The Spiritual Legacy of Francis of Assisi

“What are servants of God good for, if not for moving the hearts of men and elevating them to spiritual joy?” St. Francis

“I’ve come to help you all. Where can I find the best beer and the most beautiful women?” Drukpa Kunley

“I tried going to hell, but the path there was so packed with hypocritical priests that I had to turn back.” Drukpa Kunley

For once, here’s an episode about individuals who didn’t build their reputation by killing. Considering much of recorded history is the history of warfare and politics, of glorified violent gangsters hiding behind lofty titles of nobility, this doesn’t happen too often, so I hope you enjoy the change. Today, I’ll tell you the tales of two men, St. Francis of Assisi and the ‘divine madman’ Drukpa Kunley: one lived in the 1200s in Italy, and the other in the 1400s in the area between modern-day Tibet and Bhutan. Even though they were very different from one another, both had an uneasy relationship with the established religious authorities of the day. Both ended up being considered saints in their respective traditions (respectively, Christian and Buddhist). Both were regarded as highly eccentric.

St. Francis was the son of a wealthy merchant, but he turned his back on his birth family, gave away all earthly possessions and embraced a life of voluntary poverty serving lepers and the rejects of society (something for which he would later be heavily criticized by Martin Luther). Besides starting a new religious order, being named patron saint of ecology and becoming the author of the first piece of literature written in modern Italian, St. Francis had the guts to go preach among Muslims smack in the middle of the Crusades.

Drukpa Kunley was a wild, wild man. It’s more or less impossible to separate history and folklore when it comes to his life. What emerges from the sources is a sort of trickster whose brand of enlightenment came with a heavy dose of laughter, strong sex positivity, and a general hostility to the religious establishment. A master of freestyle battle rap before rap even existed, Kunley was a wandering teacher known for his escapades with the ladies and for defeating demons by swinging his ‘flaming thunderbolt of wisdom’.

As different as these two men were, both remind me of the heyokas of Lakota tradition, heroes of a kind of crazy wisdom at war with dogmatic thinking.

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