In September 1224, two years before his death, Francis of Assisi withdrew from the public eye and from most of his brothers for a period of retreat on Mount LaVerna, a place of solitude to which he would often come for weeks or months at a time. On September 14, the Feast of the Holy Cross, he saw a vision of a man with six wings like a seraph, but unlike the seraph in the prophet Isaiah’s vision, this one was crucified. Francis found the apparition both frightening and consoling.
Shortly after this strange vision, Francis developed growths on his hands and feet that resembled nails, both front and back, and a wound in his side that bled. His closest companions who tended him in his final illness could not help but notice, and a score of people saw these marks on his body after his death.
For this reason, most modern historians accept the “stigmata of St. Francis” as an actual event, whatever its ultimate cause. Francis had meditated on the passion of Christ daily, and he sought to conform himself to the Crucified by a life of severe penance and sacrificial service. If he carried on his body the marks of Jesus, the wounds of Christ had first been branded into his soul.
While St. Francis bearing the stigmata was an exceptional occurrence, it nonetheless betokens a union with Christ crucified that is conferred upon all the baptized. As St. Paul reminds us, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized in Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death?” (Rom. 6:3); and the Apostle further testifies, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). But how did Francis become so configured to Christ? How did this son of a prosperous Assisi cloth merchant — a pampered young bon vivant — move beyond himself to see and love Jesus, and him crucified?
Francis’s conversion seems to have come about through a series of incidents that took place within a relatively close timeframe. In his early 20s, a chivalric impulse to engage in battle against nearby Perugia ended up with his capture and imprisonment, held as a hostage for 18 months. When he was finally ransomed by his father, he was a changed man: broken in health and unsettled in mind and spirit.
In his autobiographical Testament, however, he attributes his change of heart to divine grace, which first manifested itself by a revolution in his attitude toward the most despised outcasts of medieval society — lepers: “When I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body.”
It seems that Francis’s conversion begins in earnest when he confronts his most visceral revulsion and fear. Francis discovers that imitating Christ by touching lepers as Christ did — “performing the gospel life,” as Laurence Cunningham puts it — leads to joy.[1] Already at this early stage of conversion, imitatio Christi gradually morphs into identification, with “putting on Christ.”
The next turn occurs while Francis prays, significantly, before the large painted crucifix in the Church of San Damiano. One time during the course of his prayer, the crucifix seems to speak to him: “Rebuild my church.” Francis obeys to the letter. So besides caring for lepers, he now starts to collect stones to repair the crumbling edifice of San Damiano and other churches in the vicinity.
Francis’s family, already alarmed at his eccentric behavior, feels disgraced. People of their social class simply did not engage in messy manual labor, and his habit of giving their money and goods away might ultimately jeopardize the family business, especially if he ended up squandering his inheritance. His distraught father insists on a showdown in the public square before the bishop of Assisi.
But Francis surprises everyone by stripping himself naked, excepting only his penitential hairshirt, and hands the last vestiges of family possessions back to his father while the bishop covers him with his mantle. Francis’s break with his family and its mercantile values could not have been more dramatically enacted. As he steps out of his clothes, Francis puts on the naked innocence of Eden and, still more, the nakedness of Christ on the cross. It is a kenotic gesture of self-emptying abasement. Francis thus moves even deeper into union with the Crucified.
Two years later, on the Feast of St. Matthias, Francis hears the priest read the passage in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus sends the Twelve on a mission of preaching and healing, instructing them to take but a single tunic with no money, belt, sandals, or staff. Not having the benefit of higher biblical criticism, Francis again takes these words literally and, we might observe, out of context.
But it was the word from the Lord for which Francis had been waiting. He had been feeling adrift; the gospel lesson gave him the direction he needed. He removed his shoes, discarded his staff, took off his belt and replaced it with a cord with which he tied his rough tunic. He would never again accept money, not even from begging. He began to preach a message of repentance. His lifelong love affair with Lady Poverty had begun.
It is important to realize that Francis was not the first person of his day to embrace a life of gospel simplicity and evangelical zeal. There were many movements of reform then at work in the Church, especially since the late 11th century, and numerous ordinary Christians as well as scholars pondered what “gospel living” or the “apostolic life” really entailed. Yet Francis embarked upon what he saw as obedience to Christ with such unreserved passion and infectious joy that he quickly, and unintentionally, drew others to his way of life.
The popularity turned out to have been costly for him. His original charism to follow the poor Christ, with no personal or communal possessions, became untenable as the number of “little brothers” grew exponentially. Leadership of the friars passed to others better at organizing what had become a community of thousands spanning Europe. Francis was sidelined. He let it go, all the while maintaining his commitment to absolute poverty. Indeed, the loss of control over the order required a deeper poverty than he had ever envisioned.
Yet the joy never ceased. Racked with pain and close to dying, he composed his ecstatic “Canticle of Brother Sun” within a year after the stigmata. It marks one of the first great poems in Italian. Its scriptural models can be found in those psalms that call upon creation to praise God, as well as the exuberant canticle, the “Song of Creation” (Benedicite, opera omnia Domini), with its cosmic sweep. Francis’s poem reflects these antecedents but goes beyond them as he invokes the heavenly bodies and the four elements of classical antiquity — earth, air, fire, and water — to join in praise of their Creator. It conveys a profoundly sacramental vision of a world shot through with the divine presence.
Such a capacity for mystical joy in creation, for which Francis is justly renowned, is of a piece with his devotion to the cross and his radical poverty. For it is only by self-emptying, after all, that we can see the world without self-interest, delighting in its sheer creation, and experiencing its elements as kindred creatures — as “brother” and “sister.” By contrast, the nascent capitalism of his day, epitomized by the business mentality of Francis’s family, saw water, air, animals, and minerals merely as “stuff” — resources that are there solely for our taking.
In his final days, Francis made his brothers promise to lay his naked body on the ground after his death. In his death as in his life, Francis longed to be one with Christ, who was born a naked, vulnerable infant and who died crucified, wounded and naked.
The baptismal liturgy frames our birth in Christ and our death in him as the Paschal candle burns by the font and by the casket. St. Paul teaches that in the meantime, we daily enact the death of Christ through our painful struggle with sin and our labor to die to it (Rom. 6:11). Like Francis and together with all baptized souls, we are committed to follow and obey Jesus as our Lord when we are baptized into his death and resurrection.
We carry on our bodies the sign of the cross (our version of stigmata) when we were sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever — marked with the sign of the cross traced on our forehead with chrism. Every day brings fresh opportunities, some great but most small, to see the Crucified at work in our lives, inviting us to share ever more fully in his death and so in his resurrection. The Rule of the Society of St. John the Evangelist puts it well in its chapter on “Holy Death”:
Week by week we are to accept every experience which requires us to let go as an opportunity for Christ to bring us thorough death into life. Hardships, renunciations, losses, bereavements, frustrations, and risks are all ways in which death is at work in advance, preparing us for the self-surrender of bodily death. Through them we practice the final letting go of dying, so that it will be less strange and terrifying to us.
[1] Laurence S. Cunningham, Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel Life (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004). I am indebted to this fine study at several junctures. See also Augustine Thompson, O.P., Francis of Assisi: A New Biography (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012).
