August 14, 2026

Call It Sister

Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no living man can escape.

Francis wrote this hymn in 1225 near the end of his life, nearly blind and in constant pain at San Damiano, praising God through Sun, Moon, Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth before turning at last to death itself. Rather than naming death an enemy, he called it Sister, placing it in the same family as sunlight and rain. He composed these words while his own body was failing him, choosing kinship over resistance. It speaks to nature and the body today because it refuses to split the physical from the sacred, treating decay and pain as part of the same created order as beauty.