It is difficult to write of Pope Francis in the past tense. His presence—gentle yet commanding, humble yet enduring—resists final words. Death feels more like an enduring beginning than an end, a setting sun that leads to a dawn on the dark side of the Earth. Even in the finality of our bodily life, there is a sense of a seed being planted—one that will grow quietly in the soil of artists, activists, and the poor in spirit who felt seen, heard, and loved by this pope.
When Haejin and I were invited to meet Pope Francis in November 2022, it came not through diplomatic channels or formal appointments, but through a handwritten letter helped along by a nun in Flint, Michigan—one of those small, almost hidden gestures so characteristic of his papacy. We arrived at the Vatican gates uncertain; our names were unlisted, but we had the assurance of a letter in hand. The Swiss Guard smiled knowingly and said, “This happens a lot.” Apparently Pope Francis would often pray over the guest list and invite those whom he felt God had invited. His staff often wouldn’t know until after, and sometimes never. Meetings already scheduled would wait. This quiet subversion, this openness to divine interruption, was the essence of his leadership.
And so we found ourselves welcomed—not by rank or reputation, but by grace.
In those thirty minutes with him, time seemed to stretch into eternity. He was not rushed. He was not distracted. He beheld space as only those deeply anchored in prayer can. Haejin shared her work with the marginalized children and trafficked mothers in Embers International, and Sister Dorcee spoke of her work in Flint. I presented my contemporary art of pulverized minerals and gold of Nihonga, and we spoke of the “Theology of Making,” of Culture Care, of the slow restoration of fractured things.
Then, as we prepared to leave, Pope Francis stood, walked over in his walker, and stood erect to hold my shoulders. He looked into my eyes—not past me, not around me—and spoke with the gravity of a prophet and the tenderness of a father: “What you do, to create beauty, matters. Do not stop. The darkness will push back, but do not stop.”
It was not flattery. It was a commission. And I have carried these words ever since. I have repeated them to countless artists, writers, and makers—many of whom have wept upon hearing them. They weep not because they are religious, but because so few people tell them that their creative offerings matter. Fewer still tell them this from the heart of the Church. For many, Papa Francis was the first leader of faith to say, You, too, are part of God’s restoration. Your beauty-making is not peripheral to justice or goodness; it is justice embodied. It is abundance in a world of scarcity. It is courage in the face of indifference.
This is the legacy Pope Francis leaves—not in monuments or headlines, but in the quiet exhortation to keep going and in the invisible ways he stood with the marginalized, the artists, the exiles. He practiced what Simone Weil called “attention,” which she described as the purest form of generosity. And he gave that attention not to the seen, but to the unseen.
Those of us who were shaped by his vision now inherit a charge: Do not stop. Keep tending beauty, even when the night is long. Keep choosing generosity, even when the world shouts for vengeance. Keep making, even when the fractures seem too great.
Haejin and I carry our charge in our book Beauty x Justice: Creating a Life of Abundance and Courage, forthcoming next year from Brazos Press. It tells our story of encountering Pope Francis, but more than that, it invites others into the pilgrimage—into the kind of life where art is activism, where justice is tenderness, and where beauty is not ornamental, but essential.
Pope Francis was often criticized for being too poetic, too ambiguous, too human. But perhaps that was his greatest strength. He refused the cold efficiency of bureaucratic faith. He lived instead with what Rowan Williams might call “the grammar of holiness”—the embodied, enigmatic, unpredictable language of love of Jesus.
And now he is gone. Or perhaps, more truly, now he is even more present.
He joins the great cloud of witnesses, those who have labored in obscurity and have been received in glory. I imagine him now walking among the small creatures of creation he so loved, holding the hands of invisible children, ushered into the presence of the One Who made all things new. He is welcomed not by acclaim, but by holy silence, the kind that only the truly beloved receive.
As for us, we remain—hands in the dust, fragments in our palms, still mending what’s been broken. But we do not mend alone. “The darkness will push back, but do not stop.”
Rest in peace, Papa. The seeds you planted will bloom in hidden gardens. And the world you longed to see—a world where beauty reigns and justice is restored—is not so far away. It is rising, slowly, in the quiet work of those you blessed. And we will not stop.
This essay is part of a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy. Read the rest here.
