Franciscan JPIC Spirituality and Excluded Persons

 

Seamus Mulholland OFM

 

 

 

At first sight, it may not seem as if the experience of St. Francis with the excluded persons of his own time, can have any bearing to the experience of excluded persons today and how Franciscans intra-act with them, after all they are separated by nearly 800 years. However, nothing could be further from the truth. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that there are many similarities between out own times and the times of St. Francis. The social, cultural and economic milieus are markedly similar and so too is the consequence of development in those three areas.

 

Some Old Testament Refugees, Displaced, and Excluded Persons

 

Excluded persons, whether they are migrant workers, refugees or the socially and economically displaced were a phenomenon in the time of Francis as much as they are today. We are often tempted to think solely of excluded persons in Francis’ time simply as ‘the lepers’ and to confine this to those who were suffering from physical leprosy, and having moved beyond that to spiritualise the experience of Francis by speaking about how he moved among ‘the marginalised’ of his own society.

 

I would like to suggest that this is too narrow a way of looking at Francis experience of excluded persons, and to argue for a new re-reading of the Franciscan texts and sources,. Especially the hagiographic material, so that we can come to a formulation of a radical Franciscanological approach to many of the social, environmental, cultural and economic crises of our own day. This is what I propose to offer you this morning.

 

Some Biblical Displaced and Excluded Persons

 

There has always been migration of peoples, and there have always been refugees, deportees, displaced peoples, homeless people and the ‘marginalised’ (a term which I propose we no longer use – the reason I will give in a moment). Perhaps the most significant of refugees and displaced, excluded persons were the mythic proto poloi, Adam and Eve. Paradise was theirs, they had it all, they lacked nothing, nor did they want for anything, then in one fatal mistake of judgement, it falls apart and they are expelled, ‘deported’ if you like from paradise to wander outside the garden, in unfamiliar surroundings. They are to struggle for their existence, where once the earth willingly gave up its produce, now they must work with the sweat of the brow. They must eke out an existence in a hostile land that is strange to them. They are the ultimate dispossessed people.

 

In the Genesis myth we are told of Abraham leaving Ur of the Chaldees, leaving his own home, his familiar surroundings, abandoning his own land– because the promise of a ‘new land’ with all its potential riches is being held out to him by God. However, it may be closer to view Abraham as another searcher after economic prosperity of the ‘Promised Land’. For Canaan was a land of plenty, with many interesting trading prospects and a good environment for the right entrepreneurial spirit, which if we are to believe the scriptures, Abraham possessed. Abraham was a foreign migrant, in a foreign land.

 

 

The history of the people of Israel is a history of exclusion, flight, displacement, dispossession, disenfranchisement, they were subject to racism, religious persecution, exile, fear, terror, lamentation, and longing for a place of their own where they could live in peace and tranquillity. Today, that struggle, both for the Israelite and the Palestinians (another of the world’s great displaced and excluded people) to find a mutual, co-extensive, co-habitable peace continues. Persecution, exile, deportation, loneliness, abandonment, isolation, and an ebbing hope are the experience of the people of Israel. It is of no wonder that they celebrate the great moment of their escape from Egypt, where they wandered through the world as displaced refugees towards their own homeland promised so long ago to Abraham.

 

Then there is Job. Stead fast, righteous, wealthy ‘no greater man in the world’ (Job 1.1) who suddenly is rent asunder, his wealth is gone, his family is gone, his own physical well being is gone. Here is someone who rants and raves against God like King Lear on the heath before the storm. Here is someone who is excluded and dispossessed as much as anyone in the ancient world – whose friends continue to dispossess him through their exposition of the orthodox theology: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are well meaning but ultimate serve to reinforce Job’s isolation – for what has Job done, being, according to the orthodox theology of retribution guilty of nothing – why then is he punished so by God?

 

In the time of Jesus, there were also excluded people: people who had been dispossessed of their religious and cultural heritage, people who were excluded from society, people who were nothing: the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the lepers, the Samaritans. There were those who suffered at the hands of the religious institutions: the possessed, the lame, the blind, those whom the religious authorities considered had ‘sinned’ and thus were punished by God. Yet, this is where Jesus is most at home: this is what causes the scandal, this is what turns many of the religious and civil authorities against him.

 

Though this exposition has been brief the phenomenon of refugees, displaced and excluded persons is nothing new. It has been with us for a very long time and it continues to be with us. Yet what is our approach to this to be since Jesus himself tells us ‘You will always have the poor with you’?

 

The Context for the Present Reflection

 

We are gathered here as Franciscans, we speak different languages, I know that there are some of you here who do not understand a word I am saying, and when those speakers who speak Spanish get up to deliver their reflections I will not understand them (Babel dispossessed us all!). Yet we are Franciscans, sharing a common brotherhood, a common purpose, a common unity and a common resolve to meet the difficulties and the problems that we are challenged with in this new migration of peoples, forced or otherwise.

