Francis - Naked without Protection

 Here's the homily delivered at the Feast of St. Francis Celebration at St. Bonaventure University

Every Franciscan has their favorite image, their favorite story, from the life of Francis. Mine comes from the afternoon when, at the age of 25, he is dragged into the village square to confront his father. His father is enraged, sick and tired of his son selling off the family business, giving away his hard earned money to the scum of the earth. He wants his money back. And, Francis is sick and tired of being the poster child for his father’s fashion business, strutting the streets of Assisi like they were the ravenous runways of France. Most of all, he is tired of a culture madly obsessed by greed and violence. Having gone to war, he has seen his friends butchered and left on the bloody floor of the Umbrian Valley.

As the world’s first Millennial, he wants out. He wants more, more than Daddy can pay for and more than his hometown can provide. And so, he strips. In a profound gesture of aspiration, he takes off all his clothes, throws away every trace of fashion, and stands naked before the world, naked with nothing now but the earth and God. He is naked before the naked God.

Francis is going for broke. He wants an intimacy deeper than the hook up culture of his day. He wants a truth beyond the deadly vendettas and polarizing polemics of his times.  All his life, he has played the games and followed the rules of polite snobbery that kept everything and everyone at a safe but unsatisfying distance. He doesn’t want to use women anymore. He doesn’t want to play a religious paddy-cake with God anymore. He wants to live his life, not act out someone else’s dream.

And so, he stands– naked to the world and naked before God. He is stripping not to let go of the world, but to receive it. His poverty is not to experience the scarcity of life, the mere crumbs of existence, but to open himself fully to the abundance of life.

He is standing naked before God and daring God to be absolutely and totally naked before him. He wants God and He dares God to empty God’s self in all God’s fullness into him. Francis becomes empty to receive the fullness of God.

Francis is absolutely going for broke here, because there was no model for what he was doing. Every other saint who had gone naked before him had used protection – monasteries, convents, rules and constitutions, dowries and the precaution that comes from being revered as clergy. They had experienced God but always with a filter, always with a safety net in case something went wrong. Francis wanted none of that. He wanted intensity, and not Nietzsche’s later cheap form of it. He was naked, without protection, before the world, before the sun and moon and stars. Naked before the naked mysteries of creation and God, going for broke.

Francis wanted to know what life felt like without interference. He wanted to know what joy and suffering were like without defenses, existence without the hidden agenda and false premises of other people’s scripts. He wanted life in its raw and naked form, without protection. He would go into the world now without shelter and defense, because he felt safe with God. He had come to know what even bishops and priests had forgotten—that God was good, all good, supremely good, all the time and to everyone.

Brothers and sisters, college is one of those very rare moments in life when we can go for broke. Four years to really stand vulnerable before the mysteries and questions of life.

Let’s not be naïve. We all come here with baggage. We are all the product of our family’s hopes, our culture’s agenda, and our economy’s greed. Business and marketing majors know this. By the time children are three, they can already identify 100 brand logos. Psychology majors know this. By the time children are four, they already feel stress to identify with a particular product. We are programmed to make someone else’s hopes become real and make someone else’s fortunes go higher.

But, college is that absolutely unique, once in a life-time opportunity to stand “exposed” not just before the world, but also before the mystery of God and answer Francis’ two questions:

Who are you, Lord, and who am I?

This university is your time to break through the half-baked theories of the good life that Kim Kardasian and her tribe of clowns and entertainers peddles. It’s our time to question, to muse, to ponder, and to crack open and test every promise of hope and recipe for happiness.

We’ve got to go for broke, whether we’re faculty, students, religious, and alumni.  If we are going to be true to our Franciscan roots, if we are going to earn our title as this country’s first (and best) Franciscan university, we – faculty and students—have got to go for broke.

Students, we are not here to make you cogs in the wheels of someone else’s greed and violence. We are not here to make you fit into a world that can’t make you happy and can’t satisfy your hopes.

We are here to invite you to be brokers for peace, lovers of truth, brothers and sisters to the poor and suffering, to find a love that lasts and a happiness that fulfills.

We want you in the marketplace not just to make money, but to make room for the down and out. We want you in the public square not to peddle some cheap polemic of polarization but to promote justice and the promise of a sustainable planet, God’s blessed creation.

And so, a young man stands naked in the village square and looks around at us tonight. And he tempts us with the promise of a love that can fill the infinity of the heart with a peace that passes all understanding, if we stand naked before the naked God, who is good, all good, supremely good, all the time and to everyone, now and forever. Amen.