True to his name, the boy grows up enamored of
the French language and of the tales of the Knights and Ladies of French
Romance. He is a carefree, generous young man who pursues the good life with
gusto, partying and carousing with his friends. But throughout all the
levity of his younger years, he dreams of becoming a knight, a serious,
bloody enterprise. And when a war breaks out between Assisi and its
neighbor, Perugia, he gets his chance to ride off to war as a knight of
Assisi, only to be captured as a prisoner of war in the defeat of Assisi in
the very first skirmish.
How could he have known that this was the end of
war for him, this humiliating defeat of his hometown? And how could he have
known that the year of imprisonment in a Perugian prison would change him
deeply? At just 21 years old, Francis returns home to Assisi a broken man,
to lie in bed for a year. The richest young man in Assisi, Francis spent a
year in prison, then a year in bed. His companions had dubbed him the King
of the Revels: Francis, the son of the cloth merchant, Pietro Bernardone,
and the French woman, Lady Pica.
He will try to go to war again as a knight in the papal army battling the
forces of the Holy Roman Emperor, but God has other plans. In a vision, God
tells Francis to return to Assisi where it will be revealed to him what he
is to do. And so Francis retreats from war, and one day while he is praying
before the crucifix of the dilapidated little chapel of San Damiano, outside
the walls of Assisi, he receives his call from God. From the crucifix comes
the voice, “Francis, go and repair my house which, as you see, is falling
into ruin.”
Francis is to build and to repair, not to tear
down with weapons of destruction. He begins to beg stones and repairs with
his own hands the run-down chapel of San Damiano, which is the “house”
Francis believes his vision refers to. It is this house, this little church,
but it is more. It is the larger house, the Christian Church itself that he
is to repair.
Francis learns this larger implication of the
vision one day when he sees a leper on the road and impulsively jumps from
his horse, gives coins to the leper and embraces him. Unbelievably, he is
not repulsed but filled with joy, for he realizes he has embraced his Lord,
Jesus Christ.
And so it happens that Francis goes to live
among the lepers, ministering to them and learning from them. Here, he
realizes, are the living stones; and together, they are building the Kingdom
of God on earth. Here is God among the rejected, the despised, the poor.
Thus it begins, the Franciscan rebuilding of the
Church. Others soon join Francis, and they become a brotherhood, and the
Church approves their way of life to live with the poor as poor men who
observe the Holy Gospel wholeheartedly.
Francis and the brothers preach and work with
their hands for their daily bread; and when they receive nothing for their
labor, they beg for food. They continue to live with the lepers, making
peace with them and with all people and all creation by making peace with
their own aversion to the lepers. They embrace them instead of running away.
Women come to join them; the first is Clare, the daughter of the knight, Favarone. And the Bishop of Assisi gives Clare and her companions, as their
cloister, San Damiano, the church Francis himself restored with his own
hands. There they live in extreme Gospel poverty in contemplation of the
Poor Crucified Christ. They work with their hands and depend on the begging
of the brothers for their sustenance. They pray for and minister to the sick
who are brought to their door.
Francis, in the meantime, is expanding the
brothers’ ministry beyond Assisi to all of Italy and beyond. He himself,
with one or two brothers, makes missionary journeys preaching conversion and
forgiveness which he sees as THE means of peacemaking. He travels to Spain,
France, Switzerland, Dalmatia, and even to Syria, the Holy Land, and Egypt
during the Fifth Crusade. He tries to be a peace-maker between the
Christians and Muslims, going so far as to enter the camp of the Sultan,
again preaching conversion of heart and forgiveness. The Sultan listens and
gives Francis safe passage through his kingdom.
The animal and plant worlds, too, receive
Francis’ compassionate love. He reaches out to and reveres all created
things. He preaches to the animals and birds and fish. He embraces and tames
the ravening wolf of Gubbio.
He preaches always the God-man, Jesus Christ.
Francis tries to make him visible and tangible, as when, three years before
his death, he celebrates Midnight Mass with live animals to recreate the
first Christmas, thus popularizing the tradition of the Christmas crib.
The following year, while Francis is in deep
prayer on the mountain of LaVerna in Tuscany, he receives the sacred
stigmata, the five wounds of Christ, becoming himself a visible image of his
crucified Lord.
Shortly afterward he sings his Canticle of the
Creatures, his swan song that sums up his life and attests to the peace,
joy, and integration a life of love and forgiveness brings. He sings of all
creatures as his brothers and sisters and bids them forgive one another if
they want to be crowned by God. He then welcomes even death as his sister
and embraces her.
The man who longed to be a knight, a man of war,
dies a man of peace at peace with God, with himself, with all of creation.
God changed his heart, and his changed heart changed the world.
- Contributed by Murray Bodo, OFM