 

I do not propose to give you a great deal of textual references e.,g. at 1 Cel. 218 Francis does this, or in the Legenda Maoir, Francis says this, or the 3 Companions, Legend of Perugia says this. That is to academise the process that we are engaged in, and anyone who wishes to do that can come and attend my Old Testament Literature and Franciscan Spirituality courses at the Franciscan International Study Centre at Canterbury. No, I propose to offer you an anthropological approach, which is grounded in a radical Franciscanology, to the extent that we can speak about a Franciscan Anthropology.

 

 

Refugees, Migrants and Excluded Persons in Europe

 

To do this we must first give some assessment of the current refugee or mirgrancy situation in Europe. Europe has always exported people to settle or govern distant places. Indeed, in my own country of Ireland there was proverb saying ‘Ireland’s greatest export is its people’. But today, the European Union faces a great, earth shattering change. As the economies in the European Union grow and develop, and its population continues to age, they are turning to foreign workers. In order, for example to keep its working age population stable between now and 2050, at current death and birth rates, Germany would need to import 487,00 migrants per year. A recent United Nations Population report. France would need 109,000, and the European Union as a whole 1.6million. To keep the ratio of workers to pensioners steady, the flow would need to swell to 3.6 million in Germany, i.8 million a year in France and an astounding 13.5 million a year in the EU as a whole. Europe’s working population is falling – people are needed to do the jobs. Indeed, the Spanish Employment Minister recently said ‘We need people to do the jobs the Spaniards no longer do’

 

Officially the European Union does not welcome those in search of a better life. The skilled may qualify for a work permit: over 2/5 ths of the 54,000 permits that Britain gave out in 1997 went to either Americans or to Japanese, mostly for highly skilled jobs. But these are not the migrants who stir up popular anxiety. For those the unskilled the door is firmly shut. Sometimes they try force it open and pay the most terrible human price, as the recent discovery of 58 bodies of Chinese persons trying to enter Britain illegally in a cargo container shows.

 

But most ordinary Europeans have not faced up to these changes in economic demographics. A wave of anti-immigrant sentiment is washing across the continent: over asylum seekers in Britain, foreign workers in Germany, immigrants in general in Austria. These new arrivals are popularly perceived as welfare-scroungers, job-snatchers, and threats to stability. Politicians seeking to win the nationalist vote, or jumping on the bandwagon of populist issues fan such views. In popular mythology an immigrant is easy to identify. They have left their native land in search of a better life, seek a job, and intend to stay. Yet the bulk of today’s settlers in the European Union defy these categories. For a start many of them are women. In Britain in 1997, 79% of the 58,700 immigrants accepted for permanent settlement were the spouses, mostly wives, or children of those already living in this country.

 

Some 400,000-500,000 illegal migrants slip or are smuggled into the European Union each year, according to Jonas Widgren of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development in Vienna. If these numbers are correct, it means that lore illegal migrants are coming into Europe each year than the 300,00 or so who enter America. But such numbers can be misleading a new type of migrant has appeared ‘the cross-border commuter’, ‘labour tourist; or ‘incomplete migrant’. These resourceful types defy traditional classifications; they move back a forth across a European Union border from Eastern Europe into Germany or Austria and often earn a living in the Union to support a family outside it. They may work in the European Union for only a few weeks at a time but they will spend most of any year there. Home is still outside the European Union perimeter.

 

But Europe has yet to recognise the image of itself as a continent of immigration, even though, over the centuries, its constituent bits had been refreshed by new vitality of migrants from within Europe itself. It may suit politicians, who are wary of Europe’s xenophobic streak (the right-wingers in Austria, the recent political headline grabbing of the Conservatives in Britain) and mindful that labour needs today may evaporate if economic revival falters tomorrow to keep it that way.

 

Excluded Persons and Franciscan Spirituality

 

What then is the Franciscan approach? How are we to respond to this crisis in Europe? And most particularly, is there a solid a foundation for our involvement in this central anthropological issue in the Franciscan sources from which all our rationale for any involvement should stem. It is not enough to simply say ‘Jesus spent time with the outcast and the excluded person, so must we’; ‘Jesus came to save the outcast and excluded’; or even to say’ Francis identified with the lepers, so must we as Franciscan’. It is not enough because none of these statements are true. Jesus may have had a special preference for the poor because they were the most receptive to his message since they were the ones most possessed of a deep, thirst for justice which the kingdom speaks of, yet he moved among the Pharisees, the Scribes, the Roman occupiers and persecutors; he spoke with the richest people in the country Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, Simon the Pharisee. In the case of Francis, it is true that the spent time with the lepers – but he did not identify with them. Francis may have refused possession of any kind, or money, or preferred the poor gospel life – but he still took the mountain of La Verna as a gift from John!!.

