The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [69]
The greed of some, which causes the poverty of so many. The messes the people of this world get into. Unbelievable. The arguments and the battles and almost all of them because one side or the other can’t understand the concept of a metaphor.
Out riding one day, Francis came upon a leper begging at the roadside. He dismounted. Careful to remain at arm’s length, he gave the poor deformed man a few coins. Then, pushed by some invisible hand, he knelt down and kissed the leper.
From that kiss, his destiny began to take shape. He started visiting the sick, giving them whatever he had. His father accused him of stealing from the family’s warehouse, had his son arrested and dragged before the bishop in the town square. But Francis wasn’t one for tough love. He apologized for giving away what wasn’t his, then stripped himself of his fancy clothes and threw them at his speechless father. He renounced his inheritance, saying, “Hitherto I have called you Father on earth, but now I say Our Father who art in heaven.”
The bishop quickly covered Francis with an undyed brown peasant’s frock, and the transformation from rich rebel boy to monk was complete.
Folks ridiculed Francis, but no one could deny his subversive appeal. He possessed nothing, wasn’t handsome or tall—he stood about five-foot-four. He offered no great learning or wisdom, often went hungry, but men and women from all walks of life felt compelled to follow him, giving away their money and wandering poor with this radically joyful holy nutball.
The seekers lived outside or in makeshift shelters, worked in the fields in exchange for food, tended the sick, comforted the depressed.
Francis fed all the tame birds of his community, and they gathered to hear him preach. In one town, he subdued a wolf who was attacking people and livestock. He implored the villagers to feed their wolf so it wouldn’t harm them anymore. They did, and that wolf wandered docile from door to door until the end of its days.
In his peasant’s frock, Francis challenged the decadence of church government, preached a message of antimaterialism and compassionate service. He composed a rule based on the Gospel words about perfection, sought approval from Pope Innocent III. At first the pope thought the whole thing sounded outrageous, but then he had two dreams. In one, a palm tree grew at his feet. In the next, Francis propped up the Lateran church, which seemed about to collapse. “All right,” Innocent finally said. “Preach your rule, but only by word of mouth.”
In the summer of 1224, when Francis was forty-two years old, he retired in seclusion to a tiny hut, where he intended to suffer a long fast in honor of the archangel Michael. He requested that he be left alone for six weeks, but after just a month, on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, as he contemplated the Passion so intensely he believed himself transformed into Christ, an angel appeared. Its fiery wings descended from heaven, and within their folds the crucified Savior appeared. Francis was frightened and ecstatic, uplifted and heartrended. Emerging from the vision, he was amazed to find his hands and feet marked with bent nails, his side wounded and bleeding.
For the remaining two years of his life, Francis kept his hands in his habit, his feet covered by shoes and stockings. He composed his “Canticle of the Sun,” set it to music, and on his last living day, he asked his friends and followers to sing that part of the canticle that honors death. He broke bread with his community, was laid on the earth to preach to them a last time, and to bless them.
Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Death,
from whom no one living can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Blessed are they She finds doing Your Will.
No second death can do them harm.
Praise and bless my Lord and give Him thanks,
And serve Him with great humility.
Turn to Francis when it’s time to detox and transform