The green St Francis
FRANCIS OF ASSISI: CALL TO FREEDOM, by Christopher Neville OFM. Self-published. 2009. 88pp.
Reviewed by Michael Shackleton
The need to preserve our planet through ecological awareness and action is something that we are getting well aware of. Even popes and presidents encourage it, and the Green Peace movement is no longer seen as simply on the lunatic fringe.
As a Franciscan, Christopher Neville sharply reminds us that it was St Francis who was perhaps the first to understand the intimately close relationship between humanity and the rest of creation.
Not content with praising God for his creatures, St Francis “fraternised” with them all, calling them his sisters and brothers. In his lovely “Canticle of the Sun”, for example, he praises God for Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Earth and Sister Death. He could not give due worship to God without his sense of belonging to creation and nature.
The author introduces the concept of a Franciscan eco-spirituality that he believes is appropriate for our postmodern times. People everywhere are getting to appreciate how much they are interconnected with the material cosmos. They are, he writes, becoming aware that they belong, from the cells of their bodies to the finest creations of their minds, to an intricate, beautiful and constantly changing cosmos. They perceive matter, life and consciousness as forming one single process of evolution. What they need now is to see that God is at the heart of this evolutionary process, empowering it from within.
Franciscan eco-spirituality is the profound, even mystic, realisation that the earth’s climate change, air pollution and even secularisation cannot be reversed for the better without our first taking a step into our hearts to stop the pollution in our interior selves. It seeks to restore our minds and wills to the sense of the sacred, the sense that God’s presence cannot be separated from his creation.
This short treatise begins with a potted life of St Francis and his order, and from it the author draws out what he needs in order to explain clearly and methodically how the saint’s Christocentric and mystical experience of the world of nature could be a remedy in the present era of consumerism and materialism.
• The book is available from The Catholic Bookshop, Cape Town, at the selling price of R100.
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