 

In other words, in or reading of the scriptural sources and the Franciscan sources we must be careful not to allow a romantic, naive idealism be substituted for a radical reassessment of the character of St. Francis and how he moved among the excluded people of his own time.

 

Franciscan spirituality emphasises the gospel life, fraternity and solidarity in justice with the poor and the ‘marginlised’ and we base this on what we know of the life of St. Francis. However, I would like to suggest that elements of this construction need to be deconstructed and a new, authentic approach to the life and human character of Francis is taken. In this way we can see why it is crucial that Franciscans become radically involved in the issue of excluded persons.

 

The social and economic climate of Francis’ time is well documented, but for the purposes of our reflections it suffices to say that it was a time of great economic change. And with these economic changes there came a new sense of identity and the possibility for the ‘ordinary’ people to exercise power. The source of this power lay in ‘money’. With the old feudal structures beginning to collapse, and the barter culture was beginning to change to the money culture. The emerging petit bourgeoisie, to whom Francis’ father belonged, realised the power that they possessed through their wealth and began to exercise that power. However, Francis’ heart and sympathies was not with the majores, but with the minores, with the lesser people. In real terms to use today’s terminology Francis was a left-wing democrat. And he was aware that many people were left out of the loop of benefits that this new wealth brought with it.

 

Francis and The Leper: A New Approach

 

The group that most stands out in the Franciscan sources is, of course, the lepers. And Francis detestation of this group does not lie in the fact that they we economically, or socially disadvantaged, he was simply petrified of catching their disease. We know how fastidious Francis was, we know how he would avoid the leprosarium, and while he may have had political sympathy with the minores of his own city-state – he had none with the lepers. Yet later on down the road, he tells us himself in the Testament, that he ‘was led among them’ and that ‘he had pity on them and worked with them with compassion’ and again, ‘after this, I did not wait long before I left the world’.

 

His initial encounter with the leper has become one of the primary mythopoetic moments in Franciscan literary history, his being among the lepers has formed the basis for 800 years of Franciscan involvement with outcast and the marginalised persons. But this is not enough. Francis’ involvement with the excluded people of his own day has to be reread in contemporary Franciscan spirituality for it is much more powerful symbolically and really than it may first appear. To say Francis embraced the leper and changed his whole life is too superficial a reading of the text. Setting aside any issues about whether or not the embrace of the leper actually took place, let us stake the story at face value.

 

If the story of the embracing of the leper is true then it represents one of the central defining moments not just in the life of Francis of Assisi but the Franciscan order. The lepers that Francis eventually finds himself among were not the outcast of their own society; they were not the marginalised because both these terms indicate the recognition by Francis’ society of the lepers existence. Yet, they did not exist. They did not benefit from the great social and economic changes that were going on, they had no sharing in the power structure. No participation in the decision-making – feudal or emergent democratic, they did not share i9n any of the benefits that the new money-based society brought with them. When Francis says ‘after that I did not wait long until I left the world’ – what is the world that he leaves?

 

For too long we have considered this in the old terminology of the ‘fuga mundi’, the leaving of the world to embrace a life of radical gospel-centred poverty – but Francis does not mean this. The only world he knew was the world of Assisi – the world that he leaves is the world of Assisi – the world he leaves is the newly emergent world of the value systems that are brought about by the new found power and wealth of the rising middle classes. Francis does not just leave his family, he leaves everything that is familiar to him, the prospect of his own enrichment, he leaves this behind to go into a another world – he becomes a pilgrim to the world of nothingness, not even promise.

 

The lepers of Assisi lived outside ‘the world’ – they did not appear on the Assisian city rolls, they had no names, they had no society, they had no voice – they are not just excluded persons – they are NO PERSONS, they are non-persons. They do not exist. When Francis finds himself among them he finds himself among those who did not exist and in this context, he does not exist himself. His being with the no persons of his own society is an embrace of nothingness. When the ‘leaves the world’ of Assisian riches and power based value systems – John Baptist Bernadone ceases to exist. Someone new and different begins to emerge.

 

I have not sought to offer any spiritualisation of the encounter with the leper and his subsequent being ‘led among them’. But I would like to suggest to you that the involvement of the Franciscan movement with the no people of today with the refugee, with the displaced, with the dispossessed, and with the voiceless migrant is exactly the same as that of the encounter Francis has with the lepers. I would further like to suggest that the embrace of the leper be read in a new way – and to see it not as Francis embracing the leper, but as the leper embracing Francis, then we can come to no other conclusion that the founder of the Order is not Francis of Assisi – but the leper, the one with no voice, no meaning, no power, no possessions.

