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St Francis of Assisi
His Life
In 1182, Pietro Bernadone returned from a trip to France to find
out his wife had given birth to a son.
Far from being excited or apologetic because he'd been gone,
Pietro was furious because she'd had his new son baptized
Giovanni after John the Baptist. The last thing Pietro wanted in
his son was a man of God -- he wanted a man of business, a cloth
merchant like he was, and he especially wanted a son who would
reflect his infatuation with France. So he renamed his son
Francesco -- which is the equivalent of calling him Frenchman.
Francis enjoyed a very rich easy life growing up because of his
father's wealth and the permissiveness of the times. From the
beginning everyone -- and I mean everyone -- loved Francis. He
was constantly happy, charming, and a born leader. If he was
picky, people excused him. If he was ill, people took care of
him. If he was so much of a dreamer he did poorly in school, no
one minded. In many ways he was too easy to like for his own
good. No one tried to control him or teach him.
As he grew up, Francis became the leader of a crowd of young
people who spent their nights in wild parties. Thomas of Celano,
his biographer who knew him well, said, "In other respects an
exquisite youth, he attracted to himself a whole retinue of
young people addicted to evil and accustomed to vice." Francis
himself said, "I lived in sin" during that time.
Francis fulfilled every hope of Pietro's -- even falling in love
with France. He loved the songs of France, the romance of
France, and especially the free adventurous troubadours of
France who wandered through Europe. And despite his dreaming,
Francis was also good at business. But Francis wanted more..more
than wealth. But not holiness! Francis wanted to be a noble, a
knight. Battle was the best place to win the glory and prestige
he longed for. He got his first chance when Assisi declared war
on their longtime enemy, the nearby town of Perugia.
Most of the troops from Assisi were butchered in the fight. Only
those wealthy enough to expect to be ransomed were taken
prisoner. At last Francis was among the nobility like he always
wanted to be...but chained in a harsh, dark dungeon. All
accounts say that he never lost his happy manner in that
horrible place. Finally, after a year in the dungeon, he was
ransomed. Strangely, the experience didn't seem to change him.
He gave himself to partying with as much joy and abandon as he
had before the battle.
The experience didn't change what he wanted from life either:
Glory. Finally a call for knights for the Fourth Crusade gave
him a chance for his dream. But before he left Francis had to
have a suit of armor and a horse -- no problem for the son of a
wealthy father. And not just any suit of armor would do but one
decorated with gold with a magnificent cloak. Any relief we feel
in hearing that Francis gave the cloak to a poor knight will be
destroyed by the boasts that Francis left behind that he would
return a prince.
But Francis never got farther than one day's ride from Assisi.
There he had a dream in which God told him he had it all wrong
and told him to return home. And return home he did. What must
it have been like to return without ever making it to battle --
the boy who wanted nothing more than to be liked was humiliated,
laughed at, called a coward by the village and raged at by his
father for the money wasted on armor.
Francis' conversion did not happen over night. God had waited
for him for twenty-five 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 sins. Sometimes God's grace
overwhelmed him with joy. But life couldn't just stop for God.
There was a business to run, customers to wait on.
One day while riding through the countryside, Francis, the man
who loved beauty, who was so picky about food, who hated
deformity, came face to face with a leper. Repelled by the
appearance and the smell of the leper, Francis nevertheless
jumped down from his horse and kissed the hand of the leper.
When his kiss of peace was returned, Francis was filled with
joy. As he rode off, he turned around for a last wave, and saw
that the leper had disappeared. He always looked upon it as a
test from God...that he had passed.
His search for conversion led him to the ancient church at San
Damiano. While he was praying there, he heard Christ on the
crucifix speak to him, "Francis, repair my church." Francis
assumed this meant church with a small c -- the crumbling
building he was in. Acting again in his impetuous way, he took
fabric from his father's shop and sold it to get money to repair
the church. His father saw this as an act of theft -- and put
together with Francis' cowardice, waste of money, and his
growing disinterest in money made Francis seem more like a
madman than his son. Pietro dragged Francis before the bishop
and in front of the whole town demanded that Francis return the
money and renounce all rights as his heir.
The bishop was very kind to Francis; he told him to return the
money and said God would provide. That was all Francis needed to
hear. He not only gave back the money but stripped off all his
clothes -- the clothes his father had given him -- until he was
wearing only a hair shirt. In front of the crowd that had
gathered he said, "Pietro Bernadone is no longer my father. From
now on I can say with complete freedom, 'Our Father who art in
heaven.'" Wearing nothing but castoff rags, he went off into the
freezing woods -- singing. And when robbers beat him later and
took his clothes, he climbed out of the ditch and went off
singing again. From then on Francis had nothing...and
everything.
Francis went back to what he considered God's call. He begged
for stones and rebuilt the San Damiano church with his own
hands, not realizing that it was the Church with a capital C
that God wanted repaired. Scandal and avarice were working on
the Church from the inside while outside heresies flourished by
appealing to those longing for something different or
adventurous.
Soon Francis started to preach. (He was never a priest, though
he was later ordained a deacon under his protest.) Francis was
not a reformer; he preached about returning to God and obedience
to the Church. Francis must have known about the decay in the
Church, but he always showed the Church and its people his
utmost respect. When someone told him of a priest living openly
with a woman and asked him if that meant the Mass was polluted,
Francis went to the priest, knelt before him, and kissed his
hands -- because those hands had held God.
Slowly companions came to Francis, people who wanted to follow
his life of sleeping in the open, begging for garbage to
eat...and loving God. With companions, Francis knew he now had
to have some kind of direction to this life so he opened the
Bible in three places. He read the command to the rich young man
to sell all his good and give to the poor, the order to the
apostles to take nothing on their journey, and the demand to
take up the cross daily. "Here is our rule," Francis said -- as
simple, and as seemingly impossible, as that. He was going to do
what no one thought possible any more -- live by the Gospel.
Francis took these commands so literally that he made one
brother run after the thief who stole his hood and offer him his
robe!
Francis never wanted to found a religious order -- this former
knight thought that sounded too military. He thought of what he
was doing as expressing God's brotherhood. His companions came
from all walks of life, from fields and towns, nobility and
common people, universities, the Church, and the merchant class.
Francis practiced true equality by showing honor, respect, and
love to every person whether they were beggar or pope.
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 admire its beauty. But
Francis really felt that nature, all God's creations, were part
of his brotherhood. The sparrow was as much his brother as the
pope.
In one famous story, Francis preached to hundreds of birds about
being thankful to God for their wonderful clothes, for their
independence, and for God's care. The story tells us the birds
stood still as he walked among him, only flying off when he said
they could leave.
Another famous story involves a wolf that had been eating human
beings. Francis intervened when the town wanted to kill the wolf
and talked the wolf into never killing again. The wolf became a
pet of the townspeople who made sure that he always had plenty
to eat.
Following the Gospel literally, Francis and his companions went
out to preach two by two. At first, listeners were
understandably hostile to these men in rags trying to talk about
God's love. People even ran from them for fear they'd catch this
strange madness! And they were right. Because soon these same
people noticed that these barefoot beggars wearing sacks seemed
filled with constant joy. They celebrated life. And people had
to ask themselves: Could one own nothing and be happy? Soon
those who had met them with mud and rocks, greeted them with
bells and smiles.
Francis did not try to abolish poverty, he tried to make it
holy. When his friars met someone poorer than they, they would
eagerly rip off the sleeve of their habit to give to the person.
They worked for all necessities and only begged if they had to.
But Francis would not let them accept any money. He told them to
treat coins as if they were pebbles in the road. When the bishop
showed horror at the friars' hard life, Francis said, "If we had
any possessions we should need weapons and laws to defend them."
Possessing something was the death of love for Francis. Also,
Francis reasoned, what could you do to a man who owns nothing?
You can't starve a fasting man, you can't steal from someone who
has no money, you can't ruin someone who hates prestige. They
were truly free.
