Introduction
To grasp St. Francis of Assisi’s spirit is to be liberated. A person can experience it right where they live by embracing the freedom, vulnerability, foolishness, and gentleness that Francis lived and taught. I see this happen when people begin to catch these aspects of his life and pull them into their own lives for the first time—replacing egoism, illusion, and fear.
Such freedom can, however, be disruptive. Relationships that are not life-giving can become obvious, when before they were easily accommodated. Work that doesn’t feed the soul begins to feel increasingly intolerable. Time spent is evaluated differently, especially if one’s common use of free time is revealed to be captive to what no longer really matters.
People can experience St. Francis on a more metaphysical level, as well, as a liberation of the energies that are properly and naturally stored inside them. There are energies inside us that have become cramped and distorted over the years—the result of many negative experiences in our past and present. These gather in and around our stress, responsibilities, and relationships. This is when life feels like it’s going nowhere or is stalled or we simply can’t seem to break through to something richer, better, or vital. Our energies, created for our well-being, are finding no adequate channel for their true activity, for the true activity of the energies inside us–what Christians call the Holy Spirit—is satisfying and sweet. We are meant to be inspired, creative, supportive, optimistic people. If our lives don’t feel this sweetness, we need liberation. Francis showed long ago with his life and teachings how to go about this.
An analogy helps: Our bodies and spirits are like electric batteries. The mysterious power they contain is latent, just waiting for a switch to be flipped so that a current can move. What it takes to flip that switch can vary a great deal from one person to the next. For some of us it takes more of a jolt than it does for others. Perhaps it’s like the live wires we sometimes connect between a running engine and a dead engine in an effort to bring the dead one back to life. If you are such a person, requiring such a jolt, you have something in common with Francis as he entered adult life.
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Soon, when we turn to the key moments in Francis’s life, you may conclude that he was overly dramatic. This may be true, but it only tells part of the story. Francis used gestures to communicate, and shows of emotion before others, all in the service of his conversion. This is because sometimes he was doing what he had to do—shocking himself to life, almost like one would jump-start that battery that’s dead—to liberate himself from what keeps people living without life. In other words, he seems to have known that he had to sometimes be dramatic.
He wasn’t alone in his era as a religious person of dramatic gestures and intensely expressed emotions. The early thirteenth century was marked by many—for example, lay religious women called Beguines. They were lay religious, not nuns. They lived semi-monastically and were known for having the “gift of tears” and seeking forms of public humiliation to express their devotion to God. They were more independent than nuns were, but they were religiously intense. These Beguines were sometimes known by other, even more exotic names, such as tertiaries, klopjes, recluses, and anchoresses. But exoticism aside, this was a time when it became common for ordinary people to be personally convicted of something spiritually lacking in life and then go about fixing it in public. Francis’s half century, it could be said, witnessed the birth of demonstrative Christian mysticism.1 This can feel strange to us today, but it once wasn’t.
I think of the medieval Mystery Plays. They were dramatic, public, bloody, loud reenactments of events in the lives of saints or Christ, especially Christ’s Passion. No one ever simply read such a play. One watched and heard and felt it on the front edge of the emotions–while standing and shrieking beside one’s neighbors. So the mysticism that was being born was not privately experienced in the way we expect mysticism to be today. Even the celebration of the mass was, from its ancient beginnings, meant to be a performance. The word “mystery,” in fact, means “religious performance.”2 All of it drew Francis in.
He never became a priest; he didn’t want to be ordained beyond that of a deacon. So he never said a mass himself, even though he led others in religious services from early in his conversion. He used his dramatic flair to awaken others. These services must have seemed odd, even a little dangerous, to people familiar only with the traditional ways of church. Francis learned from the entertainers and storytellers who were popular in late medieval Europe, and set out to introduce holy things, but still hold your attention. This is probably why they became so popular so fast: when Francis began leading religious services, they didn’t always seem religious. This is how the Nobel Prize–winner Dario Fo puts it:
Francis would often begin his “services” with dance, transforming his sermon into a kind of musical entertainment, full of lively rhythms, drawing his audience in with stories of love and bawdy passion. Then out of all this earthly carnal love, he would change tack and introduce the purest, most joyful love we owe to our Creator.3
He was attempting to open in others those places inside where they had not yet been able to experience God.
