The Man Who Turned Into Christ and Didn't Turn Back
The Rev’d
October 1, 2006
Evensong, 4:00 p.m.
In the name of God, our Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and Friend.
It’s partly because we’re celebrating the Feast of St. Francis today. And it’s party because we blessed the animals this morning. So I find that I too want to honor Francis’s love of God’s creation today. Maybe that also explains why I’m in the mood for fantasy. Let’s just say that because of Francis I’m especially attracted to fantasy about animals today; fantasy about our human connection with animals.
But it’s also because I had a fabulous retreat this summer in southeast Alaska . Some of you already know that I spent a week in July sea kayaking with our fellow priest, Bill Harkins, and with other clergy on the waters of the Inside Passage of Alaska. Now: between guided meditation, and kayaking rain or shine, and sighting whales and otters, and visiting native Alaskan ancestral sites—well, I’m here to tell you that some of us—I won’t say who—some of us had second and third thoughts about not coming back home at all!
Imagine that! Imagine someone having to phone Dean Candler here at the Cathedral and explain about one of his priests:
‘We don’t know what got into him, Dean Candler. What can we tell you? He just fell in love with life in Alaska ! All that open territory, big sky and wide water and nature chock full of wildlife; it did something to him. You know, he just got quieter and quieter; more content with just being, instead of doing things all the time. Why, we could hardly get him to talk anymore. It was like he was turning into a bear or a bird or a sea animal himself, and was losing the ability to have ordinary conversation with other people.
‘We noticed it especially in the mornings, when we had a rule of silence until it was time to launch out on the water in the kayaks. After the morning meditation group, when we sat in a circle by the ashes of last night’s campfire, he seemed to lapse into an almost permanent mode of meditation: like he was starting to see something in the world surrounding us, seeing things with big eyes.
‘Well, we have to tell you this sir: we don’t think he’s ever coming back. Or if he does you might not recognize him as the same person. He won’t ever be the same again!’
Well, there’s my fantasy, my fabulation! Pretty fantastic, huh? It reminds me of a related fantasy by Ursula K. LeGuin, from her series of novels beginning with “A Wizard of Earthsea.” LeGuin tells the story of a wizard who also, almost, did not come back from his travels! Sparrowhawk is his name, and he is aptly named because in one memorable episode he magically transformed himself into an actual hawk or falcon. But after the epic flight that he underwent in his falcon-hawk’s body he almost kept going; he almost did not make it back into human form.
The story is told first from the perspective of his mentor, the master wizard or “mage” known as Ogion the Silent. Years before, when Sparrowhawk first became his apprentice, Ogion had given him the name “Ged.” It was a secret name, meant to be kept secret, and so was known to Sparrowhawk and to Ogion alone.
[Now Ogion used to speak] to spiders on their webs and had been seen to greet trees courteously . . . [He] had spent all summer and autumn alone up on the mountain, and only now . . . was come back to his hearthside.
The morning after his return he rose late . . . It was broad daylight, but . . . all western Gont, from sea-beaches to the [mountain] peak, was sunless, silent, and clear in the winter morning. As the mage stood by the spring looking out over the falling lands and the harbor and the grey distances of the sea, wings beat above him. He looked up, raising one arm a little. A great hawk came down with loud-beating wings and lighted on his wrist. Like a trained hunting-bird it clung there, but it wore no broken leash, no band or bell. The claws dug hard in Ogion’s wrist; the barred wings trembled; the round, gold eye was dull and wild.
“Are you messenger or message?” Ogion said gently to the hawk. “Come on with me—“ As he spoke the hawk looked at him. Ogion was silent a minute. “I named you once, I think,” he said, and then strode to his house and entered, bearing the bird still on his wrist. He made the hawk stand on the hearth in the fire’s heat, and offered it water. It would not drink. Then Ogion began to lay a spell, very quietly, weaving the web of magic with his hands more than with words. When the spell was whole and woven he said softly,—“Ged,”—not looking at the falcon on the hearth. He waited some while, then turned, and got up, and went to the young man who stood trembling and dull-eyed before the fire . . .
[Then] Ogion . . . led him to the alcove-room where his prentice once had slept and made him lie down on the pallet there, and so with a murmured sleep-charm left him. He had said no word to him, knowing that Ged had no human speech in him now.
Now at this point in the story, LeGuin shifts from narrating her story to give some background to the magic of changing oneself into an animal’s body. And she does so by referring to Ogion the master wizard’s experience of this magic as a boy and later as a mature practitioner of the craft.
As a boy [himself], Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one’s self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear’s shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the relentless sea.
Well, I commend to you the ‘rest of the story,’ as they say. But our business here today is with the gospel story, and this is a good place to turn to it by way of turning to the life of St. Francis. Because Francis is the man who turned into Christ and actually didn’t turn back. Francis turned into a type of Christ and kept going, by all accounts, until he was no longer recognizable as the man that his family and friends expected him to become as he grew up among them in the Italian town of Assisi .
