When brother Francis wanted to say the name of Jesus, his biographer Thomas de Celano recounts, he would sometimes use the phrase 'child of Bethlehem' and when he said Bethlehem, the pure joy of saying it would make him bleat like a sheep: 'Beeeeeeeethleheeeeeeem'. An he would lick his lips as if he was tasting some sweet thing.

In the time of Francis Europe was going through a massive commercial revolution. Business was challenging the state and the religious system. People were catholics but they just went through the motions. Somehow Francis succeeded to convert people who already thought they were christians, to sort-of renew their faith. He did not just succeed, he is generally recognized as the biggest religious genius Europe has ever produced. Also he successfully showed people the harmful side of business by demonstrating the virtue of poverty in such a manner that the locals viewed him with astonishment and laughter. How did he do it? He tapped into peoples direct experience by inventing the Christmas-stable, taking live animals into church. Also he did jackass-like challenges and stunts, he had himself dragged through town behind a wagon because he ate a piece of chicken. He threw rocks at other holy-men. Could be seen talking or praying to rocks, birds, flowers etc. He was a show-man, singer songwriter, performance artist, Jesus-impersonator[1], dancer, poet, fake-instrument player, animal-trainer and village-idiot. He never told people what to do he just showed them relying completely on his intuition, and he was extremely successful.

[1]The view of brother Francis as a hilarious Jesus impersonator and performance artist, has been put forward by the dutch writer Kees 't Hart, in a booklet about what he calls 'the disease that is admiration'. (or translated as veneration perhaps)

More on Saint Francis as a patron saint of ecology, in the last paragraph on this page: http://www.siena.edu/ellard/historical_roots_of_our_ecologic.htm)

• reading notes: The Garden of Saint Francis; plants, landscape and economy in 13-th century Italy

Many of the Early Desert Hermit Saints had a small simple garden-patch next to their caves, as symbols of self-sufficiency and their escape from secular society. Monasteries followed in this tradition with very practicle and humble crops. “In addition to the suggestion that monks with gardens had escaped from secular society to live self-sufficiently off the fruits of their own labors, gardens in religious texts also had theological significance that we cannot ignore. As symbols of Eden,..” The garden as a concept seems to contradict the Franciscan notions of ownership. Thomas of Celano, writer of the first biography of the saint explains: Saint Francis had very unusual gardening advice. He thought there should be no ditches or fences around a garden, because this denotes private ownership. There was to be no