Did you ever hear about the time Saint Francis walked from Assisi to Egypt? It was 994 years ago at the very moment that the Sultan of Egypt was engaged in mortal combat with the Fifth Christian Crusade.
Now it probably took about a year to walk that distance into a war zone so fierce that the Sultan had decreed that anyone who brought him the detached head of a Christian would 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? the Sultan asked.
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.
It was an unfair imbalance for a diplomatic negotiation. But Francis did not arrive as a diplomat, but as someone who loved that Sultan and wanted 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 geopolitical conflicts.
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.
Peace, as Saint Francis teaches us, begins and ends with dying to all my self-serving power grabs, and loving the one who is right in front of me, who has been cast as my enemy.
But its so much easier to hold dearly to a grudge and to speculate on my next act of revenge than to forgive my brother for whom I hold a grudge. My grandmother used to speak of Irish Alzheimer's: where you forget everything except the grudges.
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.”
Now that’s a prayer for peace.
