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

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Among the more outraged of the onlookers was an old priest named Sylvester. In the days when Francis had gone singing through the streets of the city, begging for stones for the rebuilding of San Damiano, Sylvester had been so touched by his valor and his music that he had momentarily failed to keep a firm hold upon his common sense, and had given him good dressed stones for which he might have received a very fair price elsewhere. But now the singing of Francis merely annoyed him. Here was all this good money being flung away to undeserving vagabonds, who had done nothing whatever to earn it, while he for his stones had had no more payment than a smile and a song. He made his way to Francis and said, “Brother, you did not pay me enough for those stones; give me now a share of this money.”

  Francis listened courteously. “Thou shalt have thy due, sir priest,” he said, and going to Bernard’s cloak, where the money was piled, he took out two handfuls, and then two more, and gave them to Sylvester with that same charming gentle smile that had been Sylvester’s undoing before. “Hast thou now thy payment in full, sir priest?” he asked sweetly, and Sylvester said, “I have it in full, brother,” and took it home rejoicing.

  But during the next few days he thought constantly of Francis, and that something about the young man that at their first meeting had pierced right through his native prudence and carefulness, and made him behave in so unaccountable a manner, got through to him again. It uncovered that hidden longing within him, that hunger, and he felt most uncomfortable. It was because years ago, in his own youth, the hunger had made him uncomfortable that he had so carefully wrapped it up in prudent care for worldly things. Now Francis had released it and he compared his own greedy old age, with its confused and tortuous desires, with the straight clean channel of the young man’s love for God, and he said to himself, “I am a wretched man.” Sorrowing for the wretchedness he went to bed and to sleep and dreamed a curious and arresting dream. He dreamed that he saw a mighty cross. The top touched heaven and the arms stretched from one side of the world to the other, and the foot was set in the mouth of Francis, the young man who preached Christ crucified and him alone. Sylvester awoke convinced that Francis was a true servant of Christ and the founder of an order that would spread throughout the world. During the days that followed the old man remained alone in his house, and he wept and did penance for his sins.

  Meanwhile Francis, Bernard, and Peter had gone back to the Portiuncula and made a shelter for themselves in the woods, and Bernard and Peter put on the cross-shaped habit of the order, and girded themselves with rope as Francis had done, and through the warm spring days they prayed together and waited upon the will of God.

  On April the 23rd, Saint George’s day, mass was said very early in the church of San Giorgio near the east gate, where Francis had once learned his letters. Among the worshipers was a young countryman, a farmer’s son, kneeling alone, his sunburnt face covered with his hands that were broad and strong and hard from driving the plow. He knew about Francis, probably he had heard him preach in the streets of Assisi, and he knew Bernard had given all his money to the poor, though it is not very likely that he had been in the piazza that day because the spring work on the farm would have kept him busy. The story of these two men, Francis and Bernard, had taken him captive. They had been rich men and yet they had chosen to become poor for the love of Christ. For days he had thought about them as he went about his work in field and byre. He had been told, perhaps, that Francis frequented this church, which from his boyhood’s days must have been dear to him, and had come here hoping to see him, for surely he would be here upon Saint George’s day. But when he lifted his face from his hands and looked about him, feeling shy because the rest of the congregation were well-dressed city folk and he wore only his countryman’s tunic and rough boots, he did not see him. Abashed, he hid his face again and prayed, and gave himself humbly into the hands of God.

  He came out of the church after mass and stood in the bright sunlight wondering what to do. Other members of the congregation stared at him curiously, and did not know that when they themselves were long forgotten the name of Brother Giles would be revered all over the world. He had been told that Francis was living now in the woods, near Santa Maria degli Angeli, but he did not know where that was. However he went out of the city gate and walked down toward the great wooded plain. When he reached the crossroads near the leper hospital of San Salvatore he stopped and prayed that God would bring him to the place where Francis was, and when he opened his eyes again he saw Francis coming out of the wood. He ran forward and knelt down and said, “Brother Francis, I want to be with you for the love of God.” Francis bent over him, put his arms around him and lifted him up with great joy, and took him down through the woods to Bernard and Peter, and said to them, “See what a good brother the Lord has sent us.” And then the four of them ate their first meal together and were very merry.

  A short while after this they looked up and saw an old man coming toward them through the aisles of the trees, approaching them humbly and with diffidence, and to their astonishment they saw that he was Sylvester.

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  BUT THESE FIVE MEN had not come together in the woods to enjoy each other’s company, not even only to worship and love God; though hereafter the love and worship of God was to be the atmosphere of their life, in which they lived and which they carried with them wherever they went; they had come together to do the will of God, and that was to “preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” They set out at once, Francis and Giles going northeast through the mountains toward the March of Ancona, Bernard and Peter going to another province. Sylvester does not seem to have gone on this first journey. Perhaps he had to see to the disposal of his possessions in Assisi, and when that was done he would have come back to the Portiuncula and prayed for the others at Santa Maria degli Angeli. He was the priest of the brotherhood, and prayer, and the offering up of the love and worship of the order in oblation before the altar, would have been especially his work.