Human beings tend toward private expressions of emotion and spirit, and Francis showed a different way, probably a more productive way. The lesson was that no one should be held back by themselves or anyone else when it comes to expressions of life or bringing their spiritual selves back from the dead. The spirit needs to express itself. It needs to be experienced and seen. That can be frightening, when new. Francis showed how to shake off, wake up, turn around, and use your body to stir your soul and the souls of those around you.
When that electric current of ours is stagnant, like the automobile that has sat idle too long in the garage, we grow weak and eventually our battery dies altogether. Imagine turning a key in the ignition and hearing only a sputtering sound, followed by a splat. Francis’s spirit saves us from such a fate. His life and teachings are like a jump start for that cold, cold engine. The sputtering doesn’t go splat, but the engine begins to roar again, as it was meant to do. This is true freedom: putting to use the creative, inspired, benevolent impulses and energies naturally and supernaturally found within us. Without this freedom to express ourselves, and act, we are lost.
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People often fail to notice that they are moving through life aimlessly, like a meteor passing outside the Earth’s atmosphere into space.
It can seem, today, that it’s impossible to lose our directional way. Every stride has been mapped by someone already. There’s no place we can travel that hasn’t already been experienced by someone else. The world we see and hear and touch has lost most of its mystery. There is no part that remains unexplored, undocumented, untouched. If you want to see Timbuktu, you watch a video from Timbuktu streamed to the device of your choosing. If you’re curious about the turtles of the Galápagos Islands, you find those easily, too. This is our secularism: we’ve lost the ability to be awed. Presence means nothing.
But there is still God’s presence. It is no more clearly mapped, now, than it ever was before. That’s not how finding God works.
The other exception is what is obscured from the past. There is no way to re-create the expressions or spirit of people who have gone before us. Study the Oglala Lakota and the history of the Great Plains all you want, but you’ll never experience or relive what it was like to encounter a million buffalo in the Black Hills or to be present at an early Ghost Dance. Read all the books about the early Beguines, or the first friends of St. Francis in the valley below Assisi, and you cannot be in that place. We have to accept and approach such mysteries with awe.
So we turn to St. Francis’s writings–rules of life, letters to friends and people in power, wishes he had for laypeople and for his friend Clare—and to reliable biographies of what his lifelong conversion was all about. We may not be able to go back in time and re-create that presence, but we do well to learn from what we have. What comes through clearly in Francis’s life and teachings are moments when an astonishing union–ecstatic, surrendering, and stunning—takes place with God. This union is the key to everything else. And what happened to him eight hundred years ago still happens in the lives of ordinary people like us.
St. Francis Changed My Life
I was absorbed in myself until I met St. Francis. I was in high school: worried over my appearance, how my hair fell, how to clear up my skin, who liked me, who didn’t, where to go on weekends to be around the people I was most impressed with and whom I most wanted to impress. Did I mention I was anxious to have people like me? This is all natural, you might say, and it was. I was typical of others at my age and stage in life, and I was typically lost. I often think it’s because of Francis that I didn’t become an easily lost adult.
I came across a book one day on a shelf in the public library. I was probably in that deep row of library shelving to hide from someone in the library whom I didn’t want to see. What if the wrong person observed me in the library! I noticed this particular book in part because it was the thickest I’d ever seen, and it had a deep cherry-red cover, which was also hard to miss. I pulled it down out of curiosity. Saint Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies. The title page used the phrase “Omnibus of the Sources,” and that was interesting. I’d heard of St. Francis. He was the one who liked animals. The book said it was compiled and published by Franciscans, whoever they were.
