The pigeons are gathering already, though it’s only 11:00 am, a propitious time in the Piazza del Comune. The gathering of pigeons signals the approaching noon feeding time. When the bells in the medieval town begin to ring, hundreds of pigeons will strut and rise in short flights. Children will delight and some will be frightened as their parents lead them into the carpet of birds feeding in front of the Temple of Minerva. Noontime in Assisi.

Much of the city is there in that noontime ritual: the birds and the children, the onlooking tourists and natives who sit at the outdoor tables that front the nearby bars. A procession of tourists or pilgrims walks around or through the pigeons, and I am reminded of Saint Francis and the birds: a good reason to lose myself in the scene and remember where I am. This is the birthplace of Francesco Bernardone, whom the world knows as Saint Francis of Assisi. Of Assisi, a phrase that defines much of who he is and the unique way he lived his extraordinary life.

Today the sun is blinding as I look up from my cappuccino and see the pigeons strutting nervously as they wait for noon, and at the other end of the piazza the fountain where Francis and his first companion, Bernard of Quintavalle, in a lavish gesture, gave away all of Bernard’s possessions, thus signaling the beginning of Bernard’s life as a poor penitent Brother of Assisi.

Of Assisi. At that time Assisi was a city divided geographically between nobles (the majores, the greater ones) and merchants and the poor (the minores, the lesser ones). The towered homes of the nobles rose high in the upper part of the city, while the poor lived in lower Assisi, and the merchants in between. Upper and lower were divided, generally speaking, by the Piazza del Comune, the main piazza of the city. Rival families lived in constant tension in anticipation of the next brawl or outright battle between their houses. As a boy and young man, Francis saw these divisions and this omnipresent hostility and quarreling. War was a reality that ran through Francis’ years as a river of blood.

This was his Assisi, as were the interminable conflicts between the supporters of the pope and the emperor, the papal Guelfs and imperial Ghibellines, whose struggles for supremacy tore apart city after city and divided one city from another, their walled fortress-like towns a now-dumb tribute to the clamor of their dissensions.

Photo by Christopher Heffron

I leave the pigeons and the fountain and walk toward the Piazza of Saint Clare from where I will be able to see Assisi’s own walled fortress, the Rocca Maggiore, the symbol of the emperor’s power over Assisi and the surrounding countryside. The Rocca Maggiore and all the violence it symbolizes prepares Francis for knighthood and war, and to war he does go, only to be captured in the first battle at Ponte San Giovanni between Assisi and her rival, Perugia. Capture and prison and a year of illness after he is finally released lay the groundwork for the inner journey, just as violence and war precipitate the young Francis’ outer journey, which he resumes as soon as he is well. But only a day’s journey out of Assisi, Francis experiences the first of his dreams and voices that change him utterly. The mystic journey begins.

But I am ahead of myself, still looking up at the Rocca Maggiore, at those heights Francis longed to attain. He would instead descend from those heights again and again before he finally ascended the mountain of God, La Verna, and met there the Six-Winged Seraph with the body of a crucified man—all of which is yet to come. He has yet to be born and live. Of that story these are the bare outlines that we will flesh out as we explore Francis’ mysticism.

Francesco Bernardone was born in 1182 in the Umbrian town of Assisi and was baptized John. At the time of his baptism his father was away on a business trip to France; when he returned, he changed his son’s name to Francesco, “the Frenchman.”

True to his nickname, the boy grew up enamored of the French language and of the tales of the knights and ladies of French Romance. He was a carefree, generous young man who pursued the good life with gusto, partying and carousing with his friends. But throughout all the levity of his younger years, he dreamed of becoming a knight—a serious, bloody enterprise. And when a war broke out between Assisi and its neighbor, Perugia, he got 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? How could he have known that the year of imprisonment in a Perugian prison would change him deeply? And he, but twenty-one years old, returning home to Assisi a broken man, to lie in bed for a year. A year in prison, a year in bed. He, the richest young man in Assisi, a man his companions had dubbed “King of the Revels,” Francis, the son of the cloth merchant Pietro Bernardone and the Frenchwoman Lady Pica.

