REMEMBERING ST FRANCIS, PATRON SAINT OF ANIMALS

IT will be Easter on March 31, the anniversary of the resurrection of Jesus, which is the foundational event of Christian belief.

- RENUKA NARAYANAN

After Jesus, his parents and his apostles, the Christian figure arguably best known to educated Indians is St Francis of Assisi, the Italian mystic and poet. It was he who invented the first-known nativity scene, depicting the birth of Jesus in a manger. He first set it up at Greccio near Assisi around 1220 CE to celebrate Christmas. Most of us in India have seen such tableaux and have found them sweetly similar in spirit to the jhanki or cradle tableaux set up in homes and temples for Sri Krishna's birthday on Janmashtami. A famous prayer attributed to St Francis has admirers from other faiths for its universal message. It goes:

Lord make me an instrument of your peace/ Where there is hatred let me sow love/ Where there is injury, pardon/ Where there is doubt, faith/ Where there is despair, hope/ Where there is darkness, light/ And where there is sadness, joy.

O divine master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console/To be understood as to understand/ To be loved as to love/ For it is in giving that we receive/ It is in pardoning that we are pardoned/ And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

He is venerated by different denominations of the church such as the Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans. The present Pope chose to be named after St Francis, who has been declared the patron saint of ecology by the Catholic church due to his love for Nature. He regularly talked to birds and animals; even, apparently, taming a fierce wolf. His 'Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon' praises God's creation.