EASY TO ADMIRE, DIFFICULT TO FOLLOW | KAIROS GLOBAL | SEPTEMBER 2026

Author: Fr Patrick Kannadan OFV Conv

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Intro: Fr Patrick Kannadan OFV Conv. reflects on the themes of sonship and fatherhood from the life of St Francis, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

A Name the World Loves

Francis is easy to love. One only has to say his name, and at once a whole world gathers around it: a man clothed in poverty as if it were light; a brother of birds, wind, and lepers; a saint who seems to have carried peace through the earth with bare hands. Even the modern world, suspicious of the Church and weary of authority, still looks at Francis with tenderness. In him it senses something it has not ceased to desire: a freedom without cynicism, a poverty without bitterness, a joy unarmed by possession, a fraternity that does not humiliate.

And yet this is precisely where the misunderstanding begins. Francis is easy to admire, but difficult to follow. Francis, who can be turned into a symbol of ecology, or reduced to a patron saint of gentleness, is not yet the real Francis. The real Francis is not simply a lover of creation, nor a poet of simplicity, nor even a radical of poverty. He is a man who allowed himself to be stripped – stripped not only of things, but of the self he had learned to inhabit, of borrowed greatness, inherited ambitions, and carefully guarded certainties. Beneath all that, he discovered the deepest truth of his life: before he was a saint, before he was a brother, before he became a father, he was a son.

The Son who Left before Leaving

To understand Francis, it helps to stand for a moment beside another son: the prodigal son of the Gospel. In asking for his inheritance while his father is still alive, the younger son reveals the wound beneath his rebellion: he wants what comes from the father without wanting the father himself. He chooses gift over communion, freedom over belonging. In that sense, he leaves home before he ever sets out on the road. And once he goes, he becomes not only distant from his father, but estranged from himself. That is the deeper tragedy of sin: not simply that one does wrong, but that one forgets who one is. Yet at the moment of awakening, Scripture says something extraordinary: he came to himself (Luke 15:17). Beneath all the ruin, something remained alive – the memory of home, and more deeply still, the father’s memory of him.

Francis, too, knew something of that far country. Born in Assisi to the wealthy cloth merchant Pietro di Bernardone, he grew up inside a ready-made future. He loved songs, feasts, fine clothes, and the promise of becoming someone. He dreamed of honour and knighthood, but war, imprisonment, and illness slowly undid the life he had imagined for himself. The world that had promised him identity could no longer sustain it.

The Nakedness of Assisi

Grace does not merely correct our plans; often it dismantles them. Francis’ conversion did not come in a single flash. It came as a long unmaking. The young man who once wanted to be praised began instead to seek lonely places, silence, and prayer. In his Testament, Francis says with striking simplicity that when he was ‘in sins,’ the sight of lepers had been bitter to him; but the Lord led him among them, and what had seemed bitter became sweetness of soul and body. He does not describe himself as a hero of compassion. He says only that the Lord led him where he would never have gone alone.

Then came San Damiano. Before the crucifix in the ruined church, Francis heard the words: ‘Go and repair my house, which, as you see, is falling into ruin.’ At first he thought only of stones and walls. But God was already doing something deeper. The true house being dismantled and rebuilt was Francis himself.

That became visible in the public drama before the bishop of Assisi. In the midst of conflict with his father over money and property, Francis removed the clothes he had received from him and returned them, declaring that from now on he could say freely, ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’ It was not theatre. It was a birth. He was not merely renouncing possessions; he was surrendering an identity. The son of Bernardone was being stripped away so that another son might emerge, the one whose life would no longer be secured by inheritance, status, or family ambition, but by the mercy of God.

The Father Remembers

The prodigal, when he decides to return, still does not know how to return as a son. He can imagine himself only as a servant. That is perhaps the saddest part of the parable: one may desire the father and yet no longer remember what it means to be his child. One may hunger for home and still believe oneself fit only for wages.

But the father remembers. The son has forgotten his place; the father has not. The son prepares a speech of shame; the father interrupts him with an embrace, a robe, a ring, and a feast. His identity was never safe in his own memory. It was safe in the father’s heart.

So, it was for Francis. He discovered that the truth of his life was not preserved by family status, public esteem, or even his own spiritual effort. It was held in the mercy of God. Christian faith pushes this even further: we do not become children of God by merit or natural right, but in Christ, the eternal Son, who shares with us His own relationship to the Father. Sonship is first a gift before it becomes a task.

A Son becomes Brother

This is why Francis becomes difficult. To live as a son means refusing to build one’s identity on possession, success, control, or domination. It means living with open hands before the Father.

Francis embraced poverty not because misery is holy in itself, but because poverty became for him the posture of a son. The son does not possess to be. He receives to live. And from sonship there arose fraternity. Francis did not gather followers around an ideology; he called brothers. For if there is one Father, then no brother may claim the throne over another. Fraternity is simply what sonship looks like when it enters the world.

This is also the meaning of Franciscan minority. To be a lesser brother is not merely to be humble in a moral sense. It is to refuse mastery, to renounce the temptation to stand above, to live without the need to secure oneself through power. Francis had discovered that the son does not need a throne. He has a father.

The Strange Fatherhood of Francis

And here the deepest paradox appears: Francis became a father precisely by remaining a son. Spiritual fatherhood is possible only where there is first spiritual sonship. Otherwise, fatherhood curdles into possession, projection, or vanity.

Francis became father not by making others depend on him, but by giving them room to live before God. He did not create admirers; he formed brothers. He did not gather lives around himself; he pointed them beyond himself to Christ and the Gospel. This is why his fatherhood was so tender. He could welcome the weak because he knew himself welcomed. He could live among lepers, sinners, and failures without fear, because his identity no longer depended on standing apart from them. He fathered not from a throne, but from the ground.

The White Garment of Baptism

Beneath all of this lies the grace of baptism. Baptism is not a religious ceremony at the edges of life; it is the birth of Christian sonship. There the old self is drowned, the new garment is given, and a person is named again in Christ. Francis did not invent a holiness beyond baptism. He made baptism visible. His poverty was baptismal; his fraternity was baptismal; his whole life became an unveiled baptism, a life lived from the truth that one belongs first to God.

The Long Road Home

Yet even this sonship is not possessed without struggle. It remains a hope, a road, a slow conformity to the Son. Francis’ later years were not romantic. They were marked by sickness, misunderstanding, and finally by the wounds of Christ impressed upon his own body. The nearer he drew to the Son, the more his life took the shape of the cross. But this did not undo his sonship; it revealed its deepest truth.

And so, Francis still disturbs us, perhaps because he reminds us that the Christian life is not first about achievement, usefulness, or even religious success. It is about return. It is about allowing oneself to be found, reclothed, and restored. Francis became a father because he first learned to stand before the Father with empty hands, as a son.

To admire Francis is easy. To follow him is something else. It is to accept the harder grace of becoming poor enough, small enough, and truthful enough to hear again the oldest words spoken over our lives: beloved son, beloved daughter. Only from there can fraternity be born, authority be purified, and the Church become once more a house of those who know that, after all their wandering, they have been brought home.

A former Professor of Philosophy at Bonaventure University, Rome, Fr Patrick Kannadan, OFM Conv. presently serves as Province Secretary and Provincial Councillor of the Province of St Maximilian Kolbe, India.