Twenty-Third Publications

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1 The LONELINESS and LONGING of SAINT FRANCIS Gerard Thomas Straub a Hollywood filmmaker, a medieval saint, and a life-changing spirituality for today

2 Cover Art St. Francis of Assisi Painted by Paolo Grimaldi tempera, oil and gold leaf on panel website: Montauk Avenue, Suite 200, New London, CT (860) » (800) » Copyright 2014 Gerard Thomas Straub. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission of the publisher. Write to the Permissions Editor. ISBN: Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:

3 Contents PRELUDE.... xi PROLOGUE...1 PART I The Setting...15 PART II The Conversion PART III The Founding PART IV The Mission PART V The Stigmata PART VI The Canticle PART VII The Transitus

4 Would I might wake Saint Francis in you all, Brother of birds and trees, God s Troubadour, Blinded with weeping for the sad and the poor: Our wealth undone, all strict Franciscan men, Come, let us chant the canticle again Of mother earth and the enduring sun. God make each soul The lowly leper s slave: God make us saints, and brave. ó VACHEL LINDSAY

5 PRELUDE Why? It is Christmas morning, The sun has not yet risen on this day when we celebrate the birth of the Son of God. Wrapping gifts is easy. Wrapping your mind around the unfathomable mystery of the Incarnation, God assuming human flesh while still maintaining the essence of divinity, is far from easy. My mind for the past two weeks has been intensely focused on the life of one person whose sole goal was to imitate Jesus as fully as possible, a man who came closer to attaining that lofty goal than any other person in recorded history. This one man, a poor, simple man from medieval Italy, is as hard to understand and imitate as is Christ. He was, of course, Francis of Assisi. I have twelve days to deliver my manuscript about the saint to the publisher. It is my second book on St. Francis. Suddenly on this most festive day of the liturgical year, I was thrust into a dark cave of doubt about my book this xi

6 The Loneliness and Longing of Saint Francis book. Why am I writing it? The easy answer is simple, and it has nothing to do with a desire to have the book published. I m writing this book in order to fall in love with Francis again. St. Francis has animated my life for nearly twenty years. Everything I have done over that span has been inspired by my understanding of the saint and my wish to emulate his spirit in my own unique way. I m a different person today than I was when I wrote the first book. My admiration for St. Francis has deepened; my understanding of him has broadened. My first book on St. Francis caused me to change the direction of my life. Writing it sent me on a journey into the depths of poverty around the world, where I witnessed unimaginable suffering. Published just over a dozen years ago, the book was far too long just over six hundred pages. The new realities of publishing no longer allow such long books. As I struggled to boil down the complex story of this simple man, I needed to get to the core of his message and vision. While the external historical life of Francis is very important, I wanted to enter more fully into the internal spiritual life of the saint, and in as few pages as is possible. My sudden doubts this morning were triggered by something I read. I was standing in front of a bookcase in my library glancing at the titles of the more than one hundred twenty-five books on Francis that I own. Francis, of course, eschewed all forms of ownership, including books. He even gave away his only copy of the Bible. I was very familiar with all of the books I saw. But one title failed to spark my memory. I pulled it off the shelf. Clearly, I had not read it, as none of the text had been highlighted and there were no marginal notes. Folded up inside was a review of the book that had been published in Commonweal magazine in It was written by my friend Professor Lawrence xii

7 Prelude Cunningham of the University of Notre Dame. Larry had written a very gracious blurb for the back cover of my first book on St. Francis. He also invited me to Notre Dame to screen one of my early documentary films on poverty, which was narrated by Martin Sheen. We also spent time together in Italy attending a conference on theology. In his review of the book in question, Professor Cunningham basically said it wasn t a bad book, but that it had missed the mark in its interpretation of the facts of Francis life. Cunningham mused about how hard it is to write about a historical figure who was both a model of orthodoxy and a charismatic innovator. He goes on to say how different authors present Francis through their own prism of interest. He gave a few examples of very well-known books on Francis. One presented the saint as a Protestant, another as a religious zealot, another as a medieval hippie, and another as a precursor to liberation theology. Cunningham adds that many, many biographers have viewed him through the rose-colored glasses of pop romanticism. The rest of the day, I was haunted by two questions: What would the erudite professor, who has written extensively on St. Francis, make of this book? Through what prism am I writing this book? I have no idea what Professor Cunningham will think of this book. But after thinking about that less-than-enthusiastic book review, I realized this: I wrote this book through the prism of the two ingredients that made Francis special: poverty and prayer. The saint had two great loves: the poor and solitude. He enriched himself in solitude, and he shared the wealth of his spirit with the poor and the rejected, the desperate people living on the margins of his rapidly changing society. Pope Francis chose his name because he wanted xiii

8 The Loneliness and Longing of Saint Francis to focus the Church on poverty and prayer. Like St. Francis, Pope Francis wants to rebuild a Church that has been torn apart by scandal, a Church weakened by clericalism and dogmatism. Pope Francis wants the poor to be the center of the Church. In these humble pages, I want to share with you the Francis who never ceases to inspire and motivate me. I m not a historian or a theologian. I m an artist who was touched by the saint in a profound way. Francis changed my life. This is the story of the saint and his impact on a thoroughly modern guy who dropped his skepticism and tried to embrace, albeit poorly, the mystical way of the little poor man from Assisi. St. Francis love of poverty will be mentioned frequently in this book. I want to make it clear at the outset that the poverty embraced by St. Francis was voluntary poverty, which is vastly different from the involuntary poverty that millions of people who are thrust into a prison of immoral, chronic poverty experience every day. Francis, like Christ, wanted to free people from the bondage of the degrading poverty that causes hunger, illness, and isolation. There is a huge difference between giving up all for Christ through voluntary poverty as espoused by St. Francis and the wretched state of poverty inflicted on people by injustice. The latter form of poverty was hated and denounced by the Jewish prophets before Christ, and has nothing to do with Franciscan poverty. xiv

