On the Road with Francis of Assisi (14 page)

Along the way we pass several stone shrines with open iron grilles, each giving us false hope that we have achieved the Upper Shrine. But no. Enclosed in the seventeenth-century shrines we pass are sacred rocks, one described by a wooden sign as bearing the imprint of Francis’s knees; another encasing the footprint of an angel; a third, the twisted image of the devil. Still we climb, the church below receding to the size of a dollhouse toy, until we reach a large rock hanging precipitously over the valley. It is crowned with a rude wooden cross, a plastic water bottle bearing a single red poppy, and a wooden sign that translates: “The cross: from here St. Francis blessed the Rieti Valley.”

For all that the sentiment must be reassuring to the residents of the valley, it does not seem quite accurate. The legend says that Francis wrestled with his conscience on this wild outcropping of rock and prayed for days for forgiveness. “He persevered there for a long time with fear and trembling before the Lord of the whole earth,” Celano writes, “and he thought in the bitterness of his soul of the years he had spent wretchedly, frequently repeating this word: ‘O God, be merciful to me the sinner.’ ”

I climb up on the rock to see if I can re-create the feeling of desperation Francis must have been experiencing, but what strikes me, besides vertigo, is the beauty of the valley stretching out below me. And the silence. There isn’t a sound except for the occasional bird’s call and the whisper of the wind in the trees—until the wedding ends.

I nearly meet God myself on the rock when the church bells suddenly start to peal below, followed by the blare of car horns and some celebratory gunshots. The adrenaline rush gets me off the rock and back on the path, so steep at this point that it becomes steps cut into the side of the mountain. And suddenly—unbelievably—we arrive at a very old church, clinging to the edge of a chalk cliff. There we are, alone with Francis, at what must be the doorway to heaven. But we are definitely not the first.

There are hundreds of little handmade twig crosses stuck in the netting holding the cliff in place, as well as a bell over the church entry with a celebratory rope for pilgrims to pull. Inside the sky-scraping chapel, through a tiny, unlocked wooden door, is an ancient fresco of St. Bernardino and more twig crosses propped up on the little altar, along with fresh roses, candles, and crucifixes. And there, in the rear of the fifteenth-century church, festooned with vases of fresh poppies and daisies and hyacinth along with more candles and handmade crosses, is the Grotto of Revelations itself, the cave where Francis repaired briefly to sleep before resuming his entreaties to God for forgiveness.

God must have responded positively, which is a blessing to all who for centuries have held Francis in such high esteem. Francis might very well have never come down from that mountaintop if he had not found absolution from his agony. But he did. “Little by little, a certain unspeakable joy and very great sweetness began to flood his innermost heart,” writes Celano. “He began also to stand aloof from himself and as his feelings were checked and the darkness that had gathered in his heart because of his fear of sin dispelled, there was poured into him a certainty that all his sins had been forgiven, and a confidence of his restoration to grace was given him.”

The Francis who finally returned to his worried friars waiting in the hermitage below “seemed changed into another man,” notes Celano. And he was. Somewhere between the rock and the grotto, Francis had accepted his conversion from playboy to penitent to emerge the humble pilgrim of enduring legend.

It is little wonder, then, that so many people before us have made the uphill trek to the sacred Grotto of Revelations, though we haven’t seen a soul. The handmade twig crosses and assorted fresh flowers are testament to the pilgrims’ faith in the power of forgiveness and renewal personified by the “penitent” from Assisi. So is the church’s guest book, the first such registry we have seen. Most of the messages are in Italian, some in German and French, and a few in English. “We traveled a long way from Dallas, Texas, and Rockall, Texas,” reads one entry from the anxious autumn of 2002. “We pray for peace, love and understanding.”

Returning downhill, we find more of Francis’s legend at Poggio Bustone inside the now empty single-nave church. On one wall is a painting of Francis kneeling on the rock at the top of the mountain in front of a forgiving angel while his original six friars wait anxiously for him in the hermitage below. Another painting depicts the legendary exchange an older Francis had with the people of Poggio Bustone.

Francis is stooped and emaciated, and he is holding his hand over his heart in an attitude of confession. The image fits perfectly a sermon the ailing Francis delivered on a much later visit to Poggio Bustone when he publicly confessed to eating forbidden lard during a period of fasting. His “sin” was easily explained by the decision of a worried friar to cook his vegetables with a little lard to try to coax Francis to eat, but Francis chose to use the episode to broadcast his hypocrisy and to present himself as unworthy of any exaltation. “In this way, he often ascribed to pleasure what had been granted to him because of his infirmity,” writes Celano. Such self-deprecation was one of Francis’s most endearing and enduring characteristics. He was a human being like everyone else, he was telling the people, and just as prone to stumble on the road to salvation.

We make a quick tour of the cloister of the old friary behind the church with its intact thirteenth-century columns and the one remaining wall from the original church. Various scenes from Francis’s life are painted on the semicircular fanlights that run along the entire cloister corridor, including the de rigueur scene of him receiving the stigmata. But it is Francis’s original hermitage or Lower Shrine we’re after, and we find the cave a short distance along a passageway.

No matter how many hermitages we have seen where Francis regularly withdrew from the world to meditate and pray, they never fail to amaze me in their starkness and complete discomfort. The hermitage at Poggio Bustone is no exception. Predating Francis and given to him and his friars by the resident Benedictine monks, the now restored hermitage is nothing but barren rock—rough rocks, big rocks, the rock of the hill behind it. No wonder Francis is said to have slept only two or three hours a night. The only luxury consists of two little windows that have since been fitted with stained glass: One shows Francis miraculously healing a child in the town of Poggio Bustone, whom legend tells us “had lived enormously swollen so that he could not even see his legs”; the other, a leper who was cured four hundred years after Francis died by washing himself in the water from a basin named after the saint farther up the mountain.

Francis returned to Assisi from the Rieti Valley, as do we, past the extraordinarily beautiful Lake Piediluco. We linger there, in far greater comfort than did Francis, at the Hotel del Lago, from which the view of the lake, tucked into the mountains and rimmed with cypresses, evergreens, and elms in early fall foliage, is hypnotic. As we watch the luminous morning mist lift off the silver lake, it is easy to understand why Francis believed everything, including the view, was a gift from God. “He rejoiced in all the works of the hands of the Lord, and saw behind things pleasant to behold their life-giving reason and cause,” Celano writes. “In beautiful things, he saw Beauty itself; all things to him were good.”

Francis also returned from the Rieti Valley with a great prize: Angelo Tancredi, the first knight to join his group of companions. “You have worn the belt, the sword, and the spurs of the world, long enough,” Francis evidently said to Tancredi of Rieti. “Come with me and I will arm you as Christ’s knight.” It proved to be a most fortuitous union. “Brother” Angelo would stay with Francis for the rest of