Giving Up Without Giving Up by Jim Green

Author:Jim Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

MEDITATION: WITH THE LEPER AND THE WOLF

Franciscan tradition tells us two stories that are a profound gift to every meditator and to every person tempted to escape his or her own darkness by fleeing into the supposed safety of a different, ‘ideal’ identity.

St Francis’s signature is his empathy with the natural world and with animals in particular. For him it was instinctively un-natural to allow distance between himself and any part of creation. This is why the Sun was his brother and the Moon his sister. It’s why he communed with the birds. He seemed to know at a cellular level that there was no such thing as being, only inter-being. He is someone for whom the only real sin is the refusal to connect with all the teeming manifestations of life; to stubbornly and defensively keep your distance. He doesn’t want to leave anything out. This is the impulse that lies behind the story of his taming of a wolf, soon after his conversion. The people of Gubbio were terrorized by a huge, fierce and terrible beast which was preying on animals and humans alike. Everyone feared for their lives. Against all advice, Francis goes alone to meet the wolf, who runs towards him with slavering jaws. The story tells us how Francis makes the sign of the cross and admonishes the beast, naming all the wrongs it has committed and the suffering it has caused. He offers to negotiate a peace with the people of the city, and the wolf – unused to being met and addressed – agrees. The citizens and their former enemy live in peaceful harmony for the next two years. They feed the wolf affectionately and mourn its passing when it dies.

The second celebrated story concerns another terror of the medieval mind: leprosy. Everybody avoided lepers, dreading the horrors that any contact with them would likely bring. The afflicted were forced to carry bells warning of their presence. They were explicitly cut off from the rest of humanity: rejected and excluded. Francis shared the general abhorrence for these outcasts, until the day when an inner prompting moves him to turn and face the leper he is about to ride away from. He dismounts, walks towards his greatest fear and embraces the man.

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