Originally published as an op-ed by Fr. Stephen Mimnaugh on Syracuse.com. Fr. Stephen Mimnaugh, O.F.M., is vice president for Mission Integration at St. Bonaventure University.

Eight hundred years after the death of Francis of Assisi, perhaps the best way to remember him is not simply to admire him. Perhaps it is to allow his life to ask something of ours.

Francis died on Oct. 3, 1226, at the Portiuncula, a small chapel in the valley below Assisi. He was only about 44 years old. Yet in that relatively short life, something extraordinary had happened. The young man who dreamed of becoming a knight became a lesser brother. The man who recoiled from people with leprosy chose to live among them. The soldier who went to war eventually crossed the battle lines of the Fifth Crusade to meet Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, the Muslim ruler of Egypt.

Eight centuries later, three questions from Francis’s journey seem especially urgent: Who am I? Who is the outcast? Who is the enemy?

Francis spent the first part of his life with a confident answer to the first question. The son of a prosperous cloth merchant, he had friends, money and social standing. He dreamed of becoming a knight.

War with neighboring Perugia disrupted that dream. Francis was captured and imprisoned, returning home physically ill and increasingly uncertain about the life he had imagined. Eventually, praying before a crucifix in the small church of San Damiano, he asked God to “enlighten the darkness of my heart.”

There is remarkable humility in that prayer. It acknowledges that our way of seeing may be incomplete, that our experience is not the whole of reality and that we might still have something to learn.

That is not an easy posture to maintain today.

We live in a culture that rewards instant certainty. Politics, religion, social media and even ordinary disagreements can quickly sort people into categories.

Which brings us to Francis’s second question: Who is the outcast?

Francis acknowledged that before his conversion, the sight of people with leprosy was bitter to him. They were feared, avoided and kept at a distance. Then Francis crossed that distance.

Looking back near the end of his life, he wrote, “The Lord himself led me among them.” A young Francis thought he was going to bring mercy to someone else. The dying Francis understood that the encounter changed him.

Every community has people at the edge of our field of vision: people whose experiences differ from ours, people without much influence, people whose opinions make us uncomfortable, people whose lives we don’t really understand.

Francis invites us to notice the distance, and then to cross some of it.

Not because differences are unimportant or every idea is equally true, but because a category never tells us the whole truth about a person. The person whose perspective I have dismissed may see something I have overlooked. The person at the edge of my world may enlarge my world.

And then comes the hardest question: Who is the enemy?

Francis knew something about enemies. In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Christian and Muslim armies faced one another near Damietta in Egypt. The categories could hardly have been clearer: Christian and Muslim. Friend and enemy. Us and them.

Francis crossed the battle lines and eventually met Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil.

We should not romanticize what happened. Francis remained a Christian. Al-Kamil remained a Muslim. Their differences were real, and their meeting did not end the Crusade.

But something happened that the logic of war said should not happen. Two people whom their world defined as enemies encountered one another face to face. They spoke. They listened.

Our own communities need more of that.

We live in a culture extraordinarily proficient at creating enemies: political enemies, ideological enemies, religious enemies. People who disagree with us can gradually cease to be neighbors and become categories instead.

The problem is not disagreement. A healthy community will contain serious disagreements. A healthy democracy requires them. We should care about truth and be willing to argue for what we believe.

The more important question is what happens to the other person when we disagree. Does that person remain my neighbor or become a label? Do I become curious about why someone sees the world differently, or merely suspicious of them? Can I believe that someone is profoundly mistaken and still recognize goodness in that person?

Those questions matter in Washington, but they matter just as much closer to home.

Here in Western New York, they matter in our workplaces and schools, our churches and neighborhoods, at community meetings and across dinner tables.

Francis crossed a battlefield to encounter the person behind the category “enemy.” Most of us will never have to cross a literal battlefield. But we create battle lines of our own, and every day we decide whether to reinforce them or cross them.

Eight hundred years after Francis’s death, perhaps that is one way we might honor his legacy.

Franciscan fraternity does not mean agreement. Recognizing goodness in another person does not require surrendering our convictions. It asks something more difficult: to pursue truth while remaining in relationship. To disagree without diminishing. To listen with the genuine possibility that we might learn something. To approach another person believing there may be goodness there that we have not yet learned to see.

And perhaps to recover Francis’s simple prayer: Enlighten the darkness of our hearts.

Because sometimes the darkness that most needs enlightening is the darkness that prevents us from seeing the goodness of the person standing right in front of us.