He would try to go to war again as a knight in the papal army battling the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor, but God had other plans and in a vision told Francis to return to Assisi where it would be revealed to him what he was to do. And so Francis retreated from war, and one day while he was praying before the crucifix of the dilapidated little chapel of San Damiano, outside the walls of Assisi, he received his call from God. From the crucifix came the voice, “Francis, go and rebuild my house which, as you see, is falling utterly to ruin.”¹

Francis was to build, to repair, not to tear down with weapons of destruction. He began to beg for stones and repaired with his own hands the run-down chapel of San Damiano, which was the “house” Francis believed his vision referred to. It was this house, this little church, but it was more. It was the larger house, the Catholic church itself, that he was to repair.

Francis learned this larger implication of the vision one day when he saw a leper on the road and impulsively jumped from his horse, gave coins to the leper and embraced him. Unbelievably, he was not repulsed, but filled with joy, for he realized he had embraced his Lord, Jesus Christ.

That is how it happened that Francis went to live among the lepers, ministering to them and learning from them. There, he realized, were the living stones, and together, they were building the kingdom of God on earth. There was God among the rejected, the despised, the poor.

Thus it began, the Franciscan rebuilding of the church. Others soon joined Francis, and they became a brotherhood, and the church approved their way of life: to live with the poor as poor men who observed the holy gospel wholeheartedly.

Francis and the brothers preached and worked with their hands for their daily bread, and when they received nothing for their labor, they begged for their food. They continued to live among the lepers, making peace with them and with all people and all creation by making peace with their own aversion to the lepers. They embraced them instead of running away.

Women came to join them; the first was Clare, the daughter of the knight Favarone di Offreduccio. The bishop of Assisi gave Clare and her companions as their cloister San Damiano, the church Francis himself had restored with his own hands. There they lived in extreme gospel poverty in contemplation of the Poor Crucified Christ. They worked with their hands and depended on the begging of the brothers for their sustenance. They prayed for and ministered to the sick who were brought to their door.

Francis, in the meantime, was expanding the brothers’ ministry beyond Assisi to all of Italy and even farther. He himself, with one or two brothers, made missionary journeys preaching conversion and forgiveness, which he saw as the means of peacemaking. He traveled to Spain, France, Switzerland, Dalmatia and even to Syria, the Holy Land and Egypt during the Fifth Crusade. He tried to be a peacemaker between Christians and Muslims, going so far as to enter the camp of the sultan, again preaching conversion of heart and forgiveness; the sultan listened and gave Francis safe passage through his kingdom.

The animal and plant worlds, too, received Francis’ compassionate love. He reached out to and reverenced all created things. He preached to the animals and birds and fish. He embraced and tamed the ravening wolf of Gubbio.

He preached always the God-man, Jesus Christ, and tried to make him visible and tangible, as when, three years before his death, he celebrated Midnight Mass with live animals to re-create the first Christmas, thus popularizing the tradition of the Christmas crib.

The following year, while Francis was in deep prayer on the mountain of La Verna in Tuscany, he received the sacred stigmata, the five wounds of Christ, becoming himself a visible image of his crucified Lord.

Shortly afterward he sang his “Canticle of the Creatures,” the swan song that summed up his life and attested to the peace and joy and integration a life of love and forgiveness brings. He sang of all creatures as his brothers and sisters and bade them forgive one another if they wished to be crowned by God. He then welcomed even death as his sister and embraced her.

The man who longed to be a knight, a man of war, died a man of peace—at peace with God, with himself and with all of creation. God changed his heart, and his changed heart changed the world.

The mysticism of Saint Francis grew out of and was not separate from his Catholic sacramental and gospel life. Francis’ intimacy with God was not a category of experience separate from his intense living of the gospel within the Catholic church.