What’s interesting to me now is how my discovery of that book is similar to how people sometimes discovered the Franciscan way of life in Francis’s own time. He and the friends who joined in his poor, simple way of living used to introduce strangers to their life similarly to how I became attentive to that conspicuous, unusual book on the shelf. They would send one of their number to a nearby Italian town to see whom they might reach with their Gospel message. He would be dressed strangely, unexpectedly shabby. A friar (that’s what they were called—the word means simply “brother”) was always dressed shabbily compared to monks, priests, and knights. He would walk, never ride a horse, all the way there. The journey might take days, but if you saw him on the road he wouldn’t be asking for a ride. Even in the rain, he’d seem quite happy where he was, doing what he was doing, making his way to wherever he was slowly traveling on foot. He also wouldn’t bring food with him but would beg for his bread or hope to find some free fruit on the trees as he walked. He’d sleep under the stars, in a cave, or beneath any temporary shelter. He’d never knock on doors and ask for special treatment. He’d keep mostly to himself, except for singing. Francis and his friends enjoyed making music. All of this was intentional. The rule of life they lived was simple, taken from the Gospels:
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.… And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” … But strive first for the kingdom of God … (Mt. 6:26, 28–31, 33)
By the time this simple friar arrived at his destination, he’d be dusty and hungry. But the Franciscan way was to be joyful in dustiness and hunger. To experience such small hardships was to identify with Christ in his poverty and to thereby partake a little bit of heaven. Christ had divided loaves and fishes to feed large crowds, he had even refused a drink while hanging on the cross, and he’d said not to worry about the needs of tomorrow. So the dusty hungry friar would take a seat in the town square with a grin on his face. I imagine there were exceptions but that most often the grin was genuine joyfulness. The friar had learned how not to worry, how to live in the moment—and for this reason, his look disconcerted ordinary people even more than usual. Inevitably, like that cherry-red book I couldn’t help but see on the shelf when I was a nervous teenager, this friar stuck out like a sore thumb.
Very quickly, children would come and mock him. They saw a dirty, shabbily clothed new person in town as a sort of lunatic. Unless you were a young child, life was meant to be a grim matter and a hardworking responsibility. The fact that the friar had what seemed to them to be a silly look on his face made him even more someone to be reviled. He was unfamiliar to them, and children, unless they’re taught to appreciate difference, are frightened by unfamiliarity. They also didn’t know how else to respond to someone who seemed immune to others’ expectations. Some of the adults around the kids were no better.
The mocking—sometimes playful, often less so—might go on for days, until finally someone more sensitive and thoughtful would come sit beside the friar in the piazza and say something like, “Who are you? Why are you here?” It was then that the little poor man (Francis called them Friars Minor, because they deliberately went through life without worldly significance) would pull from the pocket of his tattered cowl a document with some Bible verses on it, shaped just enough to read like a rule of life. Most people knew what rules were: written documents of monastic orders, in which the principles for communal life, vows, obedience to an abbot, and so forth, were made clear. Francis’s was a bit different, and simpler.
None of the physical copies of this document have survived, which isn’t surprising, because they were probably just scraps of paper. It would be a few years before their principles were formed into something worthy of being formally approved by a pope in Rome. When that happened, the language sounded more formal, but certain parts still resembled what a friar would have shared with that first sensitive and thoughtful fellow pilgrim in the town square:
We should take nothing for ourselves, not a house or any property or things at all. We should remain simple pilgrims and strangers in the world, and serve God in poverty and humility. We should expect nothing, but ask for whatever is left over. And we should never be ashamed by this, because our Lord made himself poor in this world. Our hope is in him who can make us heirs of the kingdom of heaven.
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Let’s treat each other as members of one family, and confidently make known to each other our needs. Consider this: If a mother loves and cherishes the son she raises how much more should we cherish and love one who is our brother according to the Holy Spirit! For example, when one of us falls sick, the others should serve him as they would wish to be served themselves.
That was essentially the cherry-red book I took down that day from the shelf—or, at least, that was the cherry-red book’s effect on me.
The first stories of Francis I read were about the friends who deserted him, as well as the friends who joined him in a way of life that was more real than the one he’d previously been trying to live. I realized that Francis, too, was a nervous young man preoccupied with what people thought of him. I read about Francis going off to war when he was not much older than I was. He suited up in the best armor his father could afford, which was a lot, but then soon he was captured. He spent a year in a prison cell in Perugia, a city very near Assisi. Eventually, his father ransomed him and he returned home. Two years later, Francis went to war again, following a famous knight. On the first day of travel, with a destination of Apulia, he only got as far as Spoleto. The following morning, he was perhaps sick. Some of the sources say so; they also sometimes suggest that Francis heard God telling him to return home. Most likely, he came back to Assisi that day in disgrace, as either a deserter or a failure or both. This is the day that his biographers pinpoint as when his conversion began.
