My God and My All: The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi

  Francis never stopped to inquire into the worthiness or otherwise of the poor for whom he spent himself, for only those who have some opinion of their own worthiness do that, and Francis had no opinion whatever of his. Once when he and Masseo were traveling home together from a preaching tour Masseo, teasing him, said, “Why after you? Why after you? You are not fair to look upon; you are not a man of parts; you are not of noble birth; why, pray, does all the world run after you?”

  There is no doubt that Masseo knew the answer to his question perfectly well, or the gospel phrase, “the world is gone after him,” would not have been ringing in his head, but he wanted to know how Francis himself accounted for his power over men. Was he aware of his own Christlike holiness?

  “Would you know why?” answered Francis. “Because in all the world God has not been able to perceive a viler creature, and so he has chosen me to confound the nobility, the might, and the wisdom of the world, that people may know that all things come from him, and not from the creature.”

  This was his honest belief, as it is of all saints, for the nearer a man comes to the terrible holiness of God, the more fearful does his own sin seem in his eyes. And so Francis felt himself one with all sinners in his sin, as he was one with all poor men in his poverty, and like Christ he had a special love for those who were lost, the outcasts of society who with all their crimes are nearer to sainthood than the self-satisfied and the hypocrites. When he came to die he asked that he might be buried on the collis infernus, the hill outside Assisi where criminals were executed, that he might be one with them in his death, and it is there that the great church was built that holds his bones today.

  He knew exactly how to win these outcasts. In the woods near one of the convents of the order lived a gang of desperate men, who kept themselves alive by robbery and murder. Three of them, finding themselves hungry one day, presented themselves at the convent and demanded food. The brother in charge, though he was likely to be murdered for his plain speaking, confronted them with great courage and told them what he thought of them. What right had they, robbers and murderers, to come to a convent demanding food which had been given in charity to the servants of God? “You are not worthy of the earth which bears you,” he said, “for you neither respect man nor the Lord who made you. Go about your business, and do not appear here again.” A bully, withstood with pluck, often crumbles, and the thieves did not use their daggers, though they went away in great anger.

  A little later Francis arrived, bringing with him a sack of bread and a little vessel of wine that had been given to him, and the brother, perhaps feeling a little pleased with himself, told him what had happened. But he was not commended, for this was one of those occasions when the fierce streak in Francis suddenly showed itself, and he lashed out at the brother as he had lashed out at Ruffino when he had failed in obedience. For this brother too had been disobedient. He was vowed to the service of Christ in his poor, and he had turned three hungry men from the door, men for whom Christ had died. The brother had perhaps enjoyed telling the robbers what he thought of them, but now he had to have a taste of his own medicine and stand humbly and patiently while Francis, at length, gave him his candid opinion of his behavior and told him what he was to do to retrieve it. He must take the bread and wine and go, alone, through the woods and mountain passes until he found the robbers, and then he was to kneel before them and humbly confess his fault. He was to tell them that Brother Francis had sent them the bread and wine and begged them not to do evil anymore, but to fear God and never again offend him. And he was to say that if they would promise this, Francis on his side promised to look after them and see that they never wanted food and drink.

  These sons of Francis, though they might fail in obedience now and then, always retrieved their failure with startling courage. The brother did exactly as he was told, as Ruffino had done, though he must have been convinced that he went to certain death, and while he went on his lonely dangerous way, Francis within the convent gave himself to prayer. It was for the robbers that he prayed, asking God to touch their hearts and bring them to repentance. The story as told in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis does not say that he prayed for the safety of the brother. Dearly though he loved them he never seems to have been concerned for the physical safety of his sons. The exaggerated importance which we in our day attach to the safety, comfort, and pleasure of the body was something that he would not have understood. To him the body was only the cell of the soul. It was far more terrible to him that his son should have endangered his immortal soul by his harshness to three poor men than that he should die at their hands. But he understood, none better, the misery and clamor of a starving body, and he knew how often the crimes of poor men are rooted in that alone, and so, to win these men to God, he sent them food and offered them security.

  And his wisdom won them. As they ate the bread and drank the wine, offered so humbly on his knees by the young friar who put his life into their hands with the gift he brought them, brokenly begging them to forgive him for his harshness, the same thing happened to them as had happened to the thief on the cross. They saw what they were beside the other. That this man should be kneeling before them in penitence for so small a fault made their own crimes seem suddenly hideous in their eyes. They said to each other, “For all these cruel deeds we feel no remorse of conscience, and no fear of God! And behold this holy friar who is come to us, for a few unkind words, which we merited most justly, has humbly confessed that he was wrong, and has brought us likewise bread and wine, with a most gracious promise from the holy Saint Francis. These men indeed are holy religious of God who merit his paradise, and we are sons of perdition worthy of the pains of hell. Let us go to Saint Francis; and if he gives us a hope that our sins may find mercy in the sight of God, we will do what he shall command to save our souls from the punishment of hell.”

