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St. Francis of Assisi lived between 1181 and 1226 AD. At 20 he was at war and captured in Perugia for a year. After he was ransomed, he saved and prepared to go on crusade but left that ambition behind when God gave him a dream to pursue a different path. Francis prayed, tried to live as God wanted, and sought solitude. A conversion happened with him when he met a leper, hugged him, and kissed him. Prior to that he was repulsed and afraid of lepers. While in prayer he heard God say, “Francis, repair my church.” He began physically repairing his local church but came to understand that God had greater things in mind for him. He gave everything away and famously gave everything back to his father including his clothes. He heard Matthew 10:9 (proclaim the Kingdom, take no money, walking stick, shoes…”) and understood that this was his calling – to leave everything, live for Christ, and preach the Gospel.
Soon afterwards others began to follow Francis’ simple way. When he was 29 he went to Pope Innocent III and got permission to found the order of “Friars Minor” and was ordained a deacon. He dedicated himself to preaching the Gospel and living the simple life of poverty and charity. When he was 38 he left for Egypt and then Syria to win the Muslims for Christ. Incredibly he walked past the lines of war, met with and befriended the sultans, and even convinced them to a certain degree, but the historical situation would not allow their outright conversion. He returned home where he continued his preaching and leading the order. When he was 43 he received the stigmata. He was a sickly man in general but even more so in his later years. He died in 1226 when he was 45 years old listening to Psalm 142.
Themes of St. Francis’ spirituality:
Poverty:
a. Loving poverty does not mean limiting yourself to loving the poor, while making sure that you lack nothing. It means becoming poor with them, it means to embrace, as our Lord did, their state and their neediness.
b. Poverty is something to make holy. His insistence to use “no money” was a protest against the misguided materialism of his day. “You can't starve a fasting man, you can't steal from someone who has no money, you can't ruin someone who hates prestige. They are truly free.”
Love of the outcast:
“During my life of sin,” he writes, “nothing disgusted me like seeing victims of leprosy. It was the Lord Himself who urged me to go to them. I did so, and ever since, everything was so changed for me that what had seemed at first painful and impossible to overcome became easy and pleasant. Shortly after, I definitely forsook the world.”
Love of nature:
a. Because all creation is from God, we share a certain “brotherhood of all creation”. This doesn’t mean that we worship creation, but that we love it because of our mutual connection to it through God.
b. There is the story about the taming of the wolf that was menacing the town of Gubbio. He told the wolf, “If you agree to make peace, brother wolf, I will tell the people to feed you as long as you live, for I know that it was hunger that drove you to commit so many crimes. Do you promise never to harm man or beast again?” The wolf kept his bargain and so did the town.
c. St. Francis is the originator of the Manger Scene. He wanted to bring the nativity alive to the senses of the people instead of it being a vague sounding story. He led a procession up the mountain at Greccio where a crib, ox, donkey, and straw was waiting for everyone. The Mass commenced at an altar placed in an overhanging niche.
Simplicity of life:
a. Francis was a man of humility and action. He sought out permission from the Pope and sought out the sultans in Syria and Egypt to pursue peace. Only one of the sermons preached by St. Francis at San Damiano has come down to us, and it is a sermon without words. Clare and her community were in choir waiting for him. Francis knelt down, raised his eyes to heaven, and prayed for a while. He then had ashes brought, put part of them on his head and sprinkled the rest around him in a circle. Again he paused, recited the Miserere, and then left. And that was his whole sermon.
b. Language: Francis “always spoke in a familiar style, without having recourse to the learned and bombastic words of human wisdom.”
c. Scholarship: He would have us venerate the theologians who dispense God’s Word to us; nevertheless, regardless of how noble and beneficial learning appeared to him, Francis did not consider it useful for his friars. (Francis had a rare gift of being able to get by without formal theological training. His intuitive sense was stronger than most)
Prayer, discernment, and action:
About three-quarters of a mile below Assisi stands the little convent of San Damiano. Francis heard, "Francis, go repair My house, which is falling in ruins." He acted on what God revealed to him and discerned God's greater meaning.
Charismatic, joyful, and genuine nature:
This trait of his explains his ability to charm so many even before his conversion. It is why he was able to preach so openly, meet the Pope, and get audiences with the sultans.
Making the Gospel present:
a. Living out the teaching he heard in Matthew and Jesus’ words.
b. Acting and demonstrating Biblical events
Humility:
a. Francis looked so shabby with “his poor tunic, his tangled locks, and his great black eyebrows,” that Innocent III pretended to take him for a swineherd. “Leave me alone with your rule!” said he. “Go find your pigs instead. You can preach all the sermons you want to them!” He dashed to a pigsty, smeared himself with dung, and reappeared before the pope. “The Pope regretted having given him so ill a reception: and after sending him away to wash up, promised him another audience.”
b. Being honest about humanness: When people insisted on touching Francis’s garments in veneration, he would say, “Don’t canonize me too soon, for a ‘saint’ like me might still bring sons and daughters into the world!”
c. Working with others: The priests who would receive him wouldn’t get nagged, but would be shown holiness and be inspired.
Suffering:
a. Francis had setbacks and sufferings in his life including losing his order, suffering the stigmata, and he physically suffered and went blind while he wrote Canticle of the Sun.
b. Once Francis heard this dialog with God: “Francis, if in exchange for all these sufferings, you were to receive a treasure so great that the whole earth, even if it were changed into gold, would be nothing beside it, would you not have reason to be satisfied?” “Certainly, Lord!” “Then, be happy, for I guarantee that one day you shall enjoy the Kingdom of Heaven, and this is as certain as if you possessed it already.”
Books:
Good Biographies: I'd recommend the biography by Augustine Thompson. The first I read as a kid was by Omer Englebert and that is good too.
If you want to go fancy: St. Bonaventure and G.K. Chesterton both have biographies on St. Francis. They are more literary and theological, but good reads.