I read about Francis’s preoccupations with women, wanting to woo them, wanting them to love him, singing to them at night like a sappy troubadour. He seemed to be in love with love, and I felt like I understood that, too. There are scenes, after his return to Assisi from Spoleto, when Francis is out carousing with friends and the friends notice he seems preoccupied. Francis was being visited by God, just then, for the first time, say the authors of The Legend of the Three Companions. He was still writing poems to women, which is what I was doing, too. Awful stuff! He was caught up in his passions; he loved how it felt to be filled with such emotion, but somehow it wasn’t quite real. He would discover what real love was all about when he finally stopped chasing it.
I read about Francis giving away his possessions, trying to follow the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels in ways that followers of Jesus don’t seem to take seriously anymore. Even before his conversion was at full speed, when he was still living at home, he began taking food from his mother’s table while his father was out of town and giving it to the poor. A year later, he realized that what God wanted from him was much greater.
No kid who grows up in a comfortable home and reads the New Testament can come away from the experience without thinking, We don’t do what Jesus says, really, at all. Christians ignore what Jesus said to the first disciples: “… If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mt. 19:21). This became central to Francis’s response to God, too—taking those words seriously. So there was an authenticity about Francis that made immediate sense, not only to my immature self but also to my reflective one.
Then I read about Francis standing up to powerful people on behalf of ordinary people, and traveling to the Nile Delta to see the sultan because he thought there had to be a better option than killing others to make possible safe routes for pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. It seemed that Francis thought he could end the era of the Crusades simply by meeting with the Muslim sultan. How naïve that made him! It drew me to him even more. The naïveté never went away in Francis, either, something that attracts me to him still. Years after his conversion began, you still see Francis living by those strict Gospel principles. He doesn’t grow up and lose all his ideals. You see him still frequently going off by himself, pounding his heart, as if to wake up his soul, or asking no one but God, “Who am I?!”
I’m not courageous. I’ve never been attracted to martyrdom for my faith. I haven’t gone hungry, not really. But the simpler things Francis did I then tried to do. I still try to do them. For example, Francis had problems at home and his relationship with his father was not always good. His dad expected him to become a certain kind of person, one that Francis didn’t want to become. They fought about it. Francis felt that he had, ultimately, to decide if he was going to follow what his father wanted for him or what his conscience—informed by his now intense personal relationship with God—was telling him to do. He chose God. I didn’t have such a severe problem with my father as a boy, but since becoming an adult I’ve believed that every boy must somehow stand up to his father before he can become his own person. Franz Kafka, the Czech fiction writer, once wrote to his dad, saying: “Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it.” Kafka explained that he had to find the places not within his dad’s reach, where the young man could come into his own. I think this is what Francis did, and I could relate. Maybe girls are this way with their mothers, too; I wouldn’t know.
There was one most important woman in Francis’s life, and it wasn’t his mother. We know almost nothing about his mom, and he never speaks about her. But you may have heard of St. Clare. She was a friend of Francis and the first woman to join him in what he was doing. She, too, had to separate herself from parental expectations before she could ever become who she was meant to become. It infuriated her family. I was able to relate to all that, and so at times when what seemed right in my life was slightly at odds with what my family of origin thought best I clung closer to Francis–and to Clare.
Even the soldiering spoke to me because I discovered Francis just as I was about to register for Selective Service, as a young man about to turn eighteen. I was supposed to sign up with my government to say, I’m at your service if necessary to go to war on your behalf and fight and kill for you. I felt uncomfortable with that. Doesn’t the Gospel teach something else? Watching Francis’s discomfort helped me to discern that registering as a conscientious objector was what was right for me.
Then there were the simple things Francis did or set out to do. When he turned away from what his father expected, he was also turning away from what society expected: householding, family raising, property ownership, respectability, power, and influence as benefiting someone from his sort of background. Francis turning away from these things inspired me, years ago, to de-emphasize them in my life, too. I’ve had mortgages and raised children. I’ve never taken a vow of poverty. However, many, many times I have made conscious decisions to go for less, to live more simply, not to seek the job whose primary appeal is the income, to worry less about tomorrow, to do the thing that almost seems contrary to what we’re usually taught to do. I’ve tried to be who God wants me to be, by living according to different principles than those most parents teach their children. I fail all the time. But Francis remains my inspiration. All these principles are as countercultural today as they were in St. Francis’s thirteenth century, and for that reason, I think, Francis is the most relevant of Christian saints from centuries ago.