  And so the young brother brought them to the convent and they came in to Francis in fear and trembling. “Father,” they said, “because of the multitude of our sins we dare not look for mercy from God; but if thou hast a hope that he may have pity on us, we are ready to do what thou shalt order, and do penance for our sins with thee.” Francis comforted them, telling them that the mercy of God is boundless. And so they trusted themselves to God’s mercy and a little while later Francis, without the slightest hesitation, received three murderers into the order.

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  AS FRANCIS GREW PROGRESSIVELY further from himself and nearer to God he saw men more and more as God sees them, with deep pity for their sin and profound and cherishing love for all that was good in them. There was no intolerance in him. He could be angry but he was never critical and never sarcastic. It was in no critical spirit that he had brought food from the table of the Lord to Cardinal Ugolino’s dinner party, but in a spirit of pure love, and it was as a gift of love that the guests had received what he gave. For the rich and the poor alike seemed to understand him almost as well as he understood them. The saints are simple people. It is the condition of divided allegiance, doubt, and compromise and the twists and turns of self-deception, that is complicated, not holiness. Francis had attained to what T. S. Eliot calls “a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything,” and everyone was entirely at home with him. And so it was no wonder they gave him such a tremendous welcome wherever he went, ringing the church bells, flocking out from town or village to meet him with palm branches in their hands, their priest leading them, the children crying, “Ecco il santo! Ecco il santo!” When he had preached to them they would press about him, trying to kiss or touch his habit, and they would bring their sick to him to heal.

  He was not eager to heal, though he had the charismatic gift in high degree. He did not refuse, for healing the sick was a part of his apostolic obedience, but he would draw back from healing if he could do so without harshness. Like Bernard when he fled from the reverence of the people of Bologna, he was terrified for his humility. The charismatic gift is a spectacular one a
nd he knew well that those who possess it must be always on their guard against spiritual pride. The men of those days adored a miracle worker but Francis would never work a miracle just to make them listen to him, indeed he would do all he could to distract their attention from any power of his that was at all unusual. Once when he was preaching, a wild young donkey came into the marketplace where he stood with the people about him and began running around and frightening them. “Brother Donkey,” said Francis, “stand quiet and let me preach to the people,” and brother donkey immediately stood still, put his head between his legs and was silent. “And blessed Francis, in order that men might not take notice of a miracle so stupendous, began to say comic things to make them laugh.”

  And no doubt he healed as well as preached with gaiety, for he never did anything in a spirit of solemnity but always with that joyous courage that is in itself a healing gift, so infectious is it when we meet it in the saints. It was said of him that it was not possible for anyone “to be in such trouble of mind that all the clouds would not depart and the sky be clear again at his bright words.” There are many stories of his healing, and they include the casting out of evil spirits and the raising of the dead. One of the most delightful is that of an old woman who pushed her way to him through the crowd when he was preaching at Gubbio and “with a miserable and woebegone face” showed him her useless crippled hands. He took them and held them in his own and they were restored to her again. Overcome with joy she hurried home and put her hands to instant use, making a cheesecake for Francis. Then with delight and pride she brought it to him, the first fruits of her restored usefulness. Francis did not normally allow himself to eat anything so luxurious as a cheesecake, but he was not going to disappoint her, and so to her joy he took a piece and ate it, and told her to take the rest home to feast her family.

  Francis healing a child was something that those who witnessed it must have treasured in memory for the rest of their lives, for his own childlikeness would have made of it a heavenly occasion. At Tuscanella a small boy lay paralyzed in his little bed. Francis prayed, blessed the boy, lifted him up in his arms, and set him upon the ground, “and in the sight of all the boy straightway rose whole in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and began to walk hither and thither about the house.”

  There was one healing of a child which was of importance to Francis himself. In the year 1221 he was in the little mountain town of Bagnorea when he saw a young woman coming toward him with her dying child in her arms. Speechless in her grief she knelt down and laid her little boy at Francis’s feet. As soon as he saw the child Francis’s face lit up with joy and he cried out, “O buona ventura!” Then he prayed for the child, blessed him, and gave him back to his mother. Francis, when he cried out, “Good luck!” must have had foreknowledge of the future and communicated something of what he knew to Maria dei Ritelli, the boy’s mother, for like Pica Bernadone she realized that her son belonged in some special way to God and she dedicated the boy to him. She called him Bonaventure and as soon as he was old enough he became a Franciscan. After the death of Francis the order passed through many troubles but new hope came back to it again when Bonaventure became its minister general. He was a man of great personal beauty, a poet and scholar but holy and humble too. He instituted the angelus, the bell that rings three times a day to call the world to remember the Mother of God. He was so true a son of Francis that stories told of him might have been told of Francis himself. Saint Thomas Aquinas, the saint who sings the praises of the Franciscan Order in Dante’s Divine Comedy, once came to visit Bonaventure, caught a glimpse of him in his cell where he was writing his life of Saint Francis, and praying as he worked, and withdrew without disturbing him. “Let us leave a saint to work for a saint,” he said. Later he asked the minister general how he found time to study. “My book is the crucifix,” said Bonaventure. On hearing that he had been made a cardinal he was seized with the same sort of terror as would have seized Francis, fled to a convent near Florence and hid himself there. But the papal nuncios pursued him and ran him to earth in the kitchen where he was doing the washing up. They showed him the gorgeous cardinal’s hat and he looked at it with dismay. He could not touch it with his greasy fingers but a tree by the kitchen door made a convenient hat stand. “Hang it up on that tree,” he said to a brother, “and show the nuncios to the parlor,” and he continued with the washing up.