  Francis went up through the mountain passes singing, as he had sung when he went through the mountains to Gubbio, but this time he was not alone, and so naturally friendly and loving was he that he must have rejoiced in the simple, sturdy Giles with his gift of dry humor, and found him a delightful companion in misfortune. For this first missionary journey could hardly be called successful. The people in the walled villages and cities of the March, and the travelers whom they met on the way, did not know what to make of this strange couple in their cross-shaped garments, walking so painfully on bare bruised feet, with no staff to help them, no cloak as protection against bad weather, nothing at all except their gift of peace. “The Lord give thee peace,” Francis would cry in the streets and on the stony mountain ways, and then when he had gathered a crowd of curious sightseers about him he would speak to them of penitence and the love and fear of God, and Giles would exhort the people to listen to Francis because no man could give them better counsel.

  But these people were unaware of their need for counsel, “for at that time the love and fear of God were everywhere extinct and the way of penitence was utterly unknown.” Such knowledge of God as they had was largely a mixture of religious superstition and old pagan beliefs, and they were hardened in the sort of thoughtless carelessness that is more impervious to the simple truths of love and penitence than mortal sin itself. Francis was a stranger to them, not as at Assisi a man who had grown up in their midst and whose changing life they had witnessed, and he made little or no impression on them. They thought he and Giles were drunk, and laughed at them accordingly, or else they ran away, thinking they were wizards who would cast evil spells upon them. Sometimes they played cruel tricks upon the brothers. They would place dice in their hands and try and make them play with them, and they would take hold of their hoods from behind and carry them on their backs as though hanged by a halter. One man however had a penetrating thing to say about them. He said, “Either these men are saints or they are stark mad.” Something in Fr
ancis must, in this man, have pierced “unto the marrow of the heart,” or he would not have realized that this was an open question.

  And so Francis and Giles returned to the Portiuncula hungry and weary failures, but undismayed, and presently Bernard and Peter joined them in the same state of mind; for none of them had thought that the doing of the will of God is an easy thing, or that the hard hearts of men are anything but a stubborn field to plow. Their sore feet had been treading in the footsteps of Christ and that in itself was joy enough for them.

  Back in the woods again three more men came to join them, Sabbatino and John of the Hat, so called because he would insist on wearing a hat in violation of the rule of the order, and Morico who was one of the brothers of the Crucigeri, the brotherhood who nursed the lepers at San Salvatore. He had been dangerously ill at the hospital and had sent a message to ask Francis for his prayers. Francis had prayed for him, and sent him a piece of bread which had been dipped in the oil of the lamp which burned before the altar in Santa Maria degli Angeli, and when he had eaten it he had recovered. Ever afterwards Morico followed Francis. There was no need of a change of heart for him, for when he put on the cross-shaped habit of the order it was the symbol of something he had always borne.

  The Franciscan family now numbered eight men and their life began to take on the shape of custom. They had no proper dwelling place, for Christ had not had where to lay his head and they wanted to be like him, but they made themselves thatched huts, such as Italian shepherds build today, where they could take refuge in bad weather and where they could sleep for a few hours before they rose to begin their day with prayer. It was still dark when they began their prayer, and sometimes cold and wet, so that they shivered in their little huts, and often they were sick and weary, but nothing was allowed to interfere with their prayer, for it was their life’s blood and all that they did and were was rooted in it. Those who were beginners in prayer had to learn it the hard way, through all the alternations of dryness, self-disgust and shame, boredom and hopelessness, shot through with those moments of light that made it all worthwhile. They had Francis to help them, for he had come this way before them, in the cave at Le Grotte and in the cave at San Damiano, and they had the love of each other, that love of a small closely knit community suffering the same things together which is about the toughest love on earth. “They cherished one another with a right inward love, and served each other, and nourished him, even as a mother doth her only and well-beloved son.” And they had the worship of God, the slowly growing heaven of contemplation, filling up the empty spaces left by the things of the world of which they had stripped themselves. What pleasures and comforts were to other men worship was to them; this looking up into the face of Christ and telling him how much he meant to them.

  Their days were days of labor. They nursed the lepers, for of all the works of mercy this was always the one that was nearest the heart of Francis, they preached the gospel in Assisi and the countryside about them and they toiled for their bread by helping the laborers in the fields, though whatever they were doing they broke off at the set hours of prayer to spend a few minutes in adoration. Through the summer months in which these eight worked together they must have found great joy in this toil, mowing or turning the grass, and at evening sharing the laborers’ meal in the fields, their bread and cheese and dried beans, with perhaps a salad of herbs and thin brown wine. When the toil was done the bagpipers entered the fields and led the laden carts back to the village with music. For this was Umbria and so there was always music. Over the corn the laborers chanted ancient incantations, rhythmic prayer for blessings on the harvest, and Francis and his brothers sang the praises of God. They called themselves joculatores Domini, God’s jongleurs, and whatever suffering they endured they never failed to show to the world this face of joy.

