Francis and the Natural World

Saturday 10 October 2026  Francis and the Natural World: Weekly Summary 

Friday 9 October 2026  Listen, Learn, and Contribute 

Cherokee descendant Randy Woodley responds to Francis of Assisi’s deathbed invitation, “I have done what was mine to do. May Christ teach you what is yours”:  

My Keetoowah ancestors had a concept that I think gets at what this question really means. They understood that every person, every being, every element of creation has a particular responsibility—a role to play in the harmony of the whole. Not everyone had the same role. Some were healers, some were warriors who protected the people, some were farmers, some were storytellers. But everyone had something that was theirs to do, and the community couldn’t function without all of it.

An old Indian saying puts it more bluntly: The worst thing that can be said about a person is, “He acts like he has no relatives.”

To act as if you have no relatives means to live as though your actions don’t ripple outward. It means to treat the world as though you’re the only one in it. It means to extract what you want without asking what you owe.

Sound familiar? This is essentially the operating system of Western capitalism—the worldview that treats land as inventory, water as delivery system, people as labor units, and the sick as revenue streams. Take what you can, discard the rest, and never ask who’s downstream.

What my ancestors practiced was the opposite. They understood that humans are the younger siblings in creation—that the plants, animals, waters, and stones have been here longer and know how things work. Our job is not to dominate but to listen, learn, and contribute to the wellbeing of the whole. That’s not metaphor. That’s a survival strategy developed over thousands of years of living in reciprocal relationship with the land.

The mystics have always known that the separate self is an illusion—that we are woven into one another and into creation. That what we do to the least of these, we do to the Sacred. Indigenous peoples have been practicing that truth in daily life for millennia, not as theology to be debated but as a way of being to be lived. It goes by various names, but I call it the Harmony Way….

This is what contemplation should lead to—vulnerability. Not withdrawal from the world but deeper engagement with it. Not escape from suffering but the willingness to sit with it long enough to see clearly what is ours to do. Vulnerability requires living reflectively with yourself but also living deeply into the whole community of creation—all your relatives.

Randy S. Woodley, “Planting for the Seventh Generation: What Is Ours to Do” ONEING 14, What Is Ours to Do? (CAC Publishing, 2026): 100–101, 102.

Thursday 8 October 2026  Praying with Creation

In every work of the artist, he praised the Artist; whatever he found in made things he referred to the Maker.
—Thomas of Celano on Francis of Assisi

Father Richard reflects on how Francis and Bonaventure recognized the natural world as the place through which we learn to witness and love God:  

St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) taught that to work up to loving God, we start by loving the very humblest and simplest things and then move up from there. “Let us place our first step in the ascent at the bottom, presenting to ourselves the whole material world as a mirror, through which we may pass over to God, who is the Supreme Craftsman,” he wrote. And further, “The Creator’s supreme power, wisdom, and benevolence shine forth through all created things.” [1]

In the end, we either love everything or there is reason to doubt that we love anything. This one love and one loveliness was described by many medieval theologians and others as the “Great Chain of Being.” The message was that if we failed to recognize the divine Presence in any one link of the chain, the whole sacred universe would fall apart.

Creation—be it planets, plants, or pandas—was not just a warm-up act for the human story of the Bible. The natural world is its own good and sufficient story, if we can only learn to see it with humility and love. That takes contemplative practice, stopping our busy and superficial minds long enough to see the beauty, allow the truth, and protect the inherent goodness of what it is—whether or not it profits us or pleases us. [2]

Franciscan poet Murray Bodo points to Francis as a contemplative model for praying with creation:  

Francis took his place among creatures and, in reverence and prayerfulness, praised God with them. I believe that the goodness of our gestures toward the world around us and our gratitude for it depend a great deal upon the depth of the silence out of which those gestures come.

As it was with St. Francis, only in silence and solitude do we learn to see and hear and respond with reverence to creatures other than our busy, noisy selves…. Only the silence of solitary seeing and listening will remedy what today has grown into a violent use and abuse of the beauty and fertility of the very earth that nourishes, supports, and directs us….

The Umbrian words for what the earth does are sustenta (“nourishes”) and governa, which in one translation means “directs,” “shows the way,” and “produce,” which together mean “brings forth.” These three verbs are what silent contemplation does and is for us: it nourishes us, directs us, and produces understanding and wisdom.

I cannot prove such an assertion, nor do I wish to, for that would be just another argument. I can only ask you to try it, experience it, and feel it. That is what St. Francis did in his own time and place. And something began to grow in him, slowly, like a plant. [3]

Wednesday 7 October 2026   Creation as Kin

Brazilian theologian and philosopher Leonardo Boff highlights how Francis of Assisi recognized the elements of creation as kin:

[Francis] walked over rocks with reverence in attention to the One who called himself a rock; he took snails off the roads so that they would not be trampled by people; he gave honey and wine to bees in the winter to keep them from dying of cold and hunger…. Kinship is more than human; it is cosmic….