True, at the beginning, when he was still “in the world,” as he put it, he was gifted with ecstatic dreams and with the vision of Christ speaking to him from the crucifix of San Damiano and with the vision of Christ the Leper. But even then Francis did not have these visions and dreams in order to draw him into himself but to draw him into the mystery of the church. “Go and rebuild my house,” the voice of the crucifix spoke, “which, as you see, is falling utterly to ruin.” Francis went out and begged for stones to repair the ramshackle chapel of San Damiano, and eventually the house of the larger church itself. And when he saw Christ in a leper, Francis went to live among the lepers. “[A]nd the Lord Himself led me among them,” Francis writes in his Testament, “and I worked mercy with them.”²

The visitations from the Lord led Francis into church-building and church-making together with others, not into self-absorption. In the same way, the inner conversions he experienced and his lifelong walking in the footsteps of the poor Christ derived from his response to the Gospel on two occasions, especially, in February and April of 1208.

The first occasion was the Gospel Reading on the Feast of Saint Matthias, February 24. After Mass Francis, who’d been moved by the reading, asked the priest to explain the gospel to him, which the priest did, line by line. When he heard the words that Christ’s true disciples should “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in their belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff” (Matthew 10:9–10), Francis was filled with joy and cried out, “This is what I want; this is what I desire with all my heart!”³ Francis began immediately to live out Christ’s words.

This is Francis the practical mystic, one who responded wholeheartedly to God’s Word and in that response God was revealed. Everyone can be this kind of mystic with God’s grace. The practical mystic is not one with secret knowledge of God, but one who knows God in doing the will of God.

Francis expands on this practical mysticism for everyone when he writes in his “Letter to the Faithful,”
 

We are his bride when our faithful soul is united with Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit; we are his brothers and sisters when we do the will of his Father who is in heaven, and we are mother to him when we carry him in our hearts and souls through love and a pure and sincere conscience, and give him birth by doing good.⁴

This is a mysticism for everyone. This is a mysticism Francis offers to all believers, a mysticism which he illustrates through the gestures of his own life. The Franciscan mystic is the ordinary Christian mystic who is brother, sister, bride and mother of Christ by means of a fidelity, made possible by the Holy Spirit, in doing God’s will, in carrying Christ within and through love and a pure and sincere conscience and in giving birth to Christ by the charity of good works. In all of this is intimacy with God, and intimacy with God that results in charity is practical mysticism.

It is interesting that Francis’ response takes place within a liturgical setting and that he seeks the explanation of the priest before he acts on God’s Word. His personal response to the Gospel had begun, and it was precipitated by hearing the Gospel read at Mass.

On April 16 of that same year, Francis was approached by the son of a wealthy nobleman of Assisi, Bernard of Quintavalle, about how Bernard might “reject the world” after the example of Francis, who answered that they needed to seek God’s counsel. The two then went to the church of Saint Nicholas in Assisi, and after they’d prayed, Francis opened the Missal three times to discern God’s will.

The first text to appear was: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor” (Matthew 19:21). The second read: “Take nothing for your journey” (Luke 9:3). And the third, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). And Francis said, “This is our life and rule, and that of all who wish to join our company.”⁵

Again it is the Word of God in the liturgical Mass book that Francis and Bernard consult, and what the three openings reveal become their rule of life, not just for Bernard and Francis, but for all who will join them. When the revelation Francis received on the Feast of Saint Matthias was confirmed by Bernard’s joining him, he envisioned a company of those who, like him and Bernard, would live out this scriptural rule of life. Within the parameters of that rule and in the church, which was to confirm it officially in the person of Pope Innocent III, Francis and others who joined that holy enterprise experienced profound intimacy with God through transformation into Christ.

The most dramatic visual confirmation of that intimacy was revealed in the very flesh of Francis himself in the sacred stigmata he received on Mount La Verna in September of 1224, two years before he died and sixteen years after Francis and Bernard embraced the way of life revealed to them in the opening of the Missal.

