Francis of Assisi was born in 1181 or 1182, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant in Umbria. He was ambitious, sociable, and generous with money in the way that people are generous when they have not yet learned what it costs. He fought in a local war, was captured and imprisoned for a year, fell seriously ill, and emerged from illness and captivity a changed person — not immediately and not dramatically, but changed. The conversion that followed was gradual and then sudden: the moment he kissed the leper he had previously crossed the road to avoid, the moment he heard Matthew 10:9 read at Mass and gave away everything, the moment he stood before his father and the bishop and stripped off his clothes and said: from now on I will say not my father Pietro Bernardone but Our Father who art in heaven.

The Canticle of Creatures was composed near the end of his life, in 1224 or 1225, when Francis was nearly blind, seriously ill, and living in a small hut in the garden of San Damiano. He was in great physical pain. What he produced in that condition is one of the most joyful texts in the history of Christian literature.

The Canticle praises God through creatures — not for creatures, but through them. Each creature becomes a medium through which the praise of God passes: Brother Sun, who is radiant and bears the likeness of God; Sister Moon and the stars, precious and beautiful; Brother Wind and Sister Water and Brother Fire and Sister Mother Earth. Each creature has a name, a character, a relationship to Francis and therefore to God. None of them is an it. All of them are kin.

This is not romanticism or nature mysticism in the modern sense. Francis was not projecting human feeling onto the natural world. He was recovering a theological vision that the creation narratives of Genesis had always contained but that centuries of Platonic suspicion of the material world had obscured: that creation is good, that it is God's, that it speaks of God, and that the right human relationship to it is not exploitation or indifference but fraternity and praise.

Laudato Si — the opening words of the Canticle, Praised be you, my Lord — became the title of Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical on the environment and the Church's relationship to creation. The connection is not decorative. The Franciscan tradition's theology of creation is one of the most significant resources the Church has for addressing the contemporary crisis of how human beings relate to the natural world.

This first week of the Franciscan Pathway asks you to recover, even partially, Francis's way of seeing. Not as an intellectual exercise but as a practice: going outside, being present to the natural world, and attempting to attend to it as Francis did — as something that belongs to God, that speaks of God, that is your kin rather than your property.