More Than Birds and Blessings: The Beautiful and Uncomfortable Saint Francis
- Fiach OBroin-Molloy
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
There is a Saint Francis almost everyone recognises.
He stands quietly in a garden, a bird resting on his hand. There may be a rabbit at his feet and flowers around the base. He looks gentle, approachable and safely at home among the things we find beautiful.
I do not want to take that Francis away. His delight in creation was real. The stories of his tenderness towards creatures belong to the tradition that grew around him, and his own Canticle of the Creatures gives us the unforgettable language of Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Sister Mother Earth.
The problem is not that the garden image is false. It is that we have allowed it to become sufficient.
A saint reduced to birds and blessings is easy to admire. The actual Francis asks what I own, whom I avoid and whether peace costs me anything. He is more difficult to place neatly in a garden because his life keeps moving towards the people and truths from which most of us would rather keep a comfortable distance.
As a maker placing his name and symbols upon devotional objects, I feel a particular responsibility not to make him harmless. The gentle Francis is genuine. So is the uncomfortable one. They are the same man.
Mercy began where comfort ended
Near the beginning of his Testament, Francis looked back upon the turning point in his life. He used the language of his own age, writing about people then called “lepers”—people affected by leprosy, who were often feared, stigmatised and required to live apart.
Francis did not present himself as naturally compassionate. He admitted that the sight of them had seemed bitter to him. Then, he wrote, the Lord led him among them and he showed them mercy. Afterwards, what had seemed bitter was changed for him into sweetness of soul and body.
His account is brief. It does not give us the famous dramatic scene often supplied by later imagination, and it does not turn the people he met into scenery for a saint’s conversion. They were real people carrying illness and social exclusion. Francis’s change required real proximity.
That is what makes this part of his story so searching. Mercy did not begin as a warm opinion about suffering in general. It began when he crossed the distance between himself and people he had learned not to see.
It is possible to love an idea of humanity while arranging life so that particular people never come near us. Francis offers no comfortable refuge there. The person whose presence disturbed him became the person through whom his way of seeing was changed.
The official Franciscan letter for the 2026 centenary places this encounter close to the centre of his legacy. It holds mercy and poverty together: poverty without mercy can become an idol, while mercy detached from poverty can remain only an idea. Francis did not merely feel differently. He allowed the encounter to loosen his hold upon the life that had previously defined him.
Poverty was not a rustic appearance
Francis was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant. His embrace of poverty was therefore a chosen surrender of property, status and security—not an attractive preference for simple textures.
This distinction matters. Involuntary poverty deprives people of choices, safety and dignity. It should not be romanticised by those who can step away from it. Francis’s voluntary poverty was not a claim that hunger, homelessness or exclusion are beautiful. It was an attempt to follow the poor and crucified Christ and to stand among those whom wealth and rank allowed others to overlook.
The word poverty can become decorative surprisingly quickly. It can mean unvarnished wood, worn leather, rough cloth or a carefully arranged simplicity that still leaves every important comfort protected. There is nothing wrong with finding beauty in honest materials. But an object does not become Franciscan because it looks rustic, and a life does not become simple merely because its possessions have the right appearance.
Francis’s poverty pressed much further. It asked what possession does to relationship. Does what I hold make me more grateful and generous, or more defended? Does it help me serve, or give me a reason to place myself above someone else? Can I receive anything as gift when I have trained myself to regard everything as mine?
Those questions are uncomfortable precisely because there is no single quantity of possessions that answers them for everyone. Francis’s particular calling was radical. Most of us will not reproduce its outward form. We can still allow it to expose the ease with which ownership becomes identity and comfort becomes a reason not to move towards another person.
Christ, poor and crucified, stood at the centre
Francis is sometimes presented as though he were a free-standing nature mystic whose Christianity was a detail later added to the picture. His own life will not support that reading.
Early accounts remember him praying before the painted crucifix at San Damiano and receiving the call to repair Christ’s house. At first he understood this in the most literal way and began rebuilding a neglected church. In time, the work of repair grew into a life of Gospel renewal among brothers and within the Church.
The Cross remained at the centre. Francis wanted to follow not an abstract spiritual principle but Jesus Christ—poor, humble and crucified. Near the end of his life, the earliest Franciscan witnesses remembered the marks of the Passion upon his body as the culminating sign of how completely that desire had shaped him.
This does not diminish his love of the natural world. It locates it. Francis called creatures brother and sister because he received them with himself from one Creator. His praise travelled through creation towards God; it did not stop at creation or make nature divine.
The bird in Francis’s hand belongs in the picture. But so does the Cross before his eyes.
To be a lesser brother
Francis called his community the Friars Minor: the Lesser Brothers. The name was not a charming piece of modest branding. It described the place they were to seek—not above others, but among them; not protected by rank, but joined in fraternity.
