One philosopher of religion said that if you look at the history of all religions, they begin with one massive misperception: they begin by making a fatal distinction. They start to discriminate between the sacred and the profane, and this is a bad way to start. And then you put all your emphasis on going to the sacred spaces, creating sacred time, sacred actions, leaving ninety-eight percent of life unsacred. This is at the heart of the problem.
This is why so many people have such a hard time encountering the holy, and why we’ve massively produced, in the last few hundred years, people who call themselves atheists or agnostics, but really mostly people who are just bored with the idea of religion or even spirituality. It feels like nonsense talk, feels like people talking about nothing. And these are not insincere people. They are people who were told only to look in one place for God. Usually, I have to say as a clergyman, places that are controlled by the clergy, all right? I always cynically say, I think it has something to do with job—performance or job maintenance—that we tell them to look our way, and they will find God; to use our words, and they will find God.
What Francis did, and I’m going to say this at the very beginning, he refused to exclude anything.
That’s at the heart of it. There’s no exclusionary impulse. He had a genius for not eliminating the negative, not eliminating the negative, but incorporating it. Now, you’re going to see that in a thousand ways. He goes to the edge. He goes to the bottom. He kisses the leper. He loves the poor. He wears patches on the outside of his habit so everybody will know that that’s what he’s like on the inside. He doesn’t hide from his shadow. And so much of religion has, in effect, without knowing it or meaning to, has taught us to deny our shadow, which forces us into a fatal split from ourselves, a fatal split from reality, and that that continual distinction between the holy people and the unholy people.
And so, you end up with what we largely have to this day, and I don’t need to even illustrate it, which is religion as exclusion; religion which decides what actions are inherently holy and inherently sinful.