While I Have Breath
While I have breath I will praise the Lord: I will make melody to my God while I have my being. – Psalm 146:2 (BBE)
If you’ve ever sung any version of the hymn, “All Creatures of Our God and King,” you were singing a paraphrase of “The Canticle of the Creatures,” composed by Francis of Assisi in the early 13th century. Francis’s mystical kinship with the natural world shimmers in every line. So does his awed gratitude for the gifts that his siblings—Fire and Sun, Moon and Water, Wind and Earth—had given him all his life.
A life that was painfully ebbing away when he wrote the Canticle. Desperately ill, emaciated, nearly blind, he was lovingly tended by his friend Clare and her community of nuns who’d rigged up a lean-to for him in the garden of their ramshackle convent. But there wasn’t much they could do about Sister Icy Wind, who visited his bones by day, or Brother Rat, who chewed on his feet all night.
One of his medieval biographers claimed that Francis composed the Canticle in that miserable hut as an antidote to the self-pity he’d begun to nurse. But I don’t believe for a minute that Francis praised God as a kind of moral exercise to buck himself up or teach himself a lesson about becoming a better person.
It wasn’t to get his mind off the Rat. Francis praised God in his frailty and pain for the same reasons he praised God when he was stronger and well: because God is good, the world is beautiful, life is a relentless gift, and love never ends. He praised God because he still had breath in his body, and what is breath for if not praise?
Prayer
Give me, O God, a joy no circumstance can alter, a heart to sing your praise.
About the AuthorMary Luti is a long time seminary educator and pastor, author of Teresa of Avila’s Way and numerous articles, and founding member of The Daughters of Abraham, a national network of interfaith women’s book groups.