It’s for this reason that Francis has been called a “second Christ,” this Italian monk who turned into Christ and did not turn back. This medieval monk was also the first person authenticated in Christian history to bear on his body the stigmata—those wounds of crucifixion found on the hands and feet, and sometimes the side and the forehead; the “marks of Jesus branded on my body” that St. Paul refers to in today’s reading from Galatians. But less sensational, and more compelling, is the character of this gentle monk who also described himself as betrothed to “Lady Poverty.” It is the character of a man who conformed his life to the scripture appointed for today’s gospel reading, where Jesus said:
"Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls . . . (Matt. 11.25-30)
Yes, Francis is the icon of one who imitates Christ in simplicity and humility. This he is preeminently the ‘rested one’, the man at peace with himself, his fellows, and indeed with all creation.
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But what if there are many ways to imitate Christ, in addition to simplicity, gentleness and humility? What if—as Gregory Riley says in the title of his 2001 book—what if there may be “One Jesus” but “Many Christs,” with all of them inspiring and sustaining “Not One True Christianity But Many?” (The full title is One Jesus, Many Christs: How Jesus Inspired Not One True Christianity, But Many.)
In other words, must you have a constitutionally gentle and humble temperament in order to be an icon of Christ? Do you need to be congenitally meek, or perhaps undergo a character transformation and become gentle or meek, in order to be Christ-like? Or is it possible that there are other character traits that can also qualify as Christ-like?
I must confess that I experience the Jesus depicted is so many biblical stories to be a man so commanding and imposing that meek and mild descriptions feel inauthentic to me. And I happen to be confirmed in my impression of Jesus by the way that Albert Schweitzer, the celebrated turn-of-the 20 th century doctor and scholar, described Jesus too. “An imperious ruler” was the phrase that Schweitzer used to describe him. Imposing, imperious, compelling, commanding.
Those are some of the adjectives that, with Schweitzer, I would use to describe Jesus at least some of the time. No, he was not always meek and mild—the proverbial ‘lamb of God.’ Sometimes, as in the gospel reading two weeks ago where he rebuked St. Peter—sometimes he was fierce and ferocious too. Yes, our Lord was more like C.S. Lewis’s portrait of the fantasy lion, Aslan, about whom he wrote in his children’s stories about Narnia: “He’s not a tame lion, you know!” Now I may well have an incomplete knowledge of St. Francis’s biography, it would never occur to me to describe him with words like ‘fierce’ or ‘ferocious.’
So now: how about you and me here today, in this non-fantasy, real world of 2006? What is the temperament that you and I bring to our incarnation of Christ? What characteristics feature prominently in our Christ-like behavior and attitudes? Do we display more gentle or humble traits in our imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi)? Or rather do we manifest the more compelling or intense features of Christ, as they tend to converge with our own temperament?
Consider for example the current psychology of multiple intelligence: some of us having more intellectual intelligence and others of us having more ‘emotional intelligence.’ But all of us have temperaments and characteristics that are capable of conveying the grace of God that can render us more Christ-like. However, and this is the key of course, our temperaments and personality profiles may all need to undergo a radical transformation, if not a death and resurrection experience, in order to actualize in us an authentic Christ-like identity.
Well, I leave it to you as an open question, as we continue to observe the Feast of St. Francis later this week on Wednesday, October the 4 th. But finally, whatever our temperamental or personality predispositions we can all find agreement in that celebrated hymn attributed to St. Francis, Hymn no. 593 in the blue hymnal in the pew rack in front of you. I invite you to turn to it now as I close with these verses from Hymn no. 593. But as I read them, remember that our challenge—should we choose to accept it—is to turn into a type of Christ and to not turn back. Whether or not we have the temperament of a St. Francis is not crucial. Rather what is crucial, as St. Paul declares in today’s reading from Galatians, is becoming a new creature in the “new creation.”
May I never boast of anything [Paul exclaims] except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! As for those who will follow this rule—peace be upon them, and mercy . . . (Gal. 6.14f.)
And so let’s claim this blessing of peace and mercy! Please join me now in praying together this Franciscan prayer for peace and mercy:
Lord, make us servants of your peace:
where there is hate, may we sow love;
where there is hurt, may we forgive;
where there is strife, may we make one.
Where all is doubt, may we sow faith;
where all is gloom, may we sow hope;
where all is night, may we sow light;
where all is tears, may we sow joy.
Jesus, our Lord, may we not seek
to be consoled, but to console,
nor look to understanding hearts,
but look for hearts to understand.
May we not look for love’s return,
but seek to love unselfishly.
For in our giving we receive,
and in forgiving are forgiv’n.
Dying, we live, and are reborn
through death’s dark night to endless day.
Lord, make us servants of your peace,
to wake at last in heaven's light. *
Amen!
Comments? Contact The Rev. Thee Smith: tsmith@stphilipscathedral.org