9 PART I The Setting A VERY LONELY ROAD In the galaxy of Christian saints, the star of St. Francis burns brightest, a saint whose appeal is universal and timeless, a saint who is cherished by people of all faiths and is even admired by people who don t believe in God. In the fall of 1926, The New York Times published an account of preparations in Assisi for the commemoration of the 700 th anniversary of the death of St. Francis. The headline read: Simple Homage Paid to Saint Francis. The story claimed: No saint in the roster of Rome has as many admirers outside the circles of orthodoxy as the saint who went his way singing not in the official language of the Church but in the language of the plain people. By writers of every nation, 15

10 The Loneliness and Longing of Saint Francis representing every shade of religious belief, the husband of Lady Poverty has been proclaimed as an apostle of humanity, and one of the possessions common to all mankind. Nearly ninety years later, St. Francis popularity continues to increase. He seems to be not only a saint for all people, but for all seasons as well. Yet Francis is truly a product of his time and place. He lived eight centuries ago in a small city that sits on the side of a mountain overlooking a lush valley located in the heart of Italy. However, this man, who chose poverty for his bride, managed to transcend the thirteenth century and his small city and is still able to attract followers and admirers from all around the world. In the fall of 1992, a special edition of Time magazine dedicated to a look at the coming new millennium selected St. Francis of Assisi as one of the top ten major figures of that fading millennium. The list included Galileo, Columbus, Michelangelo, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Jefferson, Mozart, and Einstein. For a man who didn t discover any galaxies or continents, who didn t create any great works of art or write any literary masterpieces or compose any enduring music, who didn t invent anything or solve any of the mysteries of the universe, and who instead chose a life of prayer and poverty, Francis ranked in some very impressive company. Rembrandt painted him, Zeffirelli filmed him, Chesterton eulogized him, Merton admired him, Gandhi studied him, Lenin died with his name on his lips, Toynbee compared him to Jesus and Buddha, Kerouac picked him as the patron of the Beat generation, and Sir Kenneth Clark called him Europe s greatest religious genius. Even such literary luminaries as Nikos Kazantzakis, Oscar Wilde, and Albert Camus wrote glowingly of him, as did poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Francis touches and inspires 16

11 The Setting a wide range of people, people with an infinite variety of outlooks on life. Still, it s far easier to admire Francis than to understand him. He can charm us with his gentleness or chill us with his unfathomable asceticism and long fasts; he can be seen as a nature lover, a social worker, a humanist, a lyric poet, a rebel, a radical, a drop-out, and an extremist. Especially an extremist. He was, in fact, the saint of excesses: excess in sacrifice, excess in love. And then there is the perplexing matter of the stigmata. Francis can be many different things to many different people. The Francis I ve come to love and admire isn t a pious, plastic saint, or a simple man who tamed wolves and preached to birds and loved nature, but a complex man who was demanding and uncompromising, yet who above all else loved God with his entire being. Francis is a human saint, a saint who could laugh and make mistakes, including misunderstanding what he thought God was telling him. Professor Lawrence Cunningham said that when one goes beyond the usual romantic clichés about Saint Francis, one discovers a person who, for all his transparent attractiveness, is complex to the point of enigma. He was a living sermon to the people of Assisi in his day and to the world of today. His very being was a rebuke to the un-christ-like behavior within the Church and society. The truth of his humble life stood in stark contrast to the brutality of the Crusades, as well as the unbridled thirst for power and possessions. His faith was strong and his spirit gentle. The beauty of his life still burns brightly. Francis did not dominate anyone, not people, not animals, not creation; he wanted to be with everyone and not over anyone. He had no interest in power. To be poor, for him, was to be free, free to be open to everyone and every- 17

12 The Loneliness and Longing of Saint Francis thing that crossed his path. For Francis, poverty was a path to humility, and humility was an essential characteristic of God. God was so humble he emptied himself and hid within all of creation. Through his deepening humility and growing appreciation of the Incarnation, Francis was able to lovingly accept people as they were. He did not judge or try to change anyone. He simply wanted to be good news to everyone. Francis is an unlikely hero of the Church. He wasn t a bishop or an abbot or a theologian; he wasn t even a priest! Francis had no theological training, and he remained a deacon, either out of humility or because he simply did not find himself so moved by the Spirit to pursue priestly ordination. After his conversion, Francis never set out to be a religious. He never intended to form or head a new religious order, and he never imagined writing a rule of life for others to follow; all these things were done only when Francis was asked to do them by the pope in order to provide structure and direction for the thousands who chose to follow his radical, full-gospel way of life. Moreover, Francis wasn t well-versed in the Bible or the lives of the saints, and he had no interest in scholarly pursuits. Francis wasn t at home in high, ornate pulpits; he preferred to speak directly to the peasants he encountered along the road. But when he did stand behind a pulpit, he didn t preach, he conversed. He didn t concern himself with complicated reasoning or developing a theme; he merely said, simply and directly, what came into his mind. He lacked any real oratorical style, and his sermons were devoid of dogmatism, theological quotations, or pompous phrases. Francis words came freely from the inspiration of the moment. Having lived, loved, and suffered, Francis knew about life and had not forgotten its trials and sorrows or its joys. He spoke and 18