It was an experience revealed within the brotherhood and in the community that is the church as Francis was in retreat to prepare for the Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel. As the life of the brothers was an intensification of the life lived by all Christians, so Francis’ life was an intensification of the gospel life the brothers lived in common.

The sacred stigmata is the dramatic visual representation of Francis as the personification of one “wounded” by God’s word as described in the Letter to the Hebrews: “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow...” (Hebrews 4:12). And again in Isaiah: My word “shall not return to me empty, / but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, / and succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11).

All the mystics fulfill these words, of course, but there is something swift and dramatic in the way Saint Francis responds to God’s word. He hears the word of God, and he carries it out without reservation, without counting the cost, without equivocation.

“Go and repair my house which, as you see, is falling into ruin,” the voice from the San Damiano crucifix entreats; Francis goes out and rushes to his father’s shop, takes a bolt of the best cloth, mounts one of his father’s fine steeds and rides to the neighboring town of Foligno. There he sells the cloth and the horse and returns to Assisi with a bag of money for the priest of San Damiano so that the little church might be repaired.

When the wise priest refuses the money, fearing perhaps the wrath of Francis’ father, Francis, undaunted, throws the money on the windowsill and goes up to the city of Assisi to beg for stones to personally repair the church. He heard the words; he acted on them, beginning with their literal meaning. He starts with stones for a little chapel; he ends up restoring the Catholic church itself. The literal becomes something more; the literal is the symbolic and the symbolic is the literal for Francis.

Each time he hears the word of God, he immediately responds to its literal invitation, and when he does, something much larger is fulfilled. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says (Matthew 5:3). So Francis then endeavors to be poor in spirit, but he goes further. He pushes the envelope and renounces all his possessions; he leaves the protective walls of Assisi and literally lives with the poorest of the poor outside the city wall: the lepers. Others join him in this way of life, and soon the kingdom of heaven begins to happen in the swamp-like valley below Assisi. The kingdom then begins to spread throughout Italy and Europe, the Middle East and eventually throughout the world. In Francis’ response the Word of God did not return to God empty, but returned a hundredfold.

Francis follows in the footsteps of Jesus, and that is where most of us falter. We want to follow Jesus’ footsteps, but we know ahead of time where they lead, and we are afraid. We hold back.

The difference between us and saints and mystics like Saint Francis is threefold: First, the mystics have heard a word beyond the word we hear in Scripture; they literally hear an inner or outer voice inviting them to love’s journey. Second, the mystics fall in love with God whom they experience in an intimate, sometimes overwhelming way. Third, they are somehow already rich soil in which the seed of God’s word grows and produces rich fruit (see Matthew 13:9).

All of us are invited to be rich soil for God’s word, and all of us have become rich soil in baptism. All of us have heard God’s word in Scripture, in nature, in prayer, and all of us experience intimacy with God, especially in the sacraments (the external signs of a deep, interior reality). What makes the difference is both in the fullness of our response and in the level of consciousness of what is really going on within us. The kingdom of heaven is already within and around us, but because of our often lukewarm response of heart and action, we don’t have eyes to see or ears to hear.

The mystics, however, cultivate awareness. They listen for God’s word; they respond with concrete, often heroic, actions when they hear it. A mystic, then, is one who shows the rest of us who we really are, who we can become, if only we would realize the gift of God that is already within us and respond in our concrete daily lives to God’s great gift of love. The mystic shows us how not to let God’s word return to God empty. The mystic uncovers the mystery, a mystery inside each one of us, and models what it looks like and what it accomplishes.

In all of this it is important to remember that God takes the initiative—both in the ordinary believer’s life and in the mystic’s life. One cannot force God’s hand or woo God to make one a mystic. But once that initiative is taken, the mystic’s heart is changed, and he or she falls in love with God.

