One of the perks of studying for the priesthood in Rome was the gita, an Italian word meaning ‘holiday’ or ‘trip’. We students rarely returned home in our seven-year stint out there, so we were given a list of places to visit during holidays, like Subiaco, the birthplace of Benedictine monasticism, Fiesole near Florence, where we would stay with the ‘Blue Nuns’, and many other places with religious resonance. But the most popular places for gitas were the Umbrian towns and villages like Perugia and, above all, Assisi — home of Sts Francis and Clare. The local stone and light, and the undulating country with delightful hill-top towns, make Umbria very attractive, but Assisi and the Franciscan shrines in Umbria will always have a special place in my heart.
Once I had rather an unexpected adventure in Assisi when on gita with some of my students during my time as rector of the venerable English college. I suddenly found that I just could not move, and had dreadful pains in my back. So the students with me went to someone they thought was a local doctor — but he turned out to be a local vet! Eventually I found myself in a cottage hospital in a small room with one other, very sick friar who was obviously near the end of his life. By his bedside was another friar saying the Rosary, which I joined with them in praying. At the end the friar came over to me and asked me how I was, and from under his habit he produced a bottle of wine and invited me to have a drink, which I gratefully accepted. Surely, I thought at the time, it was right that, in Assisi, sickness, prayer and enjoyment of a glass of wine somehow go together.
Saint Francis made his mark not only in Assisi but also throughout Umbria and beyond. The village of Greccio, about ten miles northwest of Rieti, is a particularly significant Franciscan site, because what happened there in 1223 has a great deal to do with the images we have of the birth of Jesus at the first Christmas. According to one of Francis’s earliest biographers, Friar Thomas of Celano, about two weeks before Christmas Francis asked his dear friend Giovanni from Greccio to set up a scene of the birth of Christ in a manger. He told Giovanni it would be good and edifying ‘to have set before our bodily eyes in some way the inconveniences of his infant needs, how he lay in a manger, how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he lay upon the hay where he had been placed’. Giovanni was enthralled by the poetic vision Francis had described. Many people set to work and Francis was delighted with what they achieved, because now he had a way of showing people how small, poor and humble God had appeared on that first Christmas night in Bethlehem.
It snowed on Christmas Eve, which meant the valley was unusually silent. Franciscan brothers from nearby communities came to Greccio, as did many of the country people; the candles and torches they brought really brightened the ‘night that has lighted up all the days and years with its gleaming star’. Francis himself was the deacon for the midnight Mass; the way he read the Gospel and preached about Christ’s birth in Bethlehem evidently had a remarkable effect on many of those who heard him. He wanted to show people that the crib scene is not just about shepherds and wise men from the East, but also about a child born among the cobwebs and hay, surrounded by the heavy breath of animals. And he did this with the first ‘live crib’, in which the population of a rural valley in Italy brought the Gospel to life.
There is no mention of an ox or an ass in any of the Gospels. The only animals mentioned are the sheep the shepherds tended in the fields, and none of the Gospels says that the shepherds brought their sheep with them. What Francis and his friend the nobleman Giovanni of Greccio staged on Christmas Eve in 1223 has been portrayed ever since in paintings and carvings, on calendars and Christmas cards, even in the carols we sing. This was the way that extraordinary young man from Italy helped people realise that Jesus of Nazareth was born not in a noble palace or in any kind of comfort, but in extremely humble surroundings. His biographer puts it poetically: Francis ‘wanted the poor and hungry to sit at the tables of the rich, and oxen and asses, the humble beasts who had warmed the cold body of the baby Jesus with their breath, to be given more than the usual amount of grain and hay’. He also wanted to ask the emperor to make a law commanding people ‘to scatter corn and other grains along the roads so that the birds might have an abundance of food on such a great solemnity, especially our sisters the larks’. The animals were welcome there because Francis thought the birth of Jesus had an effect not just on the human race but on every living creature, indeed on the whole of creation. A powerful idea!
Saint Francis also wanted to share his own experience of visiting the Holy Land with people who would probably never go there. In fact, to this day the Catholic Church entrusts care of its shrines there to the Franciscans. I was there myself just a year ago. It is obviously moving, and a privilege, to visit the places made sacred by the presence of Jesus 2,000 years ago, and a constant stream of pilgrims ever since. But I came away with a heavy heart, because of the continuing tensions, which mean that even now most Christians in Israel and the Palestinian-controlled territories cannot travel a few miles to celebrate the birth of Christ in Bethlehem itself. The political difficulties are myriad but any solution must create space for Christians, as well as Jews and Muslims, in the city that is holy for them all.
The next time you see one of those scenes of the birth of Christ in a manger, or your children or grandchildren in the Christmas play at school, perhaps you will think of the remarkable man who brought it to life for the first time in Greccio. Saint Francis of Assisi had a knack of making distant realities seem remarkably close, and we should be grateful to him for that. But he was also a man of vision and courage: four years before the ‘Bethlehem’ celebration in Greccio, he had travelled to Egypt to meet the caliph, Sultan Malik el-Kamil. It may well be that, at the outset, he saw his mission as an attempt to convert the caliph, which would fit the mood of the times, but what resulted was an honest discussion, and the caliph received him with kindness because he recognised in Francis a man of God. In this sense one could say he was an early exponent of dialogue between religions, but for him and the caliph it was essential to be able to speak the truth, and neither expected the other to hide his true beliefs.
I think that needs to be the spirit of all dialogue, and in a particular way the dialogue — or trialogue — between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land today. The spirit of Saint Francis, that honest, cheerful and holy man of God, could bring the distant reality of peace in that Land much closer.