Reflection by Br. Cristofer Fernandez, OFM Conv.
This year, the Franciscan family and the wider Church family commemorates a triple anniversary—the Jubilee Year of Hope, the 10th Anniversary of Laudato Si’, and the 800th Anniversary of the Canticle of the Creatures. Let’s consider the depth of our foundational Franciscan hymnology – St. Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures – in relation to these other celebrations of 2025 and beyond.
Understanding the Medieval Backdrop of the Canticle
Firstly, most people note how the Canticle identifies Creation as kin, not as object. It is sung praise from the perspective of a man who was an aficionado of knightly chivalry. It’s not a utilitarian inventory of God’s creatures but rather a hymn of praise to God through all creatures and a warning to humanity to live in right relationship with all, offering in a literal sense, orthodoxy or “right praise.” For Francis, “sister mother earth” was an allusion to a sacred image of the whole community of Creation. His calling non-human creatures sister or brother is a form of spiritual deference, resonant of a courtly sense of family. And this really troubled the early friars of the order. They were baffled by Francis’ Creation mysticism, because never before had a saint related to other creatures as he did. They must have thought he was truly a weirdo! Saints of great virtue had other animals serve and obey them, but not quite in the same miraculous virtue as Francis who not only had an affection for other creatures, but they too reciprocated with loving tenderness. His was a mysticism of ‘true materiality.’ From the warm & fuzzy to the cold & wet, the brothers were existentially challenged by the kinship of St. Francis with the natural world.
A Song of Hope during a Jubilee Year
Important for us to appreciate today is that this as a song of hope, born not in ease but burst out of Francis’ hardship with sickness and nearing death—discovering hope in suffering. In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans (NABRE 5:3-5), we are exhorted to “boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.” In Pope Francis’ opening bull for the Jubilee year (Spes non confundit/Hope does not disappoint) we find three echoes from Francis’ Canticle that also remind us of the encyclical teachings of Laudato Si’, On Care for our Common Home:
- Endurance or spiritual resilience in the rhythms of life – Pope Francis laments our loss of patience in the ecology of daily life, our rushing past nature’s rhythms and our brushing past one another in our capitalistic penchant for productivity or at times with our inflated craving for instant gratification. He calls patience a “daughter of hope” in his invitation to reflect on Creation’s tempo and tenor. Francis’ vision of Creation as family resonates with the Pope’s critique of speed, exploitation, and disregard for natural rhythms. St. Francis exemplifies patient endurance of life’s ebbs and flows. Whether attending to the needs of Brothers in community, helping with chores and gardening, attending to and accepting his declining health, or paying attention to Brother Sun’s rising and setting, Sister Moon’s calm, and the seasons’ flow, we can learn from his life of intentional and sacred pauses for prayer, humble observation, and creative engagement.
- Faith hallmarked by the daily pilgrimage of encounter– When Pope Francis opened the Jubilee Year he described it as a collective pilgrimage of hope we embark on as Church, using the active language of encounter: opening doors, reconciling with others, venturing out and leaving comfort— all bearing Franciscan overtones. St. Francis’ goal was to walk as pilgrim and stranger all his religious life, opening doors of peace and solidarity with lepers, with the Sultan, and with non-human creatures.
- Justice as the exercise of hope – Pope Francis names addressing impoverishment and hunger, ecological debt and debt forgiveness generally. St. Francis saw evangelical poverty not as curse but as a virtue relational solidarity. Francis of Rome and Francis of Assisi both root hope in justice for the least and the land. A posture of humility before all Creation and our shared common home can allow the Spirit to convict us upon learning about environmental and social injustices and help us reflect in our hearts why working towards peacemaking and the renewal of social friendship, universal fraternity, and the care for Creation is not peripheral but intimately tied to Gospel hope. As social psychology suggests, hope is a function of struggle. Where am I in the struggles of my community and local ecosystem? Am I even in the struggle for the common good?
Building on his predecessor, Pope Leo XIV elaborates in his message for this year’s Season of Creation and the 10th Annual Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation that we’re called to sow Seeds of Peace and Hope in our lives as Catholic Christians. Like seeds, hope begins small and hidden, needing to be nurtured with patience. Pope Leo reminds us that Creation is the garden entrusted to us “to till and to keep” (Gen 2:15). St. Francis lived as cultivator of peace, tending relationships with all beings. The Franciscan cord of integral ecology teaches us that caring for Creation and justice for the poor is inseparable: peace comes when we heal both soil and society. The seeds we plant in our lives—acts of (social/ecological) care, kindness, reconciliation—grow into a peace that is larger than us.
Singing in the right key
In the Canticle, Francis praises even “Sister Death” — showing hope that transcends fear of mortality. Spes non confundit echoes that hope is purified by suffering. The Canticle of Brother Sun is cosmic and universal, reflecting a relational paradigm beyond us in the cosmos and heavens and including us in the sub-lunar dimensions of Creation. Both Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV extend the Franciscan vision—ecological care, social justice, debt relief, and peacemaking— suggesting that hope is not just for “me” but for the whole Creation. This Jubilee year of triple anniversaries invites us to live Francis’ Canticle: to let hope sing by our lives, to sow seeds of peace on the pilgrimage of life and walk as strangers no longer.
So, whether we’re planting literal seeds (i.e. gardens, trees, acts of environmental restoration), planting relational seeds (i.e. forgiveness, reconciliation, works of mercy), or planting communal seeds (i.e. advocating for justice, caring for the poor, protecting Sister Mother Earth), we can all play our part in the choir of Creation. The world we are “remaking” and repairing must honor the sacred tension, the sacred question (who do you say that I am) constantly renewed by the Creator Spirit that holds the chords of existence taut by God’s dynamic love—the grey dynamism between divine justice and merciful love—on which the song of Creation hinges, the hidden center of the canticle of life where her musical chords reverberate the ode of perfect joy. The perfect joy experienced by God’s fool, Francis of Assisi, in his exclaiming that “Love is not loved,” in bleating “with tenderness at Greccio’s crib,” in revelry considered “inappropriate” by his confreres, in the animals that revered him, in his composing a mystical Canticle of Brother Sun in the throes of pain, in asking for almond cookies in his last illness, in the laughter and tears that Francis saw as “equally valid functions of the love that flooded his heart” (cf. Mother Mary Frances, PCC). May we walk as pilgrims of hope, singing with Brother Sun and Sister Moon, sowing seeds of peace and hope in God’s garden of Creation.
Br. Cristofer Fernandez serves as co-director of Assumption Food Pantry & Soup Kitchen, Franciscan Northside Ministries in Syracuse, NY and is an adjunct professor of Religion & Ecology, Religious Studies Department at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY.