On the Road with Francis of Assisi

by Linda Bird Francke

  The sacred mountain where Francis receives the stigmata

  Anticipation mounts as we climb the winding mountain road to La Verna, the ultimate Franciscan sanctuary. We are in Tuscany, headed toward “that rock ’twixt Tiber and Arno,” as Dante describes it in Paradiso, where Francis experienced the culmination of his mystical relationship with God: the stigmata.

  Perhaps that is why everything about the approach to La Verna seems magnified, starting with the wider, more bus-friendly road than the approach to Greccio and the increasingly wild landscape we are passing through. The firs and beeches are bigger, the huge rocks more cracked and craggy. Through the trees we can see so many ledges, pinnacles, chasms, and caves that the whole mountain seems a parable of the legendary earthquake in Jerusalem. No wonder Francis came to La Verna so often during the eleven years following Count Orlando’s gift of the mountain to him at San Leo.

  There were just a few wood and reed huts built by his friars when Francis started coming to La Verna, and a little chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which Count Orlando began to build for him in 1213. The chapel, Santa Maria degli Angeli, matches in name and exact proportion the similar small chapel at the Porziuncola and, in style, the church of San Damiano. Fittingly, Count Orlando is buried in the chapel in this spiritual home away from home he created for Francis.

  It was on an earlier visit to La Verna that Francis once again displayed the humanness that had won so many hearts. When a friar cooking a meal accidentally set the hut on fire, other friars quickly arrived to help him put out the blaze, but Francis withdrew into the woods. Not only did he have such respect for Brother Fire that he did not want to participate in quenching it but he also had a warm fox pelt to sleep under, which he spirited away with him. A chagrined Francis returned when the fire was out and confessed to his friars: “From now on, I don’t want this hide over me since, because of my avarice, I did not want Brother Fire to consume it.”

  For all the rugged beauty of La Verna, Francis was visited there often by “demons.” The devil’s sometimes vicious attacks, presumably during the rancor in his order, led Francis to say wistfully: “If the brothers knew how many trials the demons cause me, there would not be one of them who would not have great piety and compassion for me.” Still, he felt closer to God here, especially among La Verna’s rocks, which he identified with the Lord. “Whenever he had to walk over rocks, he would walk with fear and reverence out of love for Him who is called ‘The Rock,’ ” records the Assisi Compilation.

  The journey from Assisi to La Verna in the summer of 1224 had not been easy for Francis or his closest companions, Leo, Masseo, and Angelo. All of them were beset by the troubles in the order and the dilution of the spiritual vision they had embraced from the beginning. Brother Leo was so troubled he even began to doubt his faith, an agony that he discussed with Francis on the long, hot journey and that resulted in the letter Francis later wrote to him in the mountain sanctuary.

  That letter, one of only two in Francis’s handwriting and preserved in Spoleto (see Chapter 3), is worth repeating here, in the context of the friars’ rebellion and Leo’s despair. “I place all the words we spoke on the road in this phrase, briefly, and [as] advice,” Francis wrote, in part, to Leo. “In whatever way it seems best to you to please the Lord God and to follow His footprints and His poverty, do this with the blessing of God and my obedience. And if you believe it necessary for the well-being of your soul, or to find comfort, and you wish to come to me, Leo, come!”

  The journey to La Verna was not only spiritually grueling for Leo but also physically exhausting for Francis. When they finally reached the base of the mountain, Celano writes, the friars persuaded a local peasant to lend Francis his donkey “to ride on, because he was not a little weak.” The peasant grudgingly started leading the donkey carrying Francis up the mountain, but the way was so hot and so steep that somewhere en route the peasant “collapsed, exhausted by a burning thirst.” The ensuing miracle, which Giotto frescoed in the basilica in Assisi, finds Francis praying and stretching “his hands towards heaven,” then directing the peasant to a nearby rock, which suddenly produces “a flow of water.”

