ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI

Probably no one in history has set out as seriously as did Francis of Assisi to imitate Christ Jesus. St Francis was born at Assisi in Umbria, Italy, about 100 miles north of Rome in 1182 and died there on 3 October, 1226. His father, Pietro Bernardone, was a wealthy cloth merchant and his mother Pica belonged to a noble family of Provence. As a youth, Francis was known to be quite lively, often the centre of attention among his peers. As a teenager, he enjoyed parties and singing and was quite worldly. Francis enjoyed a very lavish easy life because of his father’s wealth and the permissiveness of the times. No one tried to control him or to teach him. But God intervened in the prime of his life and called for conversion.

Francis’ conversion did not happen overnight. God had waited for him for twenty-four years and now it was Francis’ turn to wait. Francis started to spend more time in prayer. He went off to a cave and wept for his past sins. One day while riding through the countryside, Francis, the man who loved beauty, who hated deformity or dirt, came face to face with a leper. Repelled by the appearance and the smell of the leper, he impulsively turned away, nevertheless jumped down from his horse and embraced and kissed that leper.

Over the next year, Francis and his father regularly were at odds. He and his father formally parted ways in the presence of the Bishop of Assisi when Francis renounced his inheritance, declaring only God as his Father. He not only gave up his inheritance but stripped off all his clothes, the clothes his father had given him. Wearing nothing but castoff rags, he went off into the freezing woods, singing. During that year, Francis grew in his love for the poor and even served the lepers at a nearby hospital.

Over the next three years, Francis entered a new life of poverty, prayer, and service of God. At first, the townspeople thought Francis was out of his senses, and they ridiculed him. But as time passed companions joined Francis, people who wanted to follow his life of sleeping in the open, begging for garbage to eat and loving God. He and his followers spent much time praying, listening to the voice of God, serving the poor and lepers, and working with their hands to repair abandoned churches. By the year 1209, Francis and his followers numbered twelve and following the Gospel literally, they went out to preach two by two. At first, listeners were hostile but soon these people noticed that these barefoot beggars wearing sacks seemed filled with constant joy. Before long those who had met them with mud and rocks began to greet them with bells and smiles. Over the next ten years, the Order of Friars Minor grew to five thousand.

There was about Francis, a chivalry and a poetry which gave to his other-worldliness a quite romantic charm and beauty. While other saints shunned the world as evil, Francis was ever thoroughly in touch with the world. This exquisite human element in Francis’ character was the key to that far-reaching, all-embracing sympathy which may be called his charism.

Francis’ devotedness in consoling the afflicted made him so condescending that he was eager to live with, and to serve the lepers and to eat with them out of the same platter. But above all, it is his dealings with the erring that reveal the truly Christian spirit of his charity. Hospitality, according to Francis, was the younger sister of charity. “Whoever may come to us”, he writes, “whether a friend or a foe, a thief or a robber, let him be kindly received.”

Francis’ brotherhood included all of God’s creation. Much has been written about Francis’ love of nature but his relationship was deeper than that. We call someone a lover of nature if they spend their free time in the woods or hills and admire their beauty. But Francis really felt that this nature and all God’s creations, were part of his brotherhood. The sparrow was as much his brother as the pope. ‘The Canticle of the Sun’ is the symbol and revelation of the life and ideals of Francis of Assisi.

His entire life was a poem which he sang even when he walked in utter silence down the streets of his town. His soul was so absorbed in Seraphic Love, his vision so purified and clear, that he was delicately sensitive to the Unutterable Presence of his Eternal Love in every object. So Francis paid courtesy to every creature because every creature to him was a monstrance bearing God’s goodness and beauty. That is why he called all created things his brothers and sisters. Brother Sun and Brother Fire he loved the most because these were the symbols of God’s love and goodness. Sister Water he cherished with tender reverence. When he washed his hands he was careful that the water which fell to the ground should not be trodden upon. Out of reverence for Him Who was crucified on the tree of the Cross for our salvation he had the friars cut only as much of the tree as was necessary for wood, never the entire tree. Francis found God everywhere. Being overwhelmed by God’s presence in creation and uniting all in kinship, his familial terms in addressing natural elements ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ came as no surprise. His exposure to nature during his contemplative retreats obviously enhanced his love for nature as a whole and not only for the organic forms of life but to the inanimate too. Francis’ overwhelming sense of the interconnectedness of all life is perhaps the outstanding characteristic of his life. This made him the worthy Patron Saint of ‘Ecological Consciousness’.

Humility was no doubt, Francis’ ruling virtue. Equally admirable was Francis’ prompt and docile obedience to the voice of grace within him. We see Francis yielding ungrudging submission to ecclesiastical authority. No reformer was ever less aggressive than Francis. His apostolate embodied the very noblest spirit of reform; he strove to correct abuses by holding up an ideal and living it.

Early in August 1224, Francis retired with three companions to La Verna, to keep a forty days fast. During this retreat the sufferings of Christ became more than ever the centre of his meditations. It was on or about the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (14 Sept.) while praying, that he beheld the marvellous vision of the Seraph, as a sequel of which there appeared on his body the visible marks of the five wounds of the Crucified which had already long since been impressed upon his heart. Brother Leo who was with St. Francis when he received the stigmata has left us a clear and simple account of the miracle, now preserved at Assisi. The saint’s right side is described as bearing on open wound which looked as if made by a lance, while through his hands and feet were black nails of flesh, the points of which were bent backward. After the reception of the stigmata, Francis suffered increasing pains throughout his frail body, already broken by continual mortifications. For the remainder of his life, Francis took the greatest care to hide the stigmata. After the death of Francis, Brother Elias announced the stigmata to the order by a circular letter. Later, Brother Leo, the confessor and intimate companion of the saint who also left a written testimony of the event, said that in death Francis seemed like one just taken down from the cross.

This man of God led his small band of followers through Umbria, re-living the radical evangelical poverty. It was an extremely realistic imitation of Christ. So much did Francis remind the people of his time, of Jesus, that he similarly became idealised by his close followers. His reaching out to the poor and the lesser ones of the society and adopting a similar lifestyle of Jesus, his preaching and telling stories as he journeyed around, as well as the anecdotes of his miracles of changing water into wine, increasing a wine harvest, drawing water from a rock, having power over animals and birds, bringing back to life the dead, all recalled his life model, Jesus. It came to its fullest flowering in the stigmatization. It was this event in particular that had a very special role in confirming that he was the ‘Second Christ’.

St. Francis of Assisi might be the most cherished saint in the history of the Church. He is a man of all times. No one can deny the inspiration that he has been down the centuries and that is the reason that he has the greatest number of followers called Franciscans, who cherish his ideals, adhere to his teachings and follow his spiritual disciplines. The unique position Francis has in the Church owes in no small measure to his singularly lovable and winsome personality. Without strife or schism, God’s Poor Little Man of Assisi became the means of renewing the Church and of initiating the most potent and popular religious movement since the beginnings of the Church.