Brotherhood was not only the affection of like-minded friends. It had to survive difference, weakness, conflict and the temptation to control. Francis’s writings repeatedly turn authority back towards service. To become “lesser” was to relinquish the need to dominate another person.
This gives his familiar greeting, “May the Lord give you peace,” a harder edge. Peace is not simply a serene feeling carried privately through a noisy world. It changes how power is used. It asks whether another person is being treated as a brother or sister, especially when there is disagreement, inconvenience or fear.
Franciscan fraternity is therefore larger than friendliness. It is a refusal to build one person’s importance upon another person’s smallness.
Crossing a line during a war
In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis crossed the lines near Damietta in Egypt and met the Muslim Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil.
The meeting is historical, but it is often polished into whichever lesson a later age most wants to hear. We do not know the substance of their conversation. Francis did not end the Crusade, and he was not a modern interfaith campaigner appearing seven centuries early. He went as a Christian missionary, with a desire to bear witness to Christ.
Yet the manner of the encounter still matters. In a world arranged around opposing armies, Francis went without a weapon and met a person his own side had been taught to know chiefly as an enemy. The Sultan chose to receive him and allowed him to return safely.
There is nothing sentimental about walking across a war line. Nor is respectful encounter the same as pretending that conviction does not matter. Francis did not abandon his faith in order to meet the Sultan; he refused to let hostility be the only possible relationship between them.
We should resist inventing a tidy dialogue or an easy victory. The unadorned fact is demanding enough: while others fought, Francis placed himself within reach of the person beyond the dividing line.
Peace, in his life, was not a slogan used from a safe distance. It involved exposure.
Put the birds back—but let them tell the whole truth
After mercy, poverty, the Cross, fraternity and the encounter with the Sultan, we can return to the birds without embarrassment.
Francis’s kinship with creation was not the soft alternative to these harder parts of his life. It grew from the same conversion. The person he once rejected became neighbour. The sun and water became brother and sister. Possessions became gifts rather than defences. An enemy became someone who could be met face to face.
Near the end of his life, Francis composed most of the Canticle of the Creatures while gravely ill and with failing sight. Its bright praise of sun, moon, wind, water, fire and earth eventually makes room for forgiveness, suffering and “Sister Bodily Death”. It is not a song written by someone protected from pain. Its joy has passed through vulnerability.
That context changes the garden figure. The bird on Francis’s hand is no longer merely a sign that he liked animals. It belongs to a much wider claim: no creature is disposable, nothing exists only for our use, and praise is possible even when life cannot be controlled.
The beautiful Francis is not rescued by hiding the uncomfortable Francis. His beauty becomes visible through the things he was willing to face.
I cannot claim to know exactly what following Francis should require of someone else. I can allow his life to question the protections I construct around my own: the people I keep outside, the comforts I rename as necessities and the peace I admire most when it asks nothing of me.
A maker’s caution
This is a difficult article to write beside a workbench. Maple, jade, bronze, brass and leather can make Franciscan simplicity physically appealing. A Tau cross can become recognisable decoration. Even a tiny bee on the reverse can be enjoyed without asking anything of the person who holds it.
That does not make devotional objects empty. Bodies matter in prayer. Hands lose their place, minds wander, and a bead or cross can provide a real point of return. But I can make a set of prayer beads; I cannot manufacture the conversion to which it points.
The Catholic rosaries, Anglican prayer beads, Franciscan Crown and leather Tau necklace in this collection are specially made during the eighth centenary year of the Transitus of Saint Francis, 1226–2026. They mark an extraordinary year, but they do not contain its meaning. Nor do rustic materials make their maker—or their owner—Franciscan.
At best, an object held in prayer can become a small interruption. The Tau beneath a thumb may turn attention back to Christ. A decade may make room to remember someone usually kept at a distance. The weight of a cross may recall that peace has a cost. The little bee may return the mind to the created life entrusted to our care.
The object remains small. The life it asks us to consider is not.
The saint who will not stay in the garden
I still have affection for the familiar statue of Francis. Keep the bird in his hand. Keep the creatures gathered around him. Bless the animals on his feast and sing the Canticle with joy.
But place beside that image the people affected by leprosy whom he approached, the possessions he released, the Crucified Christ he followed, the brothers among whom he chose to be lesser and the Sultan he crossed a battlefield to meet. Hear, too, the final verses of the Canticle, where praise is large enough to contain forgiveness, suffering and death.
Then the garden Francis is no longer harmless. His gentleness has courage within it, his simplicity has relinquishment within it, and his peace has risk within it.
Eight hundred years after his death, Francis remains beautiful not because every difficult edge has been smoothed away, but because he allowed mercy to reshape a whole life.
A saint reduced to birds and blessings can decorate our world. The fuller Francis may help to change it.
May the Lord give you peace.
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