The doors were locked. They were petrified that someone would crucify them too.
When on the evening of that first day of the week, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, "Peace be with you.” And he breathed on them with the Holy Spirit. The Breath of God brought Peace.
Eight hundred and eight years ago, the thirty-seven year old father of a well-established reform of religious life and of the Church as a whole, walked to Damietta, Egypt to see the Sultan of that land at the very moment that the great King was engaged in mortal combat with the Fifth Christian Crusade.
Now it probably took about a year to walk from Assisi to Damietta and Saint Francis and his companions would have had to pass through modern day Syria along the way, perhaps traversing the very soil over which men fight today.
Arriving in Egypt, he witnessed a ferocity of war no less evident than in our own time, as the Sultan of Egypt, Malik-al-Kamil, the nephew of Saladin the Great had decreed that anyone who brought him the detached head of a Christian should be rewarded with a single golden coin.
St. Bonaventure, in his Major Life of St. Francis, tells us how the Saint and his companion just walked right into the enemy camp, where they were predictably placed in chains, beaten and dragged before the Sultan.
And then it began. Like Pilate before the Lord, the great Sultan had no idea who was before him.
Who sent you? the Sultan asked.
God. Francis replied.
And why did he send you?
To save you and to teach you the truth, he answered.
“When the Sultan saw his enthusiasm and courage,” Bonaventure tells us, “he listened to him willingly and pressed him to stay with him.”
Here you have this medieval Goliath of a Sultan with an army so powerful he and his brother had conquered the whole Middle East, but he was conquered by the simplicity of the poverello, saying pace e bene...God sent me to save your soul.
It was an unfair imbalance for a diplomatic negotiation. The Sultan probably saw Francis as a delegate of Cardinal Pelagius and his troops who would seek to negotiate a cease fire or even the return of the Holy sites or the surrender of Egypt.
But Francis did not arrive as a diplomat seeking an audience with the Great Ayyubid Sultan Malik al-Kamel Naser al-Din Abu al-Ma'ali Muhammed seeking political advantage. No. Francis arrived as a man who so loved Malik that he sought to obtain his soul for God.
In other words, Francis saw Peace not as the prize at the conclusion of an effective political negotiation, but as the opportunity to love the one who had been cast as his enemy, to humanize him and recognize him as his brother.
Which is why his example is so good for me. I am no diplomat. My entire knowledge of international diplomacy comes from observing Jed Bartlett and Leo Magarry in the Situation room of the West Wing. I, frankly, have no idea how to solve the geopolitical intricacies of the war in Syria.
I am not a diplomat. I am a Priest. But as a Priest I know the road to true peace is to love and to pray.
Mother Teresa used to say: “Smile five times a day at someone you don't really want to smile at; do it for peace. Let us radiate the peace of God and so light His light and extinguish in the world and in the hearts of all men all hatred and love for power.”
Or, as Dorothy Day used to say, “My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and love with you all, in God’s love.”
“The Spirit” Pope Francis taught last year, “frees hearts chained by fear…[the Spirit] does not revolutionize life around us, but changes our hearts. It does not free us from the weight of our problems, but liberates us within so that we can face them.”
“By the working of the Holy Spirit, joy is reborn and peace blossoms in our hearts.”
So pray for peace. Even when you are afraid. Even when you are angry. Pray for peace. And listen for that knock on all the doors you have locked. It is the Lord, who breathes his Spirit upon you and gives you the peace the world cannot give.