Francis was a man of action. His simplicity of life extended to
ideas and deeds. If there was a simple way, no matter how
impossible it seemed, Francis would take it. So when Francis
wanted approval for his brotherhood, he went straight to Rome to
see Pope Innocent III. You can imagine what the pope thought
when this beggar approached him! As a matter of fact he threw
Francis out. But when he had a dream that this tiny man in rags
held up the tilting Lateran basilica, he quickly called Francis
back and gave him permission to preach.
Sometimes this direct approach led to mistakes that he corrected
with the same spontaneity that he made them. Once he ordered a
brother who hesitated to speak because he stuttered to go preach
half-naked. When Francis realized how he had hurt someone he
loved he ran to town, stopped the brother, took off his own
clothes, and preached instead.
Francis acted quickly because he acted from the heart; he didn't
have time to put on a role. Once he was so sick and exhausted,
his companions borrowed a mule for him to ride. When the man who
owned the mule recognized Francis he said, "Try to be as
virtuous as everyone thinks you are because many have a lot of
confidence in you." Francis dropped off the mule and knelt
before the man to thank him for his advice.
Another example of his directness came when he decided to go to
Syria to convert the Moslems while the Fifth Crusade was being
fought. In the middle of a battle, Francis decided to do the
simplest thing and go straight to the sultan to make peace. When
he and his companion were captured, the real miracle was that
they weren't killed. Instead Francis was taken to the sultan who
was charmed by Francis and his preaching. He told Francis, "I
would convert to your religion which is a beautiful one -- but
both of us would be murdered."
Francis did find persecution and martyrdom of a kind -- not
among the Moslems, but among his own brothers. When he returned
to Italy, he came back to a brotherhood that had grown to 5000
in ten years. Pressure came from outside to control this great
movement, to make them conform to the standards of others. His
dream of radical poverty was too harsh, people said. Francis
responded, "Lord, didn't I tell you they wouldn't trust you?"
He finally gave up authority in his order -- but he probably
wasn't too upset about it. Now he was just another brother, like
he'd always wanted.
Francis' final years were filled with suffering as well as
humiliation. Praying to share in Christ's passion he had a
vision received the stigmata, the marks of the nails and the
lance wound that Christ suffered, in his own body.
Years of poverty and wandering had made Francis ill. When he
began to go blind, the pope ordered that his eyes be operated
on. This meant cauterizing his face with a hot iron. Francis
spoke to "Brother Fire": "Brother Fire, the Most High has made
you strong and beautiful and useful. Be courteous to me now in
this hour, for I have always loved you, and temper your heat so
that I can endure it." And Francis reported that Brother Fire
had been so kind that he felt nothing at all.
How did Francis respond to blindness and suffering? That was
when he wrote his beautiful Canticle of the Sun that expresses
his brotherhood with creation in praising God.
Francis never recovered from this illness. He died on October 4,
1226 at the age of 45 and was canonized in 1228 by Pope Gregorio
IX. Francis is considered the founder of all Franciscan orders
and the patron saint of ecologists and merchants.
Wisdom is Not Knowledge
Wisdom is a precious
virtue. It is not gained from the pursuit of knowledge nor by
the obtaining of degrees, titles, and the like. Rather, it is
fruit really of living in the ways of the Lord. That sounds so
simplistic. But St. Joseph Cupertino, whose feast we celebrate
today, illustrates this in an astounding way. His life biography
indicates that he had no “good brains” as we would measure
brains in our usual standards. In fact, one of his biographers,
Fr. Alban Godier, S.J., in this excerpt taken from the book
“Saints for Sinners,” begins by describing him in this way:
“If ever a tiny child began life with nothing in his favor it
was Joseph of Cupertino; he had only one hopeful and saving
quality—that he knew it. Other boys of his own age were clever,
he was easily the dullest of them all. Others were winning and
attractive, nobody ever wanted him. While they had pleasant
things said to them, and nice things given to them, Joseph
always wrote himself down an ass, and never looked for any
special treatment. He went to school with the rest of the
children in the village, but he did not succeed in anything. He
was absent-minded, he was awkward, he was nervous; a sudden
noise, such as the ringing of a church-bell, would make him drop
his schoolbooks on the floor. He would sit with his companions
after school-hours, and try to talk like them, but every time
his conversation would break down; he could not tell a story to
the end, no matter how he tried. His very sentences would stop
in the middle because he could not find the right words.