In Saint Francis’ case God was the Poor Crucified Christ who spoke to him from the crucifix; therefore, when he would see a poor person, or one “crucified” by life’s burdens or the evil of humans, he would embrace that person as he would Christ himself. The twentieth-century English mystic Caryll Houselander literally saw Christ in others from time to time, and I suspect such was Saint Francis’ experience when he lived and worked mercy among the lepers.

Francis did of course have visions like the other mystics in these pages, and his first vision was when he was a young man, a knight in an Assisi regiment marching to southern Italy to fight in the papal army under Walter of Brienne. On the first night out, in the city of Spoleto near Assisi, he dreamed of a large castle hall in which there were many shields adorning the walls, which a voice assured him were for him and his followers. Francis took the voice literally and thought he was to be a great lord. But then the voice spoke again.

“What is better, Francis, to serve the lord or the servant?”
“Why, the lord, surely.”
“Then why are you serving the servant? Return to Assisi and it will be shown you what you are to do.”⁶

And so it was as a deserter from the army, a seeming coward or madman that Francis returned to his hometown to the ridicule of his fellow citizens.

He began to pray in caves and abandoned churches, and it was shown him what he was to do. The crucifix of San Damiano spoke to him, and sometime later, when he was riding on the road outside the city, he saw a leper by the side of the road. Inexplicably, he dismounted his horse, gave money to the leper and then embraced the leper! When he mounted his horse and turned to leave, he looked back and there was no one there. He knew then that he had embraced Christ, and he went and began to live among the lepers.

Only a madman or a man in love would do such a thing. And in a sense Francis was both; he was a man madly in love with Christ. Gradually, from the time he returned in disgrace from Spoleto, until he embraced the leper, this man who wandered the countryside of Assisi, praying in caves and abandoned chapels, had fallen in love with Christ. His life afterward was nothing but a loving response to a love that had first loved him. He wanted to be as much like his Beloved as possible, to follow in his footsteps, to listen to his words, to love as Christ had loved.

That quest for intimacy and identification with Christ is the reason for what is perceived as Francis’ radicalism. He would hear a passage from the Gospel like, “whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38), and he would seek to embrace any cross that came his way in obedience to his Beloved’s words. He would take literally such words as “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matthew 6:26), and the birds became his brothers and sisters. He spoke to them; he blessed them; he modeled the life of his fraternity after them. And because the brothers were more important than the birds (Matthew 6:26), Francis knew the heavenly Father would care for them who, in losing their lives, would find their lives (Matthew 10:39).

Jesus himself had lived like the birds, and Francis was in love with Jesus. This is how the apostles and disciples lived, and Francis and his brothers would do the same.

In his writings Francis never uses the word imitate in relation to Christ; instead he uses the phrase, “to follow in the footsteps of Christ”; Christ’s invitation was to “follow me” (Matthew 10:38), not “imitate me.” In following Christ the self one thinks has been lost is actually found, so that one walks in the footsteps of Christ a whole and realized self.

This is the basic story of Francis of Assisi, and it is the story of the gospel lived out as fully as he was able. And in the context of that particular gospel living, there were visions and voices, culminating in Francis’ mystical experience on Mount La Verna, in which he was sealed with the wounds of Christ. He returned from La Verna a stigmatic who lived intimately and excruciatingly a Christlike passion for the final two years of his life. What, then, was the mystical experience of La Verna, and what was the subsequent way of the cross he walked?

In 1224 Francis, already very ill with what was probably a form of tubercular leprosy, his eyes hemorrhaging from a trachoma contracted when he was on the Fifth Crusade, decided to make the long, almost one-hundred-mile journey from Assisi to La Verna in Tuscany—on foot!

He was discouraged by events in the order, like the building of friaries, that were to him betrayals of the gospel poverty the brothers had vowed; he was worried about the pope’s call for a new crusade. What further loss of life and further divisions would result? And what would happen to his friend Sultan Malek al-Kamil, for whom Francis had promised to pray when he last left the sultan’s camp?

