St Francis of Assisi

Dear Hacker News crowd, I am from Assisi. I was born and raised there. At age ~30 I left Italy and joined a then-small AWS as their first employee in Europe, and ended up living abroad for ~13 years. I now live in Venice, Italy.

If you're curious about Assisi, please ask. I'll do my best to answer.

Anyhow, St. Francis always struck me as one of the very nicest stories in Christianity. Whenever my Mom was kind to animals, someone always compared her to him.

   Let the entire man be seized with fear; let the whole world tremble; let heaven exult when Christ, the Son of the Living God, is on the altar in the hands of the priest. O admirable height and stupendous condescension! O humble sublimity! O sublime humility! that the Lord of the universe, God and the Son of God, so humbles Himself that for our salvation He hides Himself under a morsel of bread.

https://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/wosf/wosf13.htm

What I think about sainthood now is that "they forgave you when you won," as many of them could have been condemned as zealots and heretics, and many of them have what are effectively cults. But if you made enough of a mark, the church authorities had to weigh the balance and decide whether to ignore you as a heretic, or cannonize you as a saint. Not much has changed about the world today, and some of my favourite modern writers could have been said to have lived similar lives to saints.

What I have come to appreciate about that religion is related to St. Francis and the Franciscans, which is being in nature and relating to it. That is, without language or self, which seems heavy on the woo, but it can make stark the smallness and absurdities of our material world and the suffering we impose on each other as the effect of our opinions and perceptions filtered through ideas of self. It's meaningful that rivers and trees in nature don't care. The Japanese "forest bathing," is related, where I think people really benefit from being free from their own judgments of themselves and the percieved judgments of others.

Where it relates to Francis is that animals absolutely notice and behave differently around people who have let go of their self-ness(?) and wants, since "wanting" in nature necessarily means predation to every other being. Life consumes life, and something expressing want of any kind is going to eat something so you don't want to be around it. I suspect that hunger is something repellant to everything in nature, as you don't want to be around anything that is expressing it. If you've ever heard someone described as "a bit thirsty," it means to avoid them. There's some deep psychosexual stuff going on with that bit of slang, imo, but the story of Francis was how he had given up that need.

People certainly let go of that want and hunger of spirit without the Christian path, just ask those Buddhist monks how they live with tigers. But if someone wanted to emmulate Jesus's example from those stories in scripture, I think the stories of Francis communing with animals are an example of someone who was able to understand that facet of Jesus' presence, and to present himself to animals without the want and hunger that defines the self in many religions, and like the lions laying down in front of the martyrs thrown to them, the acceptance by other animal beings was evidence of faith curing that spiritual hunger. The message in the canonization of Francis is, we are not merely our hungers and thirsts, we are more, and we can exercise it by emmulating Christ's example as a map - or just find a way to figure it out for yourself through some other path.

If you are in fact a genius, consider that your odds of being cannonized as one are pretty low, just do good work and make things people want that relieve their suffering, and maybe just keep your head down for a bit, as one gets the impression the inquisitors these days are restless.