 

It is after this moment of embrace that the life of Francis of Assisi is set on a course which would eventually change the face of Europe and rekindle in people the desire for the poor suffering Jesus. Yet, we have to be careful in our reading of the sources. Francis went to the lepers; it was they who showed him what to do ‘ When I did not know what to do, God himself showed me’. When Francis had this experience of revelation he was living and being with the lepers, he was one of the excluded, one of the dispossessed, one of the no people – according to the powerful and wealthy city-state of Assisi he did not exist if he was one of them. What he learned with the lepers was his ‘formation’. Yet he left them – there are few or no references to the lepers after his initial encounter with them.

 

So where do we as Franciscan find our brief for being with the excluded and the no people of today? If Francis spent time with them and then left them, should we not o the same. To adopt this attitude is to miss the point of Francis being with the excluded. It was the excluded who provided the locus for him to experience the presence of God in the radical demand to live the gospel. The living of the Gospel in Franciscan spirituality is not contextualised by the ‘religious life’ of the Church, we are not ‘religious’ in the strict sense of the term – Franciscan life is not to ‘live the rule’ Franciscan life is to ‘live the gospel. The gospel that was first given the poor and the excluded of Jesus’ own time. The tax collectors, and sinners, the prostitutes were the excluded people of Jesus’ time; yet it was to these that he offered hope and salvation.

 

In the new economic climate and in the midst of instant fortunes made through the dot Com culture – what role of place does Franciscan spirituality have in being brothers to the excluded, no people of today – to the refugee, to the migrant, to the immigrant legal or otherwise – surely it is to be what Francis was to them. Francis did nothing for them in fact; the lepers did everything for him. They were his teachers and his mentors; it was they who showed him the true value of the gospel. The gospel was not announced to Francis in loud, ringing voices, but in seclusion and exclusion. The gospel was not announced to the tax collectors and sinners with great noise and trumpets, but in the very fact of the presence of Jesus among the outcast.

 

 

Excluded Persons as No People: Franciscan Solidarity

 

The no people of Francis’ time, the lepers and outcasts did not benefit from the wealth and power that the new economic culture had brought with it, instead that culture did not even recognise their existence. Today, much has no changed. Many refugees, migrants and immigrants are seen to be drains on the economy and the welfare state. They are seen to be taking jobs and benefits from those in our own country who need them most. They are seen to be a drain on resources – this leads to racism, xenophobia and violence against persons for no other reason than that the colour of their skin, language, culture is different.

 

Yet Francis brought to the outcast a recognition of their own true value as human persons, Jesus does the same – he brings to them the out stretched hand that carries with it the possibility of the salvation of the kingdom. Franciscan spirituality today must embrace the leper anew, must suffer the consequences of ministering to refugees and migrants and immigrants and must do so free from racism, xenophobia or nationalistic bigotry. Our priority as Franciscans is to embrace the no-people as brothers and sister. For Francis to move among those who had no existence, he had to leave everything that was close to him, familiar to him, everything that was secure and safe. He had embark on a road for which there were no signposts, there was no direction. It was a road that had been travelled only once before in early Palestine. It was a road that Francis walked, until he himself became an excluded person. Oh Yes, the history of the Order showed that in the end Francis was excluded from the Order’s decision making power base. He truly had become a refugee, that is why he went back to all that was familiar to him from the early days: the early companions, Clare, the Portiuncula, the Leprosarium.

 

So I would suggest that if there a Franiscanology in working with excluded persons then that Franciscanology must be rooted in the gospel, a radical re-reading of the Franciscan sources so as to identify the essence of what it means to each one of us to be a brother. It is also interesting to note that when the Franciscans moved into the university towns, the friaries they lived in were located OUTSIDE the town, on the fringes, those places where the poor were to be found.

 

Franciscanology should also avail itself of the expertise of those whose area of study is socio-ecnomics, cultural studies, political theory – in other words; it is not enough for us to simply be engaged in some kind of philanthropic work. It needs to be solidly grounded on a firm intellectual base so that our motivations and our Franciscan justification are seen to be abreast of current thinking. Francis experience with the excluded people of his own time and culture was the foremost formative experience of his life, it shaped and moulded his initial conversion experience, and it was for him a type of novitiate. What he learned from the excluded people was the experience of real poverty, of real powerlessness, of voicelessness and dispossession. Our experience today with the excluded people will also be an experience of powerlessness, and dispossession and frequently it will mean that the society in which we live will not understand our comprehend the reasons for involvement in the solidarity of minority with the excluded. But it is in this sense that we will truly become LESSER BROTHERS – those who, like Francis of Assisi, walk among the excluded, the powerless, the no-people of our own day and in that experience we ill discover the true meaning of human dignity and the very essence of what Francis meant when he said that the life of the Lesser Brother was ‘to follow in the footsteps of our Lord Jesus Christ’, he who, like the excluded of today, was not accepted in his own country, had nowhere to lay his head and who died because of the message of hope he proclaimed.