  But they could not always find work and sometimes they had to turn to the table of the Lord. Begging was not easy now, for they were no longer welcome at Assisi. The fickle city had suffered a violent reaction of feeling and the brothers had to face what Francis had endured when the people had stoned him and mocked him on the way to his father’s house. Even Francis himself, when he went up to the city to beg, was received with insults. When he and the brothers asked for scraps of food the doors were shut in their faces and at times they came near to starvation. They had to bear not only cruelty and hardship but the searching discipline of apparent failure, for they and their preaching were no longer wanted. But Francis would have kept them merry through it all, for the gospel to which he had listened at Santa Maria degli Angeli had said, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves,” and if what their Lord had foretold for them was happening to them then that was a sure sign that they were doing his will.

  Assisi’s persecution, like most cruelties, was rooted in fear. Francis alone in his poverty and repentance had touched the citizens’ hearts, but a steadily increasing company of men living this life was something that was likely to touch their pockets. Were they to take the food out of their own mouths to support these madmen? And Bernard and the others had disposed of their wealth not by handing it back to their families but by pouring it out on the undeserving poor. This was a form of robbery which if it was allowed to go on might end in ruining some of the wealthiest families of Assisi. And how were they to defend their city against their enemies if their young men all went trailing off to the woods after a lunatic preacher and refused to fight? Without wealth and without men that terrible Perugia would devour them.

  Bishop Guido saw their point of view and shared it. At the beginning he had blessed Francis and encouraged him, but he had supposed that the young man would eventually join some religious order, not that he would himself found a brotherhood of vagrants composed of some of the most useful men of Assisi. And he was distressed for the brothers themselves. They were not fitted for this life. It was an impossible life for men who had come from comfortable homes. Winter was coming on and how would they survive, homeless, barefoot, and half-starved? He sent for Francis, receiving him graciously and kindly, and reasoned with him. Things could not go on as they were. Hardness and discipline were right and proper for men whose lives were given to God, but it must be within reason, as that of the monks was within reason. They must have a proper roof over their heads and enough property to ensure a minimum of food and comfort.

  Francis stood before the man who from the beginning had shown him such kindness and understanding, and it must have been hard to withstand and grieve him, but he did not waver. He knew that this life of entire poverty and absolute dependence upon God was the life to which he had been called. Poverty was the foundation stone of the brotherhood, and also its quality; if salt loses its savor it is good for nothing. But he was never blindly fanatical. He always knew why he was doing what he did and could support his actions with cogent reasons. Courteously, with all his gentle winning sweetness, he explained to Bishop Guido why they could have no possessions. “My Lord,” he said, “if we should have possessions, we should need arms to protect ourselves. For thence arise disputes and lawsuits, and for this cause the love of God and of our neighbor is wont ofttimes to be hindered, wherefore we be minded to possess naught of worldly goods in this world.”

  The bishop sat silent. It was perfectly true. Possessions led to greed, fear, vanity, envy, and wrangling, that were as boulders blocking the passage of love that could only flow full and free when these were away. Poverty was the logical outcome of love of such a temper as this. He could say nothing. Humbled and saddened, aware of all the ambitions and disagreements that clouded his own life and the life of the Church he loved and served, he once more blessed Francis and sent him away from his presence free to do what he would. The purpose of God was at work in this apparently crazy undertaking and he must await its unfolding patiently.

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  FRANCIS WENT OUT from Bishop Guido freshly inspired. “The love of God and of our neighbor” knew no bounds, and Christ had not commanded his disci
ples to preach the gospel in their own neighborhood only. He had said, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” They must leave Assisi and go out on another missionary journey. They could not go very far as yet but they must go as far as they could. As autumn turned to winter, and the leaves drifted down upon them in the thin sunshine, he gathered the brothers about him in the woods and told them of the new adventure that lay before them.

  Winter scarcely seems to have been a very promising time for such an undertaking, but their spirits leaped up to face the challenge of it. When the day came to set out they met together, most probably in the little church of Santa Maria degli Angeli that was so dear to them, and Francis preached to them. He said, “Dearest brethren, let us consider our vocation, unto which God in his mercy hath called us, not so much for our own salvation, as for that of the many, wherefore let us go through the world, admonishing all peoples both by example and by word to do penance and to be mindful of the commands of God. Fear ye not, for that ye seem weak and despised and foolish, but with easy minds preach repentance in simple wise, trusting in the Lord, who hath overcome the world, for that by his Spirit he speaketh through you, and in you, to admonish all men that they do turn unto him, and keep his commandments. Ye will find some men that be faithful, gentle, and gracious, who will receive you and your words with joy, and others, the more part, that be faithless, proud, and blasphemous, who with reviling will oppose you, and against these shall ye speak. Be it set therefore in your hearts to bear all things patiently and humbly.” Then one by one the brothers knelt before Francis and he blessed them, and then to each man separately he said, “Cast thy burden upon the Lord and he will sustain thee.” Then they were ready to go. They had no preparations to make, for they had nothing to leave and nothing to take. They had only themselves; and not even themselves, for to a man they were God’s. Then two by two they set out north, south, east, and west, toward the four quarters of the earth.