Friday cat blogging on St. Francis' feast day

Representations of St. Francis often render him gentle and mild -- a bit of an empty-headed softie who talked to birds and animals. Saints may be gentle and mild at times, but they are not soft. Tales of saints confront us with people in whom love burned so strongly that their lives are humanly incomprehensible to us.

After all, Francis is reputed to have attempted to interrupt the Crusades by directly approaching the Muslim Sultan peacefully in 1219. Apparently the force of his holiness momentarily turned combatants from slaughter to dialogue. Whether the legend is true or not, the Islamic world has long accepted Franciscan friars as the keepers of their shared holy places.

Francis lived within the pronouncement in the Biblical story of creation: "And God saw everything that God had made, and behold it was very good. ..."

A friend wrote of St. Francis and our animals:

For Francis, like so many Christian mystics before and after him, we are all siblings and kin, related to one another and to God in Christ.

In truth, as anyone who has lived with or lives with a member of another species knows, these siblings and kin are gifts of God in our lives more than we can say. They are blessings. They bless us. They teach us what it means to be loved by God. ...

We need all the help we can get to face up to a love so large it can scorch as well as give comfort.

On this feast of St. Francis, I give thanks for the pure gift of the cat Morty's return after nine days in the wild, for the wild and painful love that his apparent departure uncovered in his human companions, and for our continued time together, however long that may be.