Everybody knows of Franciscan nature spirituality, but understanding a Franciscan vocation begins by understanding the moment of St. Francis’s conversion. “When I was in sin,” he writes in his spiritual testament, “it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers.” Sin made him recoil from the suffering of lepers, but under the influence of God’s guidance, he turned to them anyhow, and his spirit was healed. Now he desired to help lepers, and caring for them became a source of peace.
We have much to learn from St. Francis’s turning to lepers. Current historical scholarship rejects the narrative of lepers representing those excluded by society. Medieval Italian cities provided care to the lepers in their midst. In turning to them, St. Francis took his guidance from the social order around him, where he found Christ’s healing ministry already at work. In committing himself to this service, he was a follower, not a leader. He was humble in learning how others were already helping, not accusatory in pointing out a failure to help.
We tend to treat the science of nature, such as physics and molecular biology, as neutral knowledge, neither good nor bad. But we read right at the start of the Bible that creation is good. Therefore, fundamental knowledge of God’s creation, such as cosmology, the unfolding of the universe, and evolutionary biology, the unfolding of life in it, must mean something good. Indeed, when all has come together, including humans, scripture tells us that it is very good. Nature is not just a neutral background for humans to make good or bad choices; instead, it is the good ground on which to make good choices.
If science feels like technocratic knowledge, mere power for us, then it is on account of human sin and a disordered will. If we receive the grace of conversion, as St. Francis did, our will is again in harmony with God’s will. Now, science appears in a new light. It helps us understand our own nature. It confronts us with our own createdness and fragility, and it teaches us that we can understand nature and use this knowledge to care for one another.
As rational creatures, we cannot do this without a philosophy of nature that makes sense of scientific knowledge. Franciscans today are not very interested in abstract philosophical questions, such as what the being of atoms and animals is, and how we can be both, but not just both, but also persons. Franciscans want to go straight to the human experience of life. But we just cannot do so unless we also make sense of science and what it teaches about atoms, animals, and persons, and only when we understand ourselves in all of these three ways harmoniously will we be able to be and act in truly human ways.