What we observe here is another way of being in the world, one quite different from that of the modernity that we have criticized. The latter stands above things in order to possess and dominate them, whereas that of St. Francis is together with them, to love them and live with them as brothers and sisters at home. Even with regard to anxieties and pains “he did not regard them as pains but as sisters.” Death itself is greeted as a sister who leads us to life. The Franciscan universe is never dead, nor are things simply placed within reach of the possessive human grasp or tossed one alongside another, without interconnections between them. Everything makes up a grand symphony–and God is the conductor. All things are alive and personal; through intuition Francis discovered what we now know empirically, that all living things are brothers and sisters because they [nearly] have the same genetic code. Francis experienced this consanguinity in a mystical way. We all live together under the same parental roof. Because we are brothers and sisters we love one another; violence among family members is never justified. [1]

Sister Elizabeth Johnson notes how becoming aware of our kinship with all of creation leads to “deep incarnation”:  

The flesh that the Word of God became as a particular human being is part of the tree of evolving life on earth, which in turn is part of the vast body of the cosmos….

To catch this broad meaning, the Danish theologian Niels Gregersen has coined the phrase “deep incarnation.” It is starting to be used in theology to indicate the radical divine reach in Christ through human flesh all the way down into the living web of organic life with its growth and decay, amid the wider processes of evolving nature that beget and sustain life…. The saving God became a human being, who was part of the wider human community, which shares the membrane of life with other creatures, all made from cosmic material, and vulnerable to death and disintegration….

Deep incarnation understands John’s gospel to be saying that the sarx [flesh, material] that the Word of God became not only weds Jesus Christ to other human beings in the human species; it also reaches beyond us to join the incarnate one to the whole evolving biological world of living creatures and the cosmic dust of which they are composed. [2]

[1] Leonardo Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, Phillip Berryman, trans. (Orbis Books, 2002), 210–211.  

[2] Elizabeth Johnson, Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril (Orbis Books, 2018), 184–186.  

Tuesday 6 October 2026  Conversion Through Creation

Sister Ilia Delio describes Francis of Assisi as a nature mystic:  

Francis attained the heights of contemplation through his penetrating vision of creation…. Some regard him as “the first materialist” in the best sense of the word because of the way he looked on the material world—not for what it is but for how it is—God’s creation.

Francis has been described as a nature mystic, one who finds God in the vast and beautiful fields of nature. A nature mystic is one whose mystical experiences involve an appreciation of creation as God’s handiwork; nature manifests the divine. Francis’s nature mysticism included a consciousness of God, with the appropriate religious attitudes of awe and gratitude…. He took spontaneous joy in the material world, singing its praises like a troubadour poet. With a disarming sense of immediacy, he felt himself part of the family of the creation.

Delio describes how Francis’s conversion deepened as he became more aware of God’s presence in the material world:  

Coming to an awareness of God’s presence in creation was not an immediate experience for Francis but required growth in love. Conversion is a slow, lifelong process. It is a constant effort of moving away from sin-centered attitudes and behaviors toward God-centered relationships. With this movement from sin toward God, there is a gradual change in one’s consciousness or awareness of others and in one’s relationship to others. It took Francis a lifetime to realize his integral relationship to others, not only to humans but to all of creation. The Canticle of Creatures, which sings of Francis’s cosmic fraternity, his integral relationship to all the elements of the universe, was composed in 1225, one year before he died. It took Francis a lifetime to realize that he was truly brother to the sun, moon, stars, fire and water, that is, to the whole cosmos….

In his Major Legend, Bonaventure describes Francis’s relationship with Christ as one of deepening piety. The word “piety” (pietas) means “blood-related” or “family related.” It can be defined as an attitude of respect toward those to whom one is bound by ties of religion, consanguinity; of relationships between human beings. Bonaventure highlights the idea that, through his relationship with Christ, Francis came to realize his “family” relatedness to everything, including the tiny creatures of creation….

Bonaventure claims that everything in creation “spoke” to Francis of God. He came to “see” God’s goodness in every aspect of creation, so that everything ultimately led him to Christ, the Word of God. That Francis came to “see” God in creation points to the idea that Francis contemplated God in the things of creation. Contemplation is a penetrating gaze that gets to the truth of reality, and Francis came to “see” the truth of things by following the footprints of Jesus Christ.

Monday 5 October 2026  Rediscovering Our Connection to Nature 

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 desacralizing God’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).

[1] A classic definition of a sacrament is “an outward, visible sign of an inward, invisible grace.” Read more about the sacramental nature of reality in this Daily Meditation.   

[2] Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis, Ewert Cousins, trans. (Paulist Press, 1978).  

[3] Cynthia Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity (Shambhala, 2013), 72. 

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media, 2024), 50–52. 

Sunday 4 October 2026  God’s Resting Place

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.