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

by Elizabeth Goudge

  One night after a feast they all poured out into the streets as usual but Francis, though he was master of the revels that night, gradually fell behind the others. And once more God touched him, not with the former gentleness but with some sort of piercing thrust that went so deep that it almost robbed him of consciousness. He said afterward, “Had I been pricked with knives all over at once I could not have moved from the spot.” Missing him, his companions turned back and when they saw his face they were afraid and stared at him, for he seemed changed into another man. Then, recovering themselves, they began to tease him and asked him if he was in love. Only falling in love, they thought, could explain his behavior. “Yes,” said Francis, “I am in love with a bride nobler and richer and fairer than you have ever seen.” They all roared with laughter and the riotous procession once more proceeded on its way.

  What did Francis mean by his reply? It would seem that in that moment of piercing experience poverty changed her aspect for him. He came face to face with her and saw her for what she is, not a loathsome thing to be shunned but something stern and terrible indeed, yet holy. It was she who took the infant Christ into her arms in the stable, who companioned him all his life long and into whose eyes he looked upon the cross. It seemed to Francis that no man can truly love Christ without loving her too, or live a life of love without living in some degree in poverty, for one is the logical outcome of the other. Love must give or it is not love. Francis was born to be a great lover and as love is all of a piece he could have loved deeply in the human as well as the divine sense. If he had ridden on from Spoleto with the rest it would have been to become to some woman what Tristram was to Isoult or Abelard to Heloise. He had relinquished the search for his lady when he turned back but now she had sought him. The bride of whom he had dreamed was the Lady Poverty, and he began from that moment to serve her. The time of waiting was over and this was the first thing that he was told to do in his own country.

  Until now he had given a coin or two to those who begged from him, but now he went out to look for the poor with food and money to relieve them. When he ran short of money he would give them even the clothes he was wearing rather than do nothing for them. One day, his father fortunately being away from home, he spread the table where he and his mother were to dine alone together with food for a large number, and when Pica asked him what he was doing he said it was for the poor. “But his mother, loving him beyond her other sons, bore with him in such things, taking note of what he did, and marveling greatly thereat in her heart.” And as well as serving the poor of the city Francis did what he could to help poor priests. He bought vessels for their churches and sent them to them secretly. And he was learning to pray. “He went ofttimes, and as it were in secret, daily unto prayer.” All that he did now he did hiddenly for he was not sure of himself. “Not yet was he wholly free from the vanity of the world.”

  This experience of learning to pray brought him great suffering and drove him out to desert places even as Christ was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. His life now began to be stamped with the pattern of the life of Christ, the great pattern impressed upon the small one. In the misery of his mind at this time he can hardly have been aware of pattern, perhaps was never aware that his life was like a poem, a symbolic drama of the journey through the world of a maker and redeemer of men. His wilderness was not far, only the country beyond Assisi where he wandered either alone or with a friend who was good to him at this time and with whom he found himself able to talk a little. He would explain his wanderings by saying he was looking for hidden treasure. On the far side of the river Tescio were the cave cellars of a large Roman villa, Le Grotte, where it was said there was hidden treasure. One street boy of Assisi would call out to another, “Give me a soldo!” And the other boy would answer, “No, go to Le Grotte.” Francis would go into one of the caves to pray, leaving his friend to wait for him outside, and sometimes the listening friend would hear him cry out in anguish.

  Francis was a mystic, a man whose mind could directly apprehend something of the glory of God, and his longing for him was too great to be borne. Looking up to God he saw himself in the light of his love and holiness and that too could not be borne. He saw the hideousness of sin and repented of it in agony and fear, and saw too how he was bound to the treadmill of his sinful self, revolving round and round upon what he hated. Until he could break away from self, be done with it, he could never be free to run after God and live for him alone. And so Francis entered upon this battle of winning himself for God. It must have been bitterly hard for him, for he had lived for a long time in a world of fantasy with himself the hero of all his dreams. It would take years of penance and struggle to push out this tawdry hero and enthrone Christ in his place. But Francis did not doubt that this heavenly treasure was worth winning; no one who has felt the touch of God even in the smallest degree ever doubts that; and he trod the path upon which he first entered in the cave to the very end.

  This first hard struggle with himself had another side to it, for the soul that would love God entirely must love man entirely also. He knew in his heart that he was called to serve the Lady Poverty in a far closer identification than anything he had achieved yet, for he was still only serving as a rich man serves, giving out of his abundance and going back to his own comfortable home at night. He was making no compromise in spiritual things, Christ and the tawdry hero were not to share the throne in the center of his being, it was to be Christ’s alone, however desperate the fight to make it so, but in the matter of poverty he was struggling after compromise. How could he plunge down into it all, become one with those wretches whom he saw in the streets, poor and hungry and dirty as they were? His nerves gave way and he imagined himself becoming like them, diseased and horrible, blind, or a leper. He, Francis Bernadone, delicate and fastidious, might catch leprosy and look like one of those ghastly creatures from whom he always turned his head away. Surely God couldn’t be calling him to have anything to do with lepers? Surely God couldn’t be asking that of him?

  About this time he came to know the Bishop of Assisi, who was possibly his confessor, and it may have been Bishop Guido who made the sensible suggestion that he should go on a pilgrimage. For the men of the Middle Ages a pilgrimage was not only a religious exercise, it was a change of air and scene and an excellent rest cure. And so Francis set out to visit the tombs of the apostles, following the Tiber southward to Rome. We do not know if he traveled with a party of pilgrims or whether he rode alone with perhaps just a servant to attend him, both of them with daggers ready to defend themselves against the bands of robbers who were always on the prowl, but in either case the journey would have been an exciting joy to him. He was throughout his life an inveterate traveler and this was the first of his long journeys.

  With his imagination and his sensitiveness Rome would have shaken him to his foundations, and emotion must have been at its height as he walked up the marble steps to the Basilica of Saint Peter’s, and remembered that just over four hundred years ago his hero Charlemagne had mounted them too, to kneel and pray before Saint Peter’s tomb as he was about to do now. He went through the silver door into the shadows within. With other pilgrims he kissed the foot of the great statue of Saint Peter and then went up the nave to the shrine. He kneeled before the altar, looking down through the grating to the tomb below, and prayed. In years to come he would learn to be so absorbed in prayer that he would be oblivious of the comings and goings about him, but at this time he was still only twenty-four years old and out of the corner of one eye he was aware of what the other pilgrims did, and was horrified at the smallness of their offerings. The prince of the apostles, he thought, should have more honor than this in his own great church. They were tossing down small coins with the same carelessness with which he himself had often thrown them to the poor. In a sudden fury of indignation he pulled out his own purse and flung the whole of its contents through the grating “with such a crash that all they who were standing by did marvel greatly
at so splendid an oblation.” It was a touch of the old Francis, madly generous and impulsive and not averse to being the central figure in a little drama, but the crash of that total giving was not without its effect upon him.

  He went down the dark nave and out into the bright sunlight and was confronted with the beggars on the marble steps, parading their sores and their rags, their filth and misery, clutching at the passers-by with their hot hands and crying, “Un soldo, signore. Por armor di Dio.”

  But now, for the first time, he could not give for the love of God, for he had just flung all his available money down the grating. Temporarily he was destitute too and had nothing to give but himself. Well, why not do it? Why not give himself to these men, be one of them for the day, to see what it felt like, put himself to the test? He would wear the livery of the Lady Poverty just for one day and see if he could endure it. He seized hold of an astonished beggar and persuaded him to lend him his clothes for the day, and in some hidden place he stripped off his fine clothes and put on the beggar’s verminous rags. He went back to the steps and stood there all day, begging alms for the love of God, and he begged in French, the language that he always used when he was deeply moved. It was a great moment in his life. He had won his first victory over the pride that was a part of his fastidiousness, and taken his first step toward the final plunge that he so desperately dreaded.

  Back in Assisi he continued in prayer and self-denial, seeking for the heavenly treasure and begging God to show him what he ought to do. He withdrew more and more from his old life, for “it was whispered into his spirit that spiritual merchandise hath its beginning in the contempt of the world, and that the warfare of Christ is to be begun by victory over self.”

  And very soon the grace of God enabled him to win his greatest victory yet. He was riding home to Assisi one day across the plain, along the road that brought him fairly close to the leper hospital of San Salvatore, that was administered by the Order of the Crucigeri, when suddenly to his horror he saw a leper in his path and the old loathing, the old dread of deformity, rose up and choked him. A short while ago he would have yielded to his fear, he would have swerved aside on his horse, flinging a coin to the poor wretch and covering his face with his hand, but there was a power within him now that was stronger than his fear. He did violence to himself, fought down the sickening dread and gave himself into the hands of love to do with him what love would. He jumped off his horse, came to the leper and put the money into his hand. Then he gently took the hand and kissed it, putting his lips to the rotting flesh. It was an act of courage, for to touch a leper was considered a sure way to catch the disease, above all to touch him with the lips. It was also an act of reverence, for this kiss upon the hand was the traditional homage accorded to a priest as a representative of Christ. Francis at this supreme moment of his life saw in the suffering creature the suffering Christ. Then he put his arms about the man and the astonished, shaken leper, perhaps with enough eyesight left to see the blazing love in the young man’s eyes, gave him the kiss of peace. Francis mounted his horse again and rode back to Assisi with joy in his heart.

  Chapter 3

  The Crucifix

  O deepest wisdom, counting all things dross,

  Save love of us, so wretched and forlorn;

  O love incarnate, counting gain for loss,

  Sharing our life, yet of the spirit born;

  Uplifted to embrace us on the cross,

  Love spared thee not, thy hands with nails were torn,

  Enduring Pilate’s scorn,

  That dreadful day,

  Our debt to pay,

  Upon thy cross of love.

  JACOPONE DA TODI

  LAUDA XC: “AMOR DE CARITATE”

  FROM THAT DAY ONWARD he began to visit the lepers, giving them alms and kissing their hands. Years later he wrote in his will, “The Lord himself led me amongst them, and I showed mercy to them; and when I left them what had seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of body and soul.” His road to God was one that would pass always upward through alternative light and shadow, and now that first period of suffering was over and his self-conquest had released him into happiness. This life of prayer and service that he was living now, irradiated through and through by love, was the life of the kingdom of heaven, and he lived it to the full in peace and joy and an anguish of pity. He must have marveled at the strangeness of this double life. About him was the beauty of the Italian scene that was as the landscape of paradise, and the peace of paradise was in his heart, and yet at the same time his eyes saw the agony of these men and his heart was transfixed by it. All the time, in spite of sweetness of body and soul, he must have been asking himself the question that has always tormented men. Why? Why this dreadful suffering? Francis was a simple man, not the type to be tormented by intellectual problems, and he already knew the love of God too well to doubt it, but he would hardly have been a man if he had not asked himself, “How can the God of love, who made the world so fair, permit such suffering?” He would have felt too that his present service of God in his poor was still not enough, for behind him there was still the security of his home. What did God want him to do?

  One day he was passing close to the church of San Damiano. It stood on a small hill looking out over the plain, with a house for the priest beside it, and about it grew olive trees and bushes of rosemary and lavender. It was a lovely, fragrant place, but the little church was old and had fallen into ruins. Francis, that day, felt an overwhelming impulse to go in and pray there. Inside the church, with its ruined walls and broken floor with weeds thrusting up through the paving stones, was a simple stone altar with a crucifix behind it. Francis knelt down before the altar and prayed for guidance. He said, “Great and glorious God, and thou, Lord Jesus, I pray ye, shed abroad thy light in the darkness of my mind. . . . Be found of me, Lord, so that in all things I may act in accordance with thy holy will.” That was the prayer of his whole life, that he might do God’s will, and he wanted to find God not only because of the joy of the finding but because the deeper his union with God the more perfectly would he be able to do his will. As he prayed he looked at the crucifix. It still exists and we can see it today at the church of Santa Chiara at Assisi. It is a Byzantine crucifix, painted upon wood, and it represents Christ with head up and eyes open looking out over the suffering world. The attitude of the figure is as though he were saying, “Come unto me.” Francis, gazing at the compassionate figure, went on praying, “Be found of me, Lord.” And then once again, as at Spoleto, he heard the Lord speaking to him with the voice of a friend, and saying, “Francis, go and repair my church, which as thou seest is wholly in ruin.” For a moment or two, as at Assisi when he fell behind the others, God touched him and he was terrified; in his body all his senses died and this world no longer enclosed him. He came back to consciousness again, and to the realization that his Lord had asked some service of him, and he said, “Gladly, Lord, will I repair it.”

  He stayed there praying, his eyes on the crucifix, and he was filled with a love for Christ greater than any he had felt before. The first time he had heard the voice it had been, he truly believed, God’s voice speaking within him, but this voice had seemed to come from the cross itself, it had been Christ speaking from the hidden place of the Atonement. He began to understand a very little what it had cost God to redeem mankind, the unbelievable humbling of the Incarnation, the poverty and labor and homelessness of Christ’s life on earth, the humiliation and agony of his passion and death. He realized that though the sufferings of Christ in his human body were ended yet the At-one-ment was always going on. Christ still reigned from the cross, looking out over the suffering world, drawing all men to himself on his cross that he might unite them to God in himself. When Francis had kissed the leper’s hand he had seen Christ in him, but now he saw the mystery of pain the other way round; he saw all the suffering held in Christ, knew that only on the other side of the cross are the still waters and the green pastures to be found
. In coming to the cross of Christ he had come to the only place where questioning could find rest. If it could not be entirely answered yet it shrank away into unimportance in the face of such unutterable love as this. From that moment Francis bore the seal of the cross upon his spirit, as at the end of his life he would bear it upon his body. Though he never ceased to love the sick and poor in Christ, and served them devotedly until the end, it was the suffering of Christ himself that now began increasingly to possess his mind. He could never forget the passion of Christ. Once when he was seen weeping, and a friend asked him why he wept, he answered, “I weep for the passion of my Lord Jesus Christ, for whom I ought not to be ashamed to go mourning aloud throughout the whole world.”