Some Quick History
We usually go through life blind and deaf to what ails us. We tune out most forms of critique and exhortation because it is shrill to hear, and we decide to remain essentially who we are, now, except that who we are is mostly who we have been, and who we have been began in us when we were children. So you can see why most spiritual greats have come to say that we shouldn’t sit satisfied in ignorance or laziness—because that’s what this often looks, most of all, like in us: ignorance and laziness. There is much more to a happy, productive, blessed life than this. Than what is. Francis realized this, first in his own life. He was given much by his parents and circumstances, but it did not satisfy.
He was a popular boy from a good home. He had everything he needed in terms of security, possessions, and care. He was embraced by many but found that the love he craved was not easy to embrace. With money in his pockets, he was invited to parties and fun to have around. He was a good talker and singer of songs, even late at night under the city windows of girls he desired to woo. He was rarely alone. He was always talking. Until he happened to be without company and everything went quiet and he began to hear something inside of him. What was that sound?
He was graced with charm and personality and enjoyed himself until he glimpsed his vanity. He dreamed of what boys are supposed to dream—for valor and reputation—until he saw his cowardly heart. These were stages of awakening.
God does the awakening in us. We realize and respond to it. Each stage of awakening in Francis Bernardone was punctuated with dramatic gestures of change. Francis was like the man who realizes that the best way to survive outdoors in the snow and cold underdressed is not to worry or complain or wait for help, but to pick up his footsteps with vigor and yell like a soldier about to charge.
Soon he began to pay attention to small things. This is probably because he was quieting his mind, which opens the imagination and spirit to things previously unnoticed and unseen. If people know Francis today for one thing, it would be his love for creatures: he’s the birdbath saint, the one who talked with birds. This is true to who he was, and it began with simply paying attention. He began to live fully as a creature in the created world, and animals, both wild and domesticated, became familiar to him. He noticed worms on the street after a storm, birds in cages who deserved to be free, and fish caught that he would rather set loose than set his teeth into.
He joined a group of pilgrims on a walking journey to Rome, to visit the ancient churches, venerate the saints’ relics. He was looking for answers and for enlightenment. While there, he practiced begging alms, one source says, and he exchanged clothes with a poor man.
Back home, he saw the disadvantaged, poor, and rejected outside of Assisi, in the course of his wanderings, and they frightened him. The uncleanliness of their bodies repulsed him. Some of these were lepers, and they especially scared young Francis. What if their condition rubbed off on him? Until one day when Francis turned around. Having rejected a leprous man’s appeal in disgust, Francis suddenly turned around and returned to the spot where he stood and embraced him. What enabled him to turn around? Francis had no idea.
Then, one day, this sensitive soul was alone in a mostly abandoned church outside the city walls of Assisi, kneeling in prayer. He was probably there for a long time, quiet. He heard God speak to him. “Rebuild my church,” God said, and Francis obeyed that voice by beginning to gather stones. He set to work rebuilding that church. Of course, that was only the beginning, and what started so simply and innocently became a spiritual and social action movement.
Francis’s listening, and his hearing and responding, we have to believe those are things that can happen to any one of us.
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Life, as we most often live it, is not lively but can feel more like a routine disappointment. What Francis offers stands this on its head. He does this by starting at a different assumption from the typical Christian saint. Sin is not his starting point. Neither is the struggle against evil, which had such a powerful hold on many of his contemporaries. He instead begins with awareness and consciousness: Where are you right now? How do you understand yourself in the world? Because where you are and who you are—before God, among other people, with other creatures—determines what kind of person you will be. What kind of person you will be begins to determine the world in which you live. Francis teaches us to live in reality and to begin to see the One, true Reality.
* * *
For Francis, that One is seen most clearly in the person, life, and teachings of Jesus Christ. When people say that Francis modeled himself after Jesus, it sounds almost trite. Many people have claimed to do such a thing, and Christians seem to roll those words off their tongues with ease, as if “living like Christ” makes obvious sense to everyone, and as if anyone really does it. Preachers in churches every Sunday say this, and people hearing them go home repeating the words, as if they will do it, too. Of course, they don’t, really, and they probably never even seriously attempt to grasp what doing so would entail.
