Sunday, October 4, 2026
Feast Day of Francis of Assisi
Father Richard Rohr explains how Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) experienced the natural world as filled with God’s presence:
In stories of his life, Francis is quoted as talking to or about larks, lambs, rabbits, pheasants, falcons, cicadas, waterfowl, bees, the famous wolf of Gubbio, pigs (whom he praised for generously giving their bodies for our food), and hooked fish that he tried to throw back into the water whenever possible. He addressed inanimate creation too, as if it were indeed ensouled. We know this because his “Canticle of the Creatures” includes fire, wind, water, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and, of course, “our Sister Mother Earth” herself. [1]
So-called “nature mysticism” was in fact a worthy first path for Francis and also for Bonaventure, the first Franciscan theologian, who saw all things as likenesses of God (vestigia Dei), fingerprints and footprints that reveal the divine DNA underlying all living links in the Great Chain of Being.
Creation itself—not ritual or spaces constructed by human hands—was Francis’s primary cathedral, his resting place in God, which then drove him back into the needs of the city. It’s very similar to Jesus’s own movement between desert solitude and small-town healing ministry. The gospel transforms us by putting us in touch with that which is much more constant and satisfying, literally the “ground of our being,” and has much more “reality” to it, rather than theological concepts or the mere ritualization of reality.
Daily cosmic events in the sky and on the earth are the reality above our heads and beneath our feet every minute of our lives: a continuous sacrament. I find that a preoccupation with religious rituals tends to increase the more we remain untouched by Reality Itself—to which the best rituals can only point.
Jesus himself commonly points to things like the red sky, a hen, lilies, the fig tree, a donkey caught in a pit, the birds of the air, the grass in the field, the Temple animals (which he released from their cages), and on and on. He was clearly looking at the seemingly “nonreligious” world, ordinary things all around him, and he appeared to do most of his teaching outside.
In the five-day Men’s Rites of Passage that was a focus of my work for fifteen years, many men discovered that prayers and rituals inside of human-scale buildings made with artificial materials also came to seem very domesticated and controlled. They often perceived that the salvation offered there was also “small” and churchy. Almost without exception, the greatest breakthroughs for the men occurred during extended times of silence in nature, where the human and the merely verbal were not in control—or during rituals that were raw and earthy.
Rediscovering Our Connection to Nature
Monday, October 5, 2026
Father Richard Rohr considers how Christianity throughout history lost touch with the natural world as a place of grace and divine presence:
The sacramental nature of the world was largely lost until its more recent rediscovery by seers that we usually think of as “secular,” “mere” nature mystics, poets, and artists: people like Chief Seattle, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Walt Whitman, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and others. We Catholics ended up limiting “sacramentals” to things like religious medals, blessed candles, and holy water, instead of honoring the inherent holiness of the earth ores, beeswax, and water that actually formed them. Please think about that! [1]
We limited the official church sacraments to seven (six for women, subtracting the sacrament of Holy Orders) when “there should be seven hundred,” as an old man once said to me in Tanzania. We ended up actually desacralizingGod’s world without realizing it. The people we called pagans and animists actually had a head start on us, because they at least saw the world as filled with spirits, whereas our world became empty, foreign, and without any natural balm for the soul. In the modern world, wild was always bad, and domesticated was always good. Yet C.S. Lewis said of God (in the character of the lion, Aslan), “He’s wild, you know!” Domesticated, of course, means subservient to us. We liked our world more than God’s world, it seems.
For much of Christian history, we preached inside of a disenchanted, small, and lonely universe where there was no natural holiness or inherent goodness in anything non-human or non-Christian. I thought Jesus was “the Savior of the world” (John 4:42), not just human souls. We then tried to fill up the loneliness with books and ideas, since the world beneath us and above us had become boring, merely functional, and not subject to the predictability we wanted.
We grasped for meaning in merely mental ways when it was all around us in tangible and visible ways. We failed to kiss the ground on which we stood and preferred to fly off into the heavens. “The first level of perception,” according to Bonaventure, “is toward exterior material objects,” and only when we see respectfully and lovingly at that level can we “ascend” to his second and third levels of full spiritual seeing. [2] Francis knew and taught that “God does not lose energy by plunging into form,” as Cynthia Bourgeault so forcefully puts it [3], and that true transcendence is to be found in immanence and materiality itself. What a surprise!
Most of us were trained to be good Platonists, where body and soul are enemies, much more than Christian incarnationalists, where body and soul are friends. And where were we to experience this incarnation? Precisely everywhere and all the time, not just in places defined as sacred, special, churchy, or religious. That is why Paul could confidently tell us we could and should “pray always” (I Thessalonians 5:17).