  The journey up the mountain paused again at the foot of an oak tree where Francis and his companions took a rest. It was here, the Little Flowers reports, that “a great number of different kinds of birds flew to blessed Francis with joy and song and sportive flapping of their wings.” So welcoming were the birds that some “settled on his head, some on his shoulders, some on his knees and some on his hands.” That scene, too, is replicated in a multitude of paintings and garden statuary, including a birdbath that adorned my grandmother’s garden. It is memorialized at La Verna by the tiny seventeenth-century Cappella degli Uccelli, or Chapel of the Birds, along the steep old mountain road from the little town of La Breccia.

  But Francis was not through with his journey up the mountain. When he reached the level top of the sheer cliff where the friars had built their huts, he insisted on going on alone—across a chasm bridged by a log—to a solitary cave in the face of the cliff. It was in this isolated place, “separated from the others,” that Francis would spend the forty-day fast in honor of St. Michael, which fixes the dates in 1224 as between Thursday, August 16, and Saturday, September 29.

  He laid out detailed instructions for his friars, two of whom, Rufino and Silvester, were already at La Verna. “None of his companions should come to him, nor should they allow anyone else to come except Brother Leo,” reports the Little Flowers. He gave Brother Leo his own detailed instructions. Leo was to bring him bread and water in the morning and return for late night prayers—but with a proviso. He was to “approach him saying nothing but ‘Lord, open my lips.’ ” If Francis replied, “ ‘And my mouth shall declare your praise,’ ” then Leo was to cross the log to continue reciting the Night Office with him. If Francis did not reply, Brother Leo was to leave.

  But Brother Leo cheated. He kept a close eye on Francis, whether or not Francis had given him the password to join him, and secretly saw amazing things. We must bear in mind that the Little Flowers was written by a friar from the Marches, where spiritual ecstasy was common, but it says that Leo witnessed Francis on one occasion “elevated in the air to such a height that he could touch his feet” and on another, “elevated to such a height that he could hardly see him.”

  This routine went on for a month, during which Francis befriended a falcon nesting near his cell. According to St. Bonaventure, the falcon became so attuned to Francis’s late night prayer schedule that “it anticipated him with its noise and song.” Francis was grateful to the attentive falcon, because “such great concern for him shook out of him all sluggish laziness.” In contrast, when Francis was “more than usually burdened with illness,” he was also grateful to the sympathetic falcon for choosing to remain silent.

  The miracle of the stigmata took place in stages, according to the Little Flowers. The first occurred during one of Leo’s late night forays to Francis’s cell. Francis did not respond when Leo called out “Lord, open my lips,” but Leo pressed on anyway and, finding Francis’s cell empty, snuck through the woods to find him. At first, what Leo witnessed was common enough. He found Francis praying on his knees, arms outstretched, his face raised toward heaven. “Who are you, my most dear God, and who am I, a worm and your little servant?” Francis kept repeating. But then, by the light of the moon, Leo witnessed a “most beautiful flame of fire descending from the height of the heavens to the top of the head of Saint Francis” and heard the flame speaking to Francis.

  Leo, “afraid and retreating,” tried to flee but was exposed when Francis heard the “sound of his feet stepping on twigs.” Francis then told the curious Leo that the flame was God and that God had asked him for three things. Francis was puzzled, he told Leo. He had nothing to give God save “a tunic, a cord and trousers,” which he summarily offered. God’s response to Francis, which he made three times, was to “put your hand in your pocket and off
er me whatever you find there.” Each time Francis found a gold coin in his pocket and realized “that the threefold offering was figuratively golden obedience, the most exalted poverty and the most beautiful chastity,” and thus a reaffirmation of the “holy goodness God has given me.”

  But God had told him something else as well. In a few days, Francis told Leo, God was going to perform “an astonishing miracle” on this mountain, “which the whole world will admire.” Though it seems unlikely Francis would have said anything so boastful, he then ordered Leo to return to his cell “with God’s blessing.”

  A few nights later, on September 14, a bright light, brighter than the sun, suddenly lit the sky, waking all the friars as well as the shepherds looking after their flocks in the valley below and many of the people in the towns. The light moved steadily toward Francis and was soon discernible, Celano reports, as a “man standing above him, like a seraph with six wings, his hands extended and his feet joined together and fixed to a cross.” Francis rose to his feet, filled with feelings of fear, sorrow, joy, and confusion as to what this vision meant; he soon received the mysterious answer. Like those of the crucified man hovering above him, “the marks of the nails began to appear in his hands and feet … [and] his right side was as though it had been pierced by a lance.” By the time the bright light receded, Francis had become the first earthly being to receive the five wounds of Christ.

