The legend of St. Francis and
the Wolf at left is a Capuchin Franciscans’ response to today’s rural and urban
problems. The wolf can be any problem that presses the people into a fear-
based fight or flight response; a problem which the city consistently fails to
solve, and which tears them apart day and night without mercy. Whatever is
“tearing a community apart” – that is its Wolf.
The Wolf killed to satisfy its
hunger, but it did so in a lawless and uncontrolled way bringing judgment on
itself and fear to the city. Similarly the Wolf that afflicts a given urban
community is generally the lawless meeting of an out of control need.
St. Francis represents the
Christian exercising God’s mandated authority in the name of Jesus Christ and
working with the cross in view. The Wolf is made both lawful and peaceful
through the exercise of spiritual authority and its needs are met through creative
problem solving.
St. Francis demonstrates
personal mastery and an approach to the Wolf that is entirely different from
that of the townsfolk of Gubbio. Francis neither fights nor flees. He has no
fear and does not resort to a fight or flight based solution. He faces and
confronts the Wolf in order to peacefully master it. Urban problems need
to faced calmly without retreat from the city on one hand or strong arm law and
order approaches on the other. Reactivity should not determine response. Rather
faith in the gospel will guide the response. Faith-based mastery is the desire
personal stance rather than fear-based fight- or-flight.
St. Francis demonstrates that
even the worst and most lethal of problems have an imaginative, peaceful and
truly beautiful solution. He does not see the Wolf as a dramatic
problem needing a drastic solution or as a big problem requiring a massive and
expensive solution. For St. Francis the Wolf is a moral problem requiring
a gospel solution.
There is no relationship between
the size of the problem and the size of the solution or the nastiness of the
problem and the severity required in its solution. Big problems sometimes have
easy but unseen solutions such as the terrible plague of scurvy that was
stopped by eating fresh fruit or deaths in operating theatres that declined
when Lister discovered germs and told doctors to wash their hands.
Similarly quite
deadly problems can sometimes have beautiful and almost quaint solutions.
An urban squatter community in a particular Two-Thirds world city was being
torn apart by unusual levels of community violence; so a Christian worker went
in and did an ethnographic study of the possible causes. It emerged that the
women, who had moved to the city, were without gardens and were bored and
without the things that formerly gave meaning to their existence. To fill the
void some of them had resorted to playing a rather lethal game of "my
husband is tougher than your husband" that had got out of control. When
the women were introduced to crafts that could earn them some money and give
them self-esteem and meaning, the violence subsided and their normal
peaceful pattern of life resumed. This is just one example of how ugly, brutal
, apparently complex and in this case lethal problems can have simple,
beautiful and spiritual solutions.
I believe that peace-making
should be solution-focused rather than problem-focused otherwise we can get
bogged down in "the paralysis of analysis". St. Francis goes out to
confront the Wolf convinced that God and the gospel will give him an answer.
St. Francis did not go out there to psycho-analyze the Wolf or analyze its
pattern of killing or assess whether it had a vitamin deficiency or which
species of wolf it was. He went out there to "solve the Wolf problem for
once and for all". He sought peace not information. While data collection
and ethnography can be immensely useful (as in the squatter settlement story
above) it must always be gathered in the context pf actually making peace and
solving urban problems. We need to proceed to the solution as quickly as
possible and St. Francis does just that.
Christian urban peace-making
also addresses the needs of both parties. In the story at left there is a
meeting of mutual needs in a climate of mercy. The wolf if he is to change
needs food. Indeed we are to feed our enemies! "If your enemy is
hungry give him something to eat". The city if it is to be merciful needs
a guarantee of peace. The two needs are met by having the penitent wolf fed by
the city, so that its formerly out of control needs are met in peaceful
and lawful ways
Just covenants are central to
peace-making and one is forged here between the Wolf and the town of
Gubbio. Formal peace-making ceremonies such as that described in the full
version of the story in Blaiklock's book bring a sense of closure to the
process and enable a sense of confidence and normalcy to be achieved. Such
covenants should be clear, fair and well-celebrated.
Finally the story tells us that
once a problem is tamed it can even be a friend and more than that it can give
glory to God.
The St. Francis and The Wolf
parable leads us to consider actively engaging in Christian peace-making in the
urban environment. If we seek to love others in the name of Christ and seek a
just peace the answer to the problem will be given to us by God. The very act
of seeking to be a peace-maker is creative. Therefore we seek to find peaceful,
just, Christian, creative, mastery based and solution-focused answers to the
problems that tear cities apart.
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