‘Who are we?’

(Courtesy photo of Courtney Mares)

On Sept. 24, Siena University held an unusual autumn convocation, which was kicked off with a full academic procession, complete with regalia and bagpipes. The event marked the Jubilee Year and the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi, whose life and teachings inspire the Franciscan friars who founded Siena. Bishop Mark O’Connell said the benediction and Brother Michael Perry, OFM, provincial minister for the Province of Our Lady of Gaudalupe and the founding director of the Laudato Si’ Center for Integral Ecology at Siena, delivered the invocation which is reprinted below.

(Verses 1–2: “All Creatures of Our God and King”)

Creator of life, Holy One, called by a hundred names in this room and by no name in the hearts of some — we come as creatures.

Not as owners. Not as masters. Not as the authors of our own existence.

We come as those who were made, and who did not ask to be made, and who find ourselves here anyway, breathing air we did not manufacture, standing on hallowed ground that held the Mohican and Mohawk peoples long before us.

This moment to remember invites us to ask, simply “Who are we?” 

Who are we within ourselves, in the parts we show and the parts we hide? Who are we to those near and dear, and to those whose names we will never learn, who share this same stretch of time and this same fragile air? Who are we to the ones we have been taught to fear and reject?

Who are we beneath a sky of billions of galaxies, beside Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Sister Water, Brother Fire, and our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains us and is weary?

Who are we to the migrant at the door, seeking only what our own grandparents sought? Who are we before machines that now speak our language and enter our work, our politics, our loneliness, and even our prayer? Who are we in a world that keeps choosing war over dialogue, going it alone over going together, privilege over inclusion?

And who are we — young and less young, searching, unsure — in a world where meaning and belonging seem to keep slipping just past our fingertips?

Eight hundred years ago today, a man died singing.

He had gone to war and come home from it undone — imprisoned at Perugia, sick in body and mind. What healed him was not a triumph but an encounter. He went among the lepers, he wrote, and what had been bitter to him was turned into sweetness. Later he crossed a battle line to sit with a sultan, and the two of them parted without conquest — only respect. And at the end, when the thing every creature dreads came for him, he did not flee. He called her his sister: Sister Death.

That is the freedom we are asking for today — that of a person who was set free slowly. Not the absence of pain. Not the end of our brokenness. Not even rescue from death. It is the freedom of love present inside every moment of a life, and present, we pray, in the heart of this institution that dares to call its students Saints.

So let us pray, each in the way we pray — and those who no longer pray, keep this silence with us.

Creator of all life, Source of love:

Help us become what we already are — creatures, wholly dependent on You, and bound to one another and to every other living thing.

Give us the courage to lay down the exhausting pretense of being creators. Give us the courage of encounter across every fault line that divides this world and this campus.

Teach us what Pope Francis said so plainly — that everything is connected, and that we recognize in those whom we meet here or wherever we find ourselves only goodness, beauty, worthy of our love, beloved co-creatures.

And when our own hour comes, let us meet it as our brother Francis did: unafraid, still singing, a beloved child being led home. Amen.   

And so, friends — let us sing. 

(Verses 3–4, “All Creatures of Our God and King”)