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

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Francis himself could be so happy, so attuned to the music of heaven, “the veins of murmuring which he heard secretly,” that he could not contain his joy but would break out into singing. Sometimes in the woods he would pick up a branch from the ground, “and laying it on his left arm, he drew in his right hand another stick like a bow over it, as if on a viol or other instrument, and making fitting gestures, sang with it in French unto the Lord Jesus Christ.” And then suddenly in the midst of his joy he would remember the horror of sin, and the agony of Christ who bore our sins in his own body on the tree, and he would break down and weep.

  The pattern of life that the first eight brothers had followed in the earliest days at the Portiuncula was the same now, the fourfold pattern of prayer, work, healing, and teaching that was Christ’s own pattern.

  Prayer came first, the worship and adoration of God for which man was created, the prayer of penitence for the sin of the world, of intercession for all for whom they labored. Francis taught them that without prayer “no good could be wrought in the service of God,” and that prayer was not only for their hours of contemplation in their cells or in the wood, or for the hours when they met together to say their offices, but for always. They must pray unceasingly “whether walking or sitting, within doors or without, in toil or in leisure.” To those setting out on a journey he said, “Meditate as much while on this journey as if you were shut up in a hermitage or in your cell, for wherever we are, wherever we go, we carry our cell with us; brother body is our cell, and the soul is the hermit who dwells in it, there to pray to the Lord and to meditate.” He warned them against all ostentation in prayer. He himself would hide his head in his cloak when he prayed, or he would pray in deserted churches, and rise up very quietly at night, no one seeing him, and go into the wood to pray. He never let them think that prayer was easy, and taught them that they must train themselves for prayer with heroism and perseverance. The wandering thoughts that most of us take so calmly in our prayer were sin to them. Once when Francis was praying his eyes wandered to a little pot he had been making and for a moment or two he thought about it, but when he had finished his prayer he threw it in the fire, saying, “Let us be ashamed of trivial fancies when we are speaking to the great King.” When consolation came to them in their travail of prayer they were to say, “This consolation, O Lord, thou hast sent from heaven to me a most unworthy sinner, and I commit it to thy care, for I know I should be but a thief of thy treasure.”

  In the early days the brothers had no office books. They did have a copy of the Gospels but when one day a poor woman came begging, and they themselves were in such straits that they had nothing to give her, Francis gave her their one precious book. But their poverty in this respect did not disturb them. They were themselves living the gospel and for office book they had the Lord’s Prayer, which they recited at the canonical hours with a few other simple prayers and praises that Francis taught them. These hours were never forgotten. However ill and tired Francis was, he would repeat them erect and bareheaded, or on his knees – “he would never lean on the wall or doorpost.” There is a picture of him at the end of his life, when his journeys had to be undertaken on horseback or riding a donkey because he was too weak to walk, saying his office in the pouring rain. He stopped the horse and dismounted, put back his hood, and prayed “with as great a fervor of devotion and reverence thus, standing on the road with the rain falling on him continually, as if he had been in a church or a cell.” And in this great faithfulness in prayer the brothers followed him.

  All men of prayer, especially those who are called to be contemplatives, have found that the best companion of their prayer is hard physical labor. The Cistercian Order, an order of contemplatives, have from the earliest days worked in the fields, and for the Brothers Minor too, hard work was valuable not only as a means of support for their bodies but for their souls also. Though primarily their work was rooted in their prayer it is also true to say that faithful and disciplined work prepared them for contemplation. Giles the farmer’s son, who became one of the greatest contemplatives of that or any age, held strong views about the value of hard work. “Since no one,” he said, “can enter upon the contemplative life unless he has first faithfully and devotedly practiced in the active, it behoveth that active to be pursued with toil and solicitude.” And he said that if he had achieved anything in prayer it was because he was a strong fellow who could tackle heavy labor. All the brothers worked intensely hard at their different crafts, whether as servants, farm laborers, shepherds, cobblers or basket makers, and when the day’s work was over they returned to the Portiuncula with the food that had been given them as wages, and this they shared together. It shows their independence of spirit that when work failed and they were forced to beg they found this the very hardest part of their vocation. Francis, though that day when he had eaten his first beggar’s meal and found it the table of the Lord had turned the mortification of begging into joy, remembered his own early reluctance and was gentle with them. One young brother, who had so conquered his shame and pride that he not only begged a walletful of scraps but carried it back to the Portiuncula singing, saw as he neared home that Francis was coming to meet him. Francis took the wallet, kissed the shoulder over which it had lain, and said, “Blessed be my brother, who goes forth promptly, quests humbly, and comes back merrily.”

  As prayer and work went hand in hand so did prayer and the healing and comforting of the sick and sorrowful. For the brothers, as for their Lord, the Mount of Transfiguration and the epileptic child were not divisible. They turned from prayer that they might bring the love of God down to the pain of the world, and returned to prayer again that they might lift the pain of the world up to the love of God. All the sick and sorrowful were as their children to them but the lepers were their special charge, for they followed Francis in seeing in them, above all other men, the suffering Christ. Taught by Francis they did not call their patients lepers, a word with terrible connotations, but they referred to them always as their brother Christians. There are two stories in the old chronicles which illustrate well the patience and tenderness of Francis and his sons in dealing with these poor men.

  In one of the hospitals where the brothers worked there was a very recalcitrant leper. His fearful disease had embittered him in mind and spirit and reduced him to the depths of misery. He was so impatient, so insolent and blasphemous, that the brothers were the only people who would have anything to do with him, and they had hard work to struggle on. At last even they came to the end of their tether. His violence and rudeness to themselves they could put up with but his blasphemies became more than they could endure, and they went to Francis and told him they could not go on. Then Francis himself went to the hospital, found the leper and said to him with gentle courtesy, “May God give thee peace, my beloved brother.”

  “Peace!” retorted the leper. “What peace can I look for from God, who has taken from me peace and every other blessing, and made me a putrid and disgusting object?”

  Francis tried to comfort him, telling him how strength of soul comes from patient endurance, but the sick man only broke out into bitter complaints of the long-suffering brothers who had been nursing him. “They do not serve me as they ought,” he said.

  Francis knew the answer to this, for during the stream of complaints he had been quietly praying for help. “My son,” he said, “I myself will serve thee, seeing thou art not satisfied with the others.”

  “What canst thou do more than they have done?” demanded the leper.

  “Whatsoever thou wishest I will do for thee,” said Francis.

  “Wash me all over,” said the leper, “for I am so disgusting that I cannot bear myself.”

  So Francis heated water, putting into it sweet-smelling herbs, and then gently as a mother with her child he undressed the man and washed him all over, and through the touch and the prayer of Francis help came to both body and soul. The sores that covered the leper’s body were healed, the pain ebb
ed, and the darkness passed from his mind. He was at peace, and wept.

  Another leper, also very ill and suffering, was in the special care of Brother James the Simple, a childlike person who had not grasped the fact that men as ill as his patient were not permitted to leave the hospital. He thought it would be a nice change for his leper if he took him for a walk to the Portiuncula, and so the two of them set out together along the road and through the oak wood to the peaceful enclosure within the quickset hedge. Here they encountered the horrified Francis and so startled him that before he could stop himself he said to Brother James, “You must not lead these brother Christians abroad in this fashion; it is not decent, neither for you nor for them.” But as soon as the words were out he was filled with remorse, realizing how much they must have hurt the leper. He went at once to Peter Cathanii, who was at that time the “mother” of the community, knelt before him and asked what he could do to show his penitence and sorrow.

  “Whatever it will please thee to do, that do,” said Peter compassionately.

  Francis said, “I will eat out of the same dish as my brother Christian.” And at the meal which followed he did so, and what that meant for a sensitive man like Francis, and what it meant in terms of the risk he ran of catching the loathsome disease, are best expressed in the explicit words of The Mirror of Perfection: “One dish was placed between blessed Francis and the leper. But he was all ulcerated and loathsome, and especially he had his fingers shriveled and bleeding with which he took up lumps from the dish, so that when he put them in the dish the blood and matter of the fingers flowed into it. And seeing this, Brother Peter and the other friars were much saddened, but did not dare to say anything on account of the fear and reverence of the holy father.” That this grim little scene was of great importance, epitomizing the spirit of the order in which every man held himself ready to throw away his life for love’s sake, after the pattern of Christ, the writer realized, for he ends his account of it with almost the same words that were used by John the Evangelist after he had witnessed the sacrifice of Cavalry. “He who saw this wrote it down, and bears testimony of these things.”

  The “place” of the Portiuncula has such charm that it is a temptation to think of Francis and the brothers chiefly in its setting. Actually they were never there for long. They were ever on the road, traveling to distances that seem incredible when we remember that they went there barefoot, confronting dangers and difficulties that were sometimes even greater than those which met Saint Paul on his missionary journeys; for Saint Paul, traveling in the Roman Empire and speaking the Greek that was the official language in every portion of it, had a measure of protection from his Roman citizenship and could make himself understood by those to whom he spoke. But once they passed out of Italy there was no protection for the brothers, and the lingua franca was not spoken by the uneducated among them and not understood by all to whom they preached. Though in their own country the missionary journeys of the brothers were increasingly successful, beyond it they frequently ended in what the world calls failure. It could hardly have been otherwise. That they should have attempted them at all is a measure of their courage. Christ had said, “Go ye into all the world,” and so they went, whether they knew the language or whether they did not, in childlike faith and obedience.

  In Germany a company of brothers were stripped, beaten and driven out of the country. In Hungary they were taken for mummers and mocked and insulted. In Morocco five brothers who had entered the mosque and denounced Mohammed there were scourged and imprisoned. Let out of prison and told to leave the country they refused to do so, and continued to preach Christ crucified in the streets. Once again, they were imprisoned and this time they were put to the torture. Upon the rack they were offered life if they would deny Christ, but they answered by uttering his praises in their agony. Then they were taken from the rack and beheaded.

