Francis' funny looking cross is part of God's alphabet

By Patricia Kasten
Compass Associate Editor

When I was in school, I really, really worked to get the big, red "A" on the top of my tests. That "A" mark meant that I had worked hard and had mastered the material. I had made it.

However, St. Francis might have preferred me to get a big, red "Z".

That's how the founder of the many Franciscan orders we have today - including many communities to which our jubilarian sisters belong - signed his name. Except that he used the Hebrew alphabet and its last letter - tav, better known as Tau.

While the modern Hebrew letter tav looks more like an upside-down "u," when the Hebrew scriptures were first translated, they were done into Greek. So, in Greek, the tav became the tau, which is shaped like a capital T. This is what Francis used as his signature.

The Hebrew alphabet developed from pictographs. And the last letter of that old alphabet - the old tav - looked a lot like an "X," just like the "X" sometimes used by those who cannot write to "make their mark" at the end of a letter or document.

The tav pictograph first developed to signify the small markers of stones that ancient Hebrews used to mark off the borders of property for private landholders. And since every Hebrew letter had a meaning, that is exactly what the tav meant: a seal or a mark. Or (and this was significant for Francis) a covenant.

The earliest reference about this in our scriptures can be found in the book of Ezekiel, dating to that sixth century B.C. prophet. In that book, the Lord speaks to Ezekiel in a series of visions. In one of them, God orders that all the faithful people be "marked with an X on the forehead" (9:4). Earlier translations of the passage translate this as "marked with the Tau." In other words, they were sealed as God's private property.

This is the translation Francis heard in the famous sermon of Pope Innocent III at the opening of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The pope, perhaps the most powerful person in Europe at the time, ended his sermon on Ezekiel's reading with a summons to reform lives and to live as "champions of the Tau." (This was just six years after Innocent III had approved the Franciscan order.)

However, this was not Francis' only connection to the Tau. The Tau cross was also a symbol of the Antonians, a religious community devoted to the care of lepers. They had a house in Assisi at that time. Francis, who always attributed his conversion to the moment he met Christ in the form of a leper, no doubt had contact with the Order of St. Anthony. The Antonians wore a habit emblazoned with a large Tau cross, known as the cross of St. Anthony, in memory of the fourth century Egyptian hermit who is called the "Father of Monastic Life."

Just as ancient stones had marked off land that was owned by someone, Francis saw the cross as a sign of those marked off by God as his chosen ones. For Francis, those who accepted the Tau cross also bore the mark of the passion of Christ and stretched out their arms to all, just as Christ on the cross had done.

Francis - who was often given to showing rather than telling - believed that the stretching out of one's arms, clothed in the simple gray habit of his religious community of friars, symbolized a total commitment to Christ. Perhaps that is why, late in his life, Francis received the grace of the stigmata - the marks of Christ's wounds - upon his own body.

Not much has changed in that view for those who follow Francis. Franciscans worldwide use the Tau as the symbol of their commitment to Christ. For example, for the School Sisters of St. Francis in Milwaukee, "the Tau cross signifies one's belonging to God, consecrated, commissioned, committed ... it signifies reaching out to people in need ... "

For Francis, the Tau - the outstretched arms of Christ's cross - was the only mark that mattered. He didn't care about "A's" or even "B's". It was the mark of Christ, the last sign of God's love for us, that mattered to Francis.

For Francis, the Tau was the last letter at the end of God's alphabet. What more was there to say?