  Celano describes the marks on Francis’s feet and hands as “round on the inner side, but on the outer side they were elongated; and some small pieces of flesh took on the appearance of the ends of the nails, bent and driven back and rising above the rest of the flesh.” St. Bonaventure goes beyond Celano’s description of the nails being flesh and describes them as being real nails. “The heads of the nails in his hands and his feet were round and black; their points were oblong and bent as if driven back with a hammer and they emerged from the flesh and stuck out beyond it.”

  Modern biographers, not surprisingly, are skeptical about the stigmata. Adrian House, a contemporary British writer, explores many rational explanations for the stigmata in his book Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life. According to House’s research, the explanations for Francis’s wounds run the gamut from tubercular leprosy to lymph node tuberculosis, which is also known as scrofula or the king’s evil. Other, more psychological explanations include “overexcited neural activity” or just plain hysteria.

  Francis inadvertently added to the mystery by hiding his wounds from all but a few of his closest friars. “He did not seek to use this to make himself appealing to anyone in a desire for vainglory,” Celano writes. “Rather, in every way possible he tried to hide these marks, so that human favor would not rob him of the grace given him.” From that moment on, Francis either wore bandages on his hands or tucked them inside his sleeves. Leo helped by wrapping bandages around his feet and trying to keep a dressing on the wound in his side, “from which,” St. Bonaventure writes, “his sacred blood often flowed, moistening his tunic and underwear.”

  Rational explanations aside, there is no doubt among Francis’s medieval biographers that he was “the crucified servant of the crucified Lord.” The biographers, all of whom were Franciscan friars, had a motive, of course: to establish the founder of their order as the chosen one of Christ and thus unequaled by any other religious figure at the time. And it worked.

  The stigmata virtually assured Francis, considered a saint by many while he was alive, of sainthood after his death in 1226. Before the formal canonization proceedings even took place, Cardinal Ugolino, who became Pope Gregory IX in 1227, had commissioned Brother Thomas of Celano to write the First Life of St. Francis and authorized the construction of Francis’s basilica in Assisi.

  Father Roy meets us in the dining hall at La Verna, where, for sixteen dollars, we’ve been served an adequate no-menu meal of chicken, pasta, wine, ice cream, and coffee. (This is the only Franciscan hermitage to serve food, necessitated by the daunting volume of pilgrims and visitors to La Verna—one million a year.) A friend in nearby Arezzo has arranged for the English-speaking Father Roy to show us around La Verna, which turns into a treat for us. The thirty-three-year-old friar from Croatia regales us with stories about the sanctuary, one being the miraculous saga of a would-be suicide who deposited his hat and pipe on the edge of the cliff near the site of the stigmata and jumped—but to no avail. He somehow landed safely on the rocks below, climbed back up, retrieved his hat and still-smoldering pipe, and went home.

  Father Roy, who has just completed a thesis on the Franciscan balance between preaching and contemplation, is so jovial that it is difficult, for me anyway, to try to experience, secondhand, the momentous event that took place here eight centuries ago. Instead, I momentarily abandon Francis to succumb to Father Roy’s exuberance as he tours us through the convents, chapels, and churches that have sprung up at La Verna over the centuries.

  Andrea Della Robbia’s extensive and stunning fifteenth-century ceramic artwork scattered through the sanctuary’s buildings makes a visit here worthwhile with or without Francis. The early Franciscans commissioned Della Robbia to commemorate this most sacred place because, says Father Roy, his enameled terra-cotta artwork was “not fit for a grand church but was cheap and in keeping with the Franciscan spirit of poverty.”

  The penurious Franciscans did not realize what a treasure they had given the world. While the frescoes that once adorned the walls at La Verna have either vanished or had to be restored again and again because of the mountain’s dampness, Della Robbia’s signature blue and white ceramic altarpieces, with their colorful borders of enameled apples, lemons, and oranges (including the largest altarpiece—nineteen feet, four inches by thirteen feet, ten inches—he ever created), look as fresh as if they were created yesterday. And they are gorgeous, though Father Roy mischievously points out that there is a mistake in the Latin inscription under every one of the ceramics.