  It has been said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, and from the seed of this particular martyrdom, as from all martyrdoms, there sprang new life, unnoticed at the time, but one of the first sheaves of the great harvest that was reaped in years to come when the Franciscan missionaries had traveled to every corner of the known world. The first Christian martyrs, dying in the Roman arena, trusted in Christ that he would give to each of them, as the fruit of his dying, one soul among the spectators called to himself by what they did. The Moroccan martyrs had their soul, not one saved from heathendom, for he was a Christian already, but brought into the ranks of the order and destined to be one of the greatest men in it. The Portuguese Infante Don Pedro had had the bodies of the five martyrs brought to Portugal and buried at the church at Coimbra. Many came to the tomb to pray and among them was a young man called Anthony. As he kneeled there, what these men had done took hold of him and there flamed up in him the longing to follow their example. A few days later he joined the Order of the Friars Minor. He was Saint Anthony of Padua.

  Francis also had his fruit of souls as the result of one of the early missionary disasters. Not long after the brothers went to the Portiuncula he and another brother set sail from Ancona for Syria, with the simple but staggering purpose of converting the infidels. But a storm arose and the ship was wrecked upon the coast of Dalmatia. There was no way of going on, and for a while it seemed as though there was no way of going back, for Francis and his companion were penniless and could not pay for their passage. And here once again the strand of comedy comes into the Franciscan story, for Francis, humorous and undaunted, decided that the only way to get home was to go as stowaways. So as stowaways they went, smuggled on board by one of the sailors who had been won over as a friend by the charm of Francis, and provisioned by another friend, who had the forethought to realize that if the stowaways were to survive they must have food, a detail which one can imagine would be likely to have escaped the attention of Francis himself. But again the weather was stormy and the little boat was so long upon her way that the food ran out. This was Francis’s chance. He gave the sailors his own food, sharing it out among them all. Then, in high favor with them, he preached to them and won their hearts for Christ.

  For the English no Franciscan missionary journey is so important as that which brought the brothers to England in September 1224, to a land that must have seemed to them gray and cold and inhospitable after their sunny and friendly Italy. The chronicle of Lanercost tells a story of them that is typical of the courage and gaiety of all these men. Upon landing they had pushed on gallantly to London, Canterbury and Oxford, and Christmas Day found two of them in a wood near Oxford. It was bitterly cold, that penetrating cold of Oxfordshire that enters the very bones. The mud and snow of the rough path they followed was frozen hard and blood stained the track of their naked feet. They were far from home and the cold and desolation struck at their hearts as well as their bodies. It was difficult not to think with longing of the beloved Portiuncula and the brothers in Santa Maria degli Angeli joyously singing the praises of the Babe of Bethlehem. Suddenly “the younger friar said to the elder, ‘Father, shall I sing and lighten our journey?’ and on receiving permission he thundered forth a Salve Regina Misericordiae. . . . Now, when the hymn was concluded, he who had been the consoler said, with a kind of self-congratulation to his companion: ‘Brother, was not that antiphonal well sung?’”

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  OF MOST OF THE KNIGHTS we know little or nothing, but those who were nearest to Francis share with him his power of coming near to us. Because they were simple and humble, their way of life, the gospel way that is timeless, their close companions the birds and beasts, the hills and trees and waters that are our friends too, their politics, philosophy, and art all summed up in the one word love that never changes, they do not seem to belong to one age more than another. In that as in other ways they were like their master, Christ.

  To think of a few of them is to get a good picture of the chivalry whose vanguard they were. Bernard must always come first because he was the eldest son of Francis, called by him the
Founder, dearly loved and truly representative of all the brothers who, “being called by God to carry the cross in their hearts, to practice it in their lives, and to preach it by their words, were truly crucified men in their actions and in their works.” Bernard was a quiet, steady man, loyal and reliable, a lover of the open spaces and solitude. A story told of him in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis is typical of the humility and patience of this man who in the world had known such wealth and comfort. In the early days of the order Francis sent him to preach at Bologna, the city of the famous schools where the study of law and the liberal arts was held in higher estimation than the study of scripture, that he might bear witness to the simplicity of the gospel. But when he arrived in Bologna the children in the streets, who had not seen a Franciscan friar before, thought the barefoot dusty figure that of a madman and followed him to the market place laughing and jeering and calling out “Pazzo! Pazzo!” When he reached the marketplace Bernard tried to sing the song of praise, hymn and sermon in one, which Francis had taught the brothers, and which they sang always in the market square of every village and town to which they came.

  Fear and honor, praise and bless, give thanks and adore the Lord God omnipotent in trinity and unity, Father and Son and Holy Ghost, creator of all things. Do penance, make fruits worthy of penance, for know that you soon will die. Give, and it will be given unto you. Forgive, and it will be forgiven unto you. And if you will not forgive men their sins, the Lord will not forgive you your sins. Confess all your sins. Blessed are those who die in penance for they will be in the kingdom of heaven. Woe to those who do not die in penance for they will be the sons of the devil, whose works they do, and will go into eternal fire. Beware and abstain from all evil and persevere up to the end in good.

  But the people laughed and would not listen, so he continued his preaching in a manner all his own, he sat down and endured in silence while men as well as children threw stones and dust at him, mocked him, and pulled him about by his hood. Day after day he returned to the marketplace to receive the same treatment, and to preach again his silent sermon on humility and patience.