  The prologue of his beautiful Legenda Sancti Francisi looks back in memory to that day when his mother laid him at the saint’s feet. He speaks of the devotion that he bears “to this our holy father, by whose merits and invocation I was (as I well remember) while yet a child, delivered from the jaws of death.”

  There was another child whose life Francis saved. He was once walking along the road that runs from Todi to Perugia, not far from the Tiber, when he met a woman with a basket of clothes on her head. Instantly he knew that something was wrong here, and he stopped the woman and asked her where she was going.

  “To the river to wash these clothes of mine,” she said.

  “Nay, woman,” said Francis sternly, “what thou carriest belongeth unto God. Set down thy basket and I will take charge of him.”

  When Francis commanded people obeyed. The woman put the basket down and Francis lifted away the dirty linen and took into his arms the newborn baby whom she had been going to drown in the river. Later he built a little house upon the spot where he had rescued the baby, and entrusted it to the care of charitable women. This was the first foundling hospital for the illegitimate children of the poor, and from this humble beginning has grown a great work accomplished for children through their own hospitals.

  There is another blessing that children owe to Francis, and that is the Christmas crib; but the story of Greccio belongs to another chapter of this book.

  When we think of what he did for children, and how much he must have loved them, it is sad that there are so few stories of Francis with children. But the one we have in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis shows us a child perfectly at his ease with Francis, as though with another child, and more aware of the heavenly country in which Francis lived than were the majority of his adult contemporaries. In one of the convents of the order a little boy was living, and one evening Francis arrived to spend the night with the brothers. As soon as compline had been said he went to the brothers’ sleeping place to get some rest, for he liked to get his few hours sleep in the early part of the night so that the hours after midnight could be given to prayer. Now Francis was the little boy’s hero and he had made up his mind to watch him very carefully and learn how to be a saint too, for saintliness, he thought, could be learned by observation. He was particularly anxious to watch Francis when he was praying in the woods at night, but the difficulty was to be with him there, for he had been told that Francis always went secretly and alone to prayer. Then he had a bright idea and when he had observed around the corner of the door that Francis had fallen asleep he crept in and lay down beside him. Then he took the end of the little cord that encircled his middle and tied it to the cord that Francis wore. He thought that when Francis moved he would quickly wake up and untie the cord, and then creep out after him to the wood and see exactly how saints behave at prayer. But things did not work out quite according to his plan, for when Francis awoke he was in the first deep sleep of his healthy childhood and did not stir. Francis, finding himself tethered to the child, unfastened the knot gently so as not to disturb him, and went softly from the dormitory, waking none of the sleeping brothers, and “into the wood” where a small cell had been built as an oratory. Some while after, the little boy woke up and found his bird had flown. But he was a determined child who meant to be a saint, and he did not allow himself to be discouraged by this temporary thwarting of his plan. He too arose and made his way to the door that led to the wood. It was open and he went through it and followed the path that led to the oratory. Presently he heard voices and saw a light shining through the boughs of the trees. He crept cautiously
nearer and it was not moonlight but the light of the other country in which the saints live and move and have their being, even while their bodies still inhabit this world, though the light of it is seen so seldom by themselves. Children see it occasionally, and are aware sometimes of the great ones who have been purified, and of terrible pacing angels who have never sinned. The little boy, creeping as near as he dared, saw their figures in the light and heard the music of their speech. Though he had the innocence of a child he was too young to bear it, and Francis, returning some while later to the convent, found the small and apparently lifeless body lying across the path. He picked the boy up in his arms, found to his relief that he was not dead, carried him back to the convent and put him to bed. Later, when he was awake and recovered, the saint and the little boy had a talk together in some private place and the child told Francis what he had seen. This, Francis said, was to be a secret between them, and he asked the boy never to speak of what he had seen until he himself should be dead. The child promised, thrilled with the thought of sharing a secret with Father Francis. He grew up a very valiant son of the order, growing daily in God’s grace and in deep love for Francis, and he kept his promise. Not until after the death of Francis did he say what he had seen.