The retreat he entered on La Verna was in preparation for the Feast of Saint Michael on September 29, and around the Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross, September 14, an extraordinary mystical experience took place that is now celebrated in the Franciscan liturgical calendar on September 17.

This is Saint Bonaventure’s rendering of that event:

[O]ne morning about the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, while he was praying on the mountainside, Francis saw a Seraph with six fiery wings coming down from the highest point in the heavens. The vision descended swiftly and came to rest in the air near him. Then he saw the image of a Man crucified in the midst of the wings, with his hands and feet stretched out and nailed to a cross. Two of the wings were raised above his head and two were stretched out in flight, while the remaining two shielded his body. Francis was dumbfounded at the sight and his heart was flooded with a mixture of joy and sorrow. He was overjoyed at the way Christ regarded him so graciously under the appearance of a Seraph, but the fact that he was nailed to a cross pierced his soul with a sword of compassionate sorrow.

...Eventually he realized by divine inspiration that God had shown him this vision in his providence, in order to let him see that, as Christ’s lover, he would resemble Christ crucified perfectly not by physical martyrdom, but by the fervor of his spirit. As the vision disappeared, it left his heart ablaze with eagerness and impressed upon his body a miraculous likeness. There and then the marks of the nails began to appear in his hands and feet, just as he had seen them in his vision of the Man nailed to the Cross. His hands and feet appeared pierced through the center with nails, the heads of which were in the palms of his hands and on the instep of each foot, while the points stuck out on the opposite side. The heads were black and round, but the points were long and bent back, as if they had been struck with a hammer; they rose above the surrounding flesh and stood out from it. His right side seemed as if it had been pierced with a lance and was marked with a livid scar which often bled, so that his habit and trousers were stained.⁷

From this moment on, Francis realized that his desire for martyrdom had been and would continue to be fulfilled in a way other than what he expected and wanted. His martyrdom was to remain a person of peace in the face of persecution, even by his own brothers, to remain a person of peace even in war, in the crusades, in want and poverty, in sickness, in discouragement and despair. It was an inner martyrdom that leads to a transformation in Christ that is so intense and intimate that the wounds of Christ break forth from within, the outside becoming what Francis already was inside.

He was already accustomed to putting patches of soft cloth on the outside of his habit if he was wearing soft patches underneath his habit next to his skin, so that people would know that in his illness there were soft patches protecting his skin from his rough habit. Francis had always insisted on being sincere—not to be one thing on the inside and another on the outside. This, too, was a sort of martyrdom of spirit. And in the end God revealed in his flesh what Francis had already become in his spirit, a crucified son of God.stigmata came only at the end, two years before Francis died; it was the result of a lifetime of a living martyrdom, of remaining a person of peace, no matter what the circumstances, of sitting in peace while others were taking up arms (real or metaphorical) against their “enemies.” It was the martyrdom of embracing those whom others thought repulsive; it was the martyrdom implied in the words of Jesus, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27). Francis’ whole life had been a living out of the gospel injunctions of Jesus so completely that he became another face of Christ for his own times and for all time.

Saint Francis never wrote of his mystical experiences, except to recount what the Lord had told him to do, where the Lord had led him. For example, in his Testament he writes, “For I, being in sins, thought it bitter to look at lepers, and the Lord himself led me among them, and I worked mercy with them. And when I left their company, I realized that what had seemed bitter to me, had been turned into sweetness of soul and body.”⁸

But from the mystics who did write of their intimate experiences of God, we learn of the pattern and content of those mystics who did not write down their experiences. Such is the case of Saint Francis, who kept hidden the hidden things of God. It’s true that others wrote about him, but Francis himself never wrote down his intimate experiences of God. In fact, he said to his brothers in his Twenty-Eighth Admonition:

