12.23.08
St Francis and the Nativity
St Francis reinvents the presentation of the nativity.
As I get ready to get my manger and nativity figurines out my thoughts turn to St Francis. It is to Francis of Assisi that we owe the popularity and presentation of modern nativity scenes. Francis didn’t invent the creche scene or the living nativity, but his vision of the manger where Christ was born lasts to this day.
Caravaggio re-envisions the nativity with St Francis present.
Francis required his monks to create in the village of Greccio a cave with a manager (a straw filled feeding trough) where they would celebrate the feast of the nativity. There the monks held mass with the villagers, celebrating the Eucharist, Francis read the gospel that night and was the preacher. (Francis never officiated because he was never ordained a priest.) People didn’t dress to reenact the nativity but in the manager that night it was reported that people saw a vision of a perfect babe laying in the crib. Francis’s gift was to bring the nativity to the common people and to remind everyone that Christ the King was born into the most miserable poverty, born in a barn with a feeding trough for a crib. Francis wanted to remind the people of Italy that the Christ child was born without all of the usual comforts and necessities of a 13th century child. In imitation of Francis, nativity scenes began to be created first for churches and then for homes, often reflecting the world of a 13th century Italian peasant.
Bonaventure would later write in the official Life of Francis of Assisi:
that in order to excite the inhabitants of Grecio to commemorate the nativity of the Infant Jesus with great devotion, [St. Francis] determined to keep it with all possible solemnity; and lest he should be accused of lightness or novelty, he asked and obtained the permission of the sovereign Pontiff. Then he prepared a manger, and brought hay, and an ox and an ass to the place appointed.
In truth, Francis’ celebration of the nativity was controversial, almost as controversial as placing nativity scenes on public spaces today. The pope of the day did not like biblical plays or other similar celebrations, and Francis was skating on the edge again. A few years earlier, Francis was removed as the head of his own order, the Friar’s Minor. While the official sources say he relinquished it by his choice, this is unlikely to have been the case. Francis’ practices and rigor were unsustainable for an order of the size his Friar’s Minor had grown into and his system was not capable of basic governance. He spent his last years trying to influence his order and society in ways that were open to him, by the example of his life and practices. The nativity scenes in churches and homes across the world are one illustration of how effective the example of one life can be.
For more information, see these sites:
St Francis and the Christmas Creche
12.06.08
Peterson on Selah
Eugene Peterson’s interpretation of the meaning of the word selah.
Selah, scattered randomly through the Psalms seventy-one times, is the evidence. The word never occurs within the text itself but alongside as a notation in the margin. No one is sure of the exact meaning; scholars guess “pause for benediction” perhaps, or “louder here – fortissino!” What is beyond guesswork is that it is telltale evidence of liturgy. Like detectives sifting through the clues we find Selah; from it we deduce not a crime but a community. People were gathered together in prayer by and in these psalms. Congregations were assembled in worship. These prayers were not from the pen of solitary mystics; these are the trained voices of choirs lifting their voices in lament and praise, in petition and adoration.
These psalms teach us to pray are, all of them, prayers of a people gathered in community before God in worship. Some of them most certainly originated in solitude, and all of them have been continued in solitude. But in the form in which they come to us, the only form in which they come to us, and therefore in the way they serve as our school of prayer, they are the prayers of a community before God in worship. Prayer is fundamentally liturgical. Selah, untranslated and untranslatable, strewn throughout the Psalms, will not let us forget it. If the meaning is an enigma, its use is clear: Selah directed people who were together in prayer to do something or other together. Our prayer book, by the time we get our hands on it, has all these liturgical scribbles in the margins. Biblically, we are not provided with a single prayer for private devotions. The community in prayer, not the individuals in prayer, is basic and primary. The Americanization of prayer has reveresed this clear biblical (and human!) order. Individuals don’t “make up” the community, they are produced by it. The Psalms return us to the beginning, the original matrix of humanity and spirituality.”
Eugene Peterson,(1989) Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer. HarperSanFransico, p. 83-84.
Some of the most solitary sounding psalms have choir directions in their prologue. Of course some of our hymns sound solitary or like a two-way conversation, but aren’t; ‘Amazing Grace‘ comes to mind, as does ‘Here I am Lord‘. The hymns of the Hymnal as poems have been printed in Poems of Grace: Texts of the Hymnal 1982. Perhaps these solitary sounding psalms were appropriate for a choir because the choir led the congregation in prayer rather then the choir singing instead of the congregation. Within the Temple, everyone may have been trained to take part in the choir as part of their temple training.
I think its interesting that the Book of Common Prayer strips selah out of the pslams, presumably because its shouldn’t be pronounced. That seems correct for a liturgical book. Yet, the service sheets (fliers) that people are given on Sunday with the collect, readings, and psalm does include selah, and the congregation says it. Why does the service sheet include it?
