning:

Is the child wrong then to see beauty in the Creation and a harmony among all leaving creatures? Is this a complete and thorough-going mirage? No. For what that child sees in the purity of his heart are the Vestiges of Paradise, the beauty of Eden that continues to shimmer many thousands of years later in every leaf, in the flash of every colorful wing, in the ineffable shades of aqua and blue along the Hawaiian shoreline, and in sunsets of purples and oranges and magentas lighting up the mountains and caverns of cloudlike which depict of Heaven nearly every day. In his or her racial memory, reaching back to the beginnings of time, every child that was ever born sees Eden and all that Eden means: the lion laying down with the lamb, the harmless harmony between every twig, flower, stone, and living creature.

But wait a minute! Was the foodchain existence that we call nature completely absent from Eden? Why, yes. Of course it was. For Eden was the place of perfect friendship and communion with the One Who alone if pure Being and Creation, the abundant source and provider of life supplying every need, animating every pulsing heart. The foodchain characterizes the life divorced from God. When we contemplate murder, adultery, stealing, and covetousness, we see that they are rooted in survival and fierce competition amidst scarcity. It goes without saying that the foodchain around us is governed by the same flinty laws. It is the separation from God, Whose other name is Providence (or Provide-ence), which inaugurated all foodchains.

In his ill-fated military campaigns, St. Francis was harshly immersed in foodchain existence and saw the world through new eyes. War was merely a amplified and particularly brilliant instance of more general principles. For every wealthy merchant like his father, there were hundreds of people in hard servitude eking out a wretched existence on bare-subsistence wages. For every family feasting there were hundreds who begged in the cold. For every city state that prospered there were dozens who suffered through economic hard times. And He rejected the food chain despising the world on account of it, as our Collect at the Mass reminded us a few minutes ago. He rejected foodchain-life and began living Gospel-life, which are the sweet dictates of Eden. He insisted on a harmony among all things, befriending the wolf of Gubbio, offering amity to armed robbers, and defying the cold world with the warmth of Eden, which shone in his heart. Soon others would join him wishing to draw the same pure air of paradise, seeking that same friendship with our loving God, and enjoying the decent affection among people that only God can accomplish in us. In the space and dimension of their individual lives they had accomplished what the patrons of their chapel, St. Mary and the Angels, had presaged and promised: a return to Eden.

Yet, as the human creature is an immortal soul lashed to a dying animal (to borrow Yeats' language), the brokenness of the world continued on its wild career on every side of their joyful days and holy nights. It was enough at first that such did not distract them from their good purposes. They continued in their lives of vibrant faith with many, many people seeking them out, spurning the local cathedral in favor of their tiny chapel, wishing to draw life from their converted hearts, seeking their prayers, which people instinctively knew would be heard loudly and clearly in Heaven. And the Eden-world that St. Francis built spread rapidly, a world that was recognizable everywhere and exciting to anyone who had ever read or heard the Gospels. And he might have, at this point, simply built a wall around his community just as they had rebuilt the walls of the Chapel of St. Mary and the Angels. And why not? This would only be to follow the example of other religious congregations retreating into an idyllic world with their many admirers supporting them. But this was not to be his way.

Seeing the brokenness around them, he determined that his friars go out into that world serving and loving whomever they met as the Lord Jesus had. And they would take nothing for their journey, "neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, nor money, neither two coats a piece." They would offer only their hearts, and this would be the way they would heal: to suffer with the suffering, to starve with the starving, to expose themselves to the cold with the homeless, and to be despised with the ones whom the world deems despicable. Meantime, upon Francis own person would be traced the wounds of Christ. Twelve hundred years after His death, the Lord dwelt in Francis so perfectly that the little, poor man of Assisi would bear the Lord's wounds with apertures of blood opening in his hands, his feet, and upon his side. No previous instance of this had ever happened in human history. And to the present day, the only men who have borne the stigmata are Franciscans: St. Francis and Padre St. Pio.

Lashing together the interior life of Eden with the inexhorable, cruel engine of the food chain, the leather strips of St. Francis' hide would be torn and split. Yet, upon his stigmata, he would found the greatest spiritual movement in the history of Christendom. As has been said many times, he would touch more lives than anyone else in history, save the precious life of our Lord, which St. Francis sought to wear as his own earthly garment.

He calls us to follow him: to embrace hatred offering only love; to be injured while pardoning the one who has done injury; to hear doubt yet inspiring with faith; to bear the weight of the despairing, all the while kindling hope; to live midst darkness being a light; to listen to sadness with a joyful heart. To console, to understand, and to love -- these will surely bind the wounds of the brokenhearted. And the wounds of St. Francis, we may be sure, will bind us -- will bind us to him, our Founder; to each other; and to the Lord Whom he loved with all his heart, soul, and mind. Amen.