Blessed are you servants who lay up treasures in heaven (cf. Mt. 6:20) of what the Lord shows you, and do not desire to show it to others hoping for personal gain from  the Lord’s treasure. For the same Most High will manifest  your works to whomever God pleases. Blessed then are you servants who keep in your heart the secrets of the Lord. (cf. Lk. 2:19, 51; Lk. 8:15).⁹

And Saint Bonaventure, in his Major Life of Saint Francis, quotes Saint Francis:

When the Lord visits you in prayer, you should say, “Lord, you have sent me this comfort from heaven,  even though I am a sinner and unworthy, and I entrust it to your keeping because I feel like a thief of your  treasures.” And when you leave your prayer, you should seem to be only a poor little sinner, and not someone especially graced by God.¹⁰
 
Both of these quotations speak to the humility of Francis, who, though he had one of the most celebrated mystical experiences of the Middle Ages in his stigmata, never spoke of it, nor wrote down what the Lord revealed to him in that intimate exchange on Mount La Verna. But a prayer attributed to Saint Francis by Saint Bernardine of Siena and Ubertino da Casale speaks volumes of what it was Saint Francis experienced on La Verna:
 
May the fiery and honey-sweet power of your love, O Lord,
wean me from all things under heaven, so that I may die for
love of your love, who deigned to die for love of my love.¹¹
 
That, in essence, is the practical mystic, Saint Francis of Assisi.

Eyes fixed on the Lord Jesus. In this exploration of Francis the mystic, we are reminded again to look upon Christ on the cross and know that despite what things look like from a human point of view, God is love, and everything we do and everything that happens to us takes place within God’s love—even to death upon a cross. Remaining in that love, no matter what befalls us, is to remain in God. The questions are not, “Why is this happening? How can God allow this? Why doesn’t, didn’t God prevent this?” but rather, “Can this separate me from the love of God? Is God’s love still here despite this?”

God is love, and though love does not always do our will, it does not mean that God’s love is not there, though that is what we feel is happening. As a man Jesus underwent this deep human experience of abandonment because the Father didn’t always do what he wanted. As with us, love was not his own will. Love is the interaction between two wills; for a human being it is the interaction between my will and the One whose will is the cause of my existence and my very ability to will. Creator and creature: There is an infinite difference between them. That realization is the beginning of the love of God. And realization being of the mind, it is the beginning of truth. That something, someone, outside myself is the cause of my very existence, makes my existence an act of gratitude for each moment held within that creative will.

The further realization that God’s creative will is an eternally sustaining will, namely, that my existence will not end, summons me to humble acquiescence and dialogue—or to proud, illusory self-sufficiency, which is a kind of hell because it severs the bond of love and results in a turning in upon oneself.

God’s love, in contrast to self-absorption, overflows, and though eternal creator chooses to become one with love’s creation entering the created world as creative word becoming obedient to the word’s own speaking of what it means to be a creature, obedient, as Saint Paul says, even “to the point of death— / even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). Christ was broken and died on the cross: Life did not spare the eternal Son, just as life will not spare us, but God’s Incarnate Word confirmed for us that love endures, no matter what humans or fate or life does or refuses to do. And in the end obedient love rises from the grave.

Excerpted from Mystics: 10 Who Show Us the Ways of God

Notes
1. Author’s translation from The Second Life of Saint Francis by Thomas of Celano, VI, 10.
2. Author’s translation of The Testament of Saint Francis in Through the Year with Francis of Assisi (Cincinnati: Saint Anthony Messenger Press, 1993), p. 82.
3. Author’s translation of Saint Francis’ “Letter to the Faithful,” First Version.
4. Author’s paraphrase of Saint Bonaventure’s Major Life of Saint Francis, I, 3.
5. Marion A. Habig, ed., English Omnibus of Sources for the Life of Saint Francis (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1973), pp. 730–731.
6. Author’s translation.
7. Author’s translation.
8. Author’s translation.
9. Murray Bodo, Through the Year with Francis of Assisi (Cincinnati: Saint Anthony Messenger Press, 1993), p. 60.