Altogether, even for those who pitied him, and wished to be kind
to him, Joseph was something of a trial.
Ill fortune seemed to have set its seal on Joseph before he was
born. His father, a carpenter by trade, was a good enough man in
his way, but he was a poor hand at dealing with money; what
little he earned seemed to slip at once through his fingers. At
the very moment when his son came into the world his house was
in the hands of bailiffs, and his effects were being sold up.
Joseph was born in a shed at the back of the house, where his
mother had hid herself out of very shame. With such a beginning
Joseph had very poor prospects. As a child, utterly underfed and
sickly, he was a very miserable specimen of humanity. He seemed
to catch every disease that came his way; many a time he was at
death's door, and, to tell the truth, if he had died it would
have been a great relief to those responsible for him. Even his
mother wearied of him. She, too, was good in her way, but she
was hard by nature, and circumstances had made her harder;
Joseph was ever in fault, and for every offense she punished him
without mercy, according to her notions of a mother's duty. When
he was little more than seven years old he developed a running
ulcer which would not heal; and his mother was the more
embittered against him, for now she supposed that even if the
boy grew up he would probably be always to the family nothing
but a burden.
Nobody wanted Joseph; even his mother did not want him; Joseph
learnt this lesson very early and accepted it. He did not seem
to want himself, he did not know what he wanted; at times he
seemed scarcely to know what he was doing. So abstracted was he
that he would forget his meals; and when his attention was
called to the fact his only reply would be: "I forgot." Since he
could make nothing of books, he was apprenticed to a shoemaker.
It was of little use; Joseph was too much distracted, too much
absorbed in other things not practical for work-a-day people;
and he never learnt to make or mend a shoe. But he went on
trying and his master tolerated him, merely to give the boy
something to do.”
Yet when St. Joseph of Cuptertino was canonized by Pope Clement
in 1767, he was considered, among other things, as Patron of
Students and Test-takers. This, I believe, has at least two
insights to contribute in the interest of wisdom.
One, wisdom carries with it the element of compassion that is
result of being aware of one’s own strengths and limitations. I
like the way Fr. Godier puts it: “If ever a tiny child began
life with nothing in his favor it was Joseph of Cupertino; he
had only one hopeful and saving quality—that he knew it.” It is
this self-knowledge, the kind that is not focused on self but
directed towards using all things, both good and bad, for God’s
glory that makes one truly wise. St. Joseph is Patron of
Students and Test-takers not because he was brilliant. He is
their patron because he knows how their fear of failing, of not
making the mark feels. This puts him in a position to help them
through these fears towards success. That is wisdom.
Second, with wisdom is the desire to be obedient to God in all
things. Not when it is easy but more so when it is hard. Not
when it is possible but precisely because it is impossible. St.
Joseph was obedient not in the big things (“Go to Africa and be
a missionary there”) but in the small details of living. This
was most apparent when, in these words by still another writer,
“For 35 years he was not allowed to attend choir, go to the
common refectory, walk in procession, or say Mass in church. To
prevent making a spectacle, he was ordered to remain in his room
with a private chapel. He was brought before the Inquisition,
and sent from one Capuchin or Franciscan house to another. But
Joseph retained his joyous spirit, submitting to Divine
Providence, keeping seven Lents of 40 days each year, never
letting his faith be shaken.” In the end, it is this obedience
that made this man who started off with “no good brains” a
saint. That again is wisdom.
Today’s verse states, “Wisdom shall be vindicated by all her
children.” St. Joseph of Cupertino is one of wisdom’s children.
His life is outstanding testimony to this truth.
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