  We connect with Francis again in La Verna’s dramatic and almost surreal natural surroundings. Down a steep flight of exterior steps is a chasm leading into a tree-topped jumble of huge, moss-streaked boulders, balanced precariously one on top of another. One edge of an upper rock protrudes over the chasm in a seeming mockery of gravity, and I gingerly follow Father Roy ever deeper into what is known as the Sasso Spicco (projecting rock), past a wooden cross and taus scratched into the rock walls by pilgrims, to the impossibly wild spot where Francis often withdrew to pray. “This is a wounded mountain,” says Father Roy. “Francis felt he was entering into the wounds of Christ.”

  Looking straight up is even more surreal. The mountain seems to be split cleanly in two and is spanned, high overhead, by a small bridge. That man-made bridge has replaced, appropriately, the log that Francis crossed to achieve the solitude he was seeking during the fast of St. Michael when he received the stigmata. The solitary ledge he achieved, visited only by Brother Leo, is also overhead and has since been enclosed and transformed into the Chapel of the Cross. It bears within a haunting wooden figure of the wounded Francis sitting on a log beside his companion falcon, staring heavenward in pain.

  We feel as though we are living inside the medieval legend at La Verna. Around the other side of the ledge overhead is a plaque on the edge of a sheer precipice. It marks the spot where, sometime during those forty days, Francis had such a violent encounter with the devil that he had to flatten himself against the cliff face and implore God to save him from being thrown to the rocks below. God responded, according to the Little Flowers, when “suddenly by a miracle, the rock to which he was clinging yielded to the form of his body and received him into itself.” As proof, the absorbent rock is said to bear the imprint of “the shape of his face and hands”—though we had to stretch our imaginations to recognize the shapes.

  We follow Father Roy back up the steps to the first church here, the tiny, spare chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, just off the central courtyard. To the credit of the Franciscans at La Verna, no one has tarte
d up the primitive stone chapel. The only addition, inserted into the altar, is an old stone protected by glass.

  A legend recounted in the excellent English-language guide to La Verna holds that Francis used the stone as a table for his paltry meals until the day Jesus miraculously appeared to him—“while he was eating lunch,” says Father Roy—and sat on the stone. When Jesus withdrew, Francis summoned Leo and said: “Wash this stone first with water and then with wine, oil and milk and last of all with balsam … because Jesus Christ was seated upon it.” Not surprisingly, the sacred rock has been venerated ever since and was inserted into the altar in 1719.

  La Verna has a plethora of Franciscan historical memorabilia, including the cells of St. Bonaventure and St. Anthony of Padua. But we remain focused on Francis and his legend, which is bringing us closer and closer to the actual spot where he received the stigmata.

  We pass quickly through the fourteenth-century basilica, pausing only in the seventeenth-century Chapel of the Relics, where there are some real treasures: the tablecloth, eating bowl, and drinking cup used by Francis when he visited Count Orlando in nearby Chiusi, and the count’s belt, which Francis is said to have blessed when he girted the count upon his entrance into the Third Order. The belt, described as leather in the thirteenth-century deed awarding these treasures to the Franciscans, is actually made of gold cloth. But no matter.

  Another treasure contained in a bronze-and-glass urn is a small piece of linen, which is said to be stained with Francis’s blood, having been used to cover the weeping wound in his side. But the relic Father Roy is most excited by is in another glass case: the tattered, ragged habit Francis was wearing when he received the stigmata.

  The story of the habit, recounted by Father Roy, involves a rich man who somehow knew that Francis did not have long to live when he prepared to leave La Verna and managed to trade Francis a new habit hastily made by his tailor for the old one. Trades like this were not uncommon. Many people sought Francis’s clothes as relics and were eager to pay the cost of a new habit. But after what transpired at La Verna became known, this particular habit was deemed such a treasure that it ended up in Florence for close to eight hundred years. It was only in 2000 that the habit was returned to the Franciscans at La Verna.