The little poor man of Assisi

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Prayer for the Day presented by Mark Oakley, Dean of Southwark. Good morning. Recently I was on an ecumenical pilgrimage to the beautiful city of Assisi in Italy’s Umbrian hills. It is of course the city of St Francis who died 800 years ago. To commemorate this anniversary, his relics were displayed for a period in the basilica, and we filed past them in silence. We looked down on the tiny body and skull of this spiritual giant. When contemporaries called him ‘the little poor man’ of Assisi, they weren’t kidding. The life of Francis, who gave up his belongings and began living with some friends, a rule of life that opened the eyes to the creation’s environment and opened the heart to human suffering, this life asks us whether today, with our screens and adverts and fear of missing out, we are living the enviable life rather than the good life. The enviable life, of course, leads nowhere except disappointment. What do we need in life to make us more content, more generous, more attentive? For Francis, the answer lay in recognising that the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. Life asks of us not to think less of ourselves, but to think of ourselves a bit less, and then we hear the deeper voice and see the bigger truth than when the world is simply framed by my own fears and failures. Today I’m praying with Francis: O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. Amen.