In contrast, Francis set out to very literally do what Jesus did and taught, according to the accounts of the Gospels in the New Testament. From selling all that he owned, to sleeping under the stars, to preaching the Gospel to strangers, to being happy to be reviled, he was setting out to imitate the Jesus he knew and to do what he did and taught. It has recently been said: “By his intense poverty, humility, and sufferings, the Poverello became a living icon of Christ.”4 That gets at it—at the difference between Francis of Assisi’s modeling his life after Jesus and the easy language that makes it seem ordinary. Poverello is a name Francis used for himself. It means, in Italian, “little poor man.”
He wasn’t the only person, or the first, to begin attempting to follow Christ in ways of personal poverty and simplicity, not even during his era. Christianity was undergoing a change in the century before Francis’s birth, which continued during his lifetime, that experts say was equivalent to the change that took place a few centuries later in what is known as the Reformation. The earlier transition—during Francis’s life—usually goes unnoticed or unremarked upon. The model of the monk as one who has a specialized religious vocation was breaking down, and new and independent ways of expressing a religious vocation were being founded. Both men and women began to withdraw from the world in ways that were apart from established religious foundations. Many of these new religious went to live in wilderness or desert areas, remembering the origins of monasticism itself, which started in the deserts outside Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Damascus. They remembered, too, Jesus going into the wilderness to be alone with God and to be tempted by the devil.
It became common to see oneself as a faithful disciple of Jesus, even while practicing faith outside of church walls and apart from an established monastic order. This was a radical departure from the status quo. It upset many in authority in the Church. (They became even more upset when some of these independent spiritual practitioners taught heretical ideas. Some called the Cathars became one such group.) But for people like Francis, what was really happening was the birth of what we now know so easily as spirituality.
Soon others began to notice what was happening in and around Francis. I suspect that he was putting off a kind of light or energy that was impossible for more sensitive souls to notice and then resist. But as most of the scholars note: “Francis seemed to be surprised when other men asked to join him.” Such foolishness is not usually appreciated. But then, when “they had reached the symbolic number of twelve, Francis and his brothers went to Rome to seek papal confirmation of their form of living.”5 This wasn’t withheld by Pope Innocent III, but it also wasn’t eagerly granted. There were too many of these new religious orders popping up just then; Innocent would call the Fourth Lateran Council only a few years later, precisely to stem that tide. But Francis and his merry band went away with enough of a blessing to continue with the understanding that Rome didn’t mind their lives of poverty and their urging others to likewise live more faithfully to Mother Church.
The next seventeen years would be full of travels, ministries, relationships, and occasional struggles with Church authorities who wanted to curb the earnestness of those first principles. Many of the anecdotes from these years are told in the following pages, and the central characters to appear show up in these stories. They include the highborn St. Clare, the first woman to join the ragtag group in the valley below Assisi, to the disappointment of her uncles, but her sisters and mother would soon join her at the convent they established at San Damiano. And Brother Leo, the simple and loving friend who accompanied Francis on many of his journeys, listening to many of his teachings, and passed them along to the next generation like Aaron did for his brother, Moses. There’s St. Anthony of Padua, too, who came to the Franciscans from another religious order after observing some Franciscan friars on the road. Anthony was a great theologian and Francis worried that he not titillate the companions with theological curiosities at the expense of their spiritual passion.
Spirituality was what mattered most to St. Francis, and he was eager to emphasize that a life spiritually tuned was available to every person, wherever they are.
What Francis Accomplished
Francis Bernardone is a figure both in history and in the history of the Spirit, which means that he stands in time but also somewhat outside of his time and place. In this (and only this), St. Francis is like the Buddha and Jesus, and like those earlier figures, he cannot ultimately be understood without looking at the time when he grew up, the environment he was a part of, and how his life was formed by those things and by his desire to make changes.
Many make the mistake of imagining him to be too simple. He’s too easily the gnome saint who sits silently in the garden observing the flowers and winged creatures. Francis did simple things, and he was surprised at how widely they were sometimes appreciated. But he was also a complex man with varying motivations who often seemed to contradict himself. For example, he taught his spiritual friends not to get too carried away with their ascetic practices of self-denial, and yet Francis admitted at the end of his life to treating his body like a mule and he was sorry for it. Another example is seen in his style of leadership. The pattern went like this: Francis sets a rule or makes a near decree that something must or mustn’t be done by the friars; a friar disobeys by doing or not doing what Francis has made compulsory; Francis punishes or severely corrects the friar; then Francis is sorry and apologetic for having been so strident and insists that the friar he admonished now punish him. These examples in Francis’s life undercut the popular image of him as a hippie saint—an image that became common a generation or two ago. It wasn’t the nature of a hippie to deny himself pleasure or to scold those who broke rules.
He was visual. He was dramatic. He was tough. He was shy and uncertain. He was a bundle of contradictions, and I’m convinced it is these contradictions that made him popular then, as well as now. These are some of the ways by which it is difficult to measure his accomplishments. But it is easy to point to two specific ways that he transformed the Church in his day and impacted the world around him.
First, Francis was on the side of the disadvantaged, the poor, the sick, those discarded by society, and those seen as foreign or frightening. In this way, he was exceedingly courageous and taught other Christians not to be afraid of what they don’t understand. His efforts at peacemaking were undertaken when Italian cities were rife with public vendettas, private enmities, and thug violence. Making peace between people was never simple. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” Jesus said in John 14:27, but most people thought those words of their Lord referred to a future heavenly kingdom, rather than something possible here on earth. When peace was possible, preachers often asked people to obtain it through penance. From fasts to self-flagellation, the faithful were encouraged to show God their consciousness of sin in the hope that God would bring peace through civil order and protection. Francis’s friars were some of the most effective at this and other forms of preaching throughout Europe during the thirteenth century, and Francis himself seemed always most interested in being personally involved. There were courageous saints before Francis, but they were almost always courageous as martyrs: happy to have their lives struck down as witness to faith in Christ. Francis’s intrepidity and bravery were different. He placed himself in uncomfortable positions between feuding parties and physical danger between people—in encounters with wild animals and between vowed enemies in wartime situations. We too easily imagine him in statues, with a few fingers gesturing, peace reigning through his holy presence—but that’s not how it happened.
The most extravagant example of this courage came in the long journey he undertook to see the Muslim sultan in the Nile Delta during the Fifth Crusade. Nearly every Christian alive viewed a man like the sultan as someone to kill, not someone to love. That is one of the reasons why it was so easy to recruit knights and soldiers to join each new crusade. They’d been going for more than a century. Also in the century before Francis, a powerful Christian monk named Peter the Venerable went to great expense and effort to locate Muslim texts, the Qur’an and its commentaries, and have them translated into Latin for the first time, simply so they could be refuted. Monks and theologians began to carry copies of these translations from place to place, to preach against them. Imagine then, Francis with courage that bordered at times on madness, childlike, remembering the Gospels, naïve, preaching to the sultan in a language the sultan would not even have understood. Francis seems to have believed that if only the Muslim leader could meet and talk with a faithful Christian he might see to changing his ways. That of course didn’t happen, but it is no accident that to this day Franciscans take care of most of the holy places in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, safeguarding them with the cooperation and understanding of Jews, Arabs, and Christians.
Second, Francis completely changed how Christians view the natural world and its creatures. What was most often regarded as potentially useful or dangerous, before Francis, was shown to be sanctified in the saint’s example and teachings. He showed why and how to be gentle with creatures. He appreciated the wildness of mammals, plants, birds, and fish, knowing that they understood things humans cannot. The twentieth-century anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once said: “It is almost painful for me to know that I will never be able to find out what the matter and structure of the universe is made of. This would have meant being able to talk to a bird. But this is the line that cannot be crossed.”6 Francis attempted to cross that line. Perhaps he succeeded just a little bit. He was also reverent in the face of the stars, the sun, and the moon. He was even careful of stones in a way that suggests all natural things have life and breath. I even wonder if this appreciation of the sacredness of simple things could explain the world we now realize is much larger than humanity. I mean, we now know that the consciousness of human beings is very recent in the history of creation; for billions of years our planet consisted only of single-cell organisms. Did God’s involvement only begin with the forming of our first human parents? Of course not. God is without beginning and end. All is sacred and has always been. If only this imagination and vision of Francis, of how human beings interact with the rest of creation, had held sway in the centuries after his death—if only people had followed him on this point—our planet home wouldn’t be in the imminent danger today that it finds itself in. Only in the last century have sensitive people caught up to Francis in this.
Copyright © 2019 by Jon M. Sweeney
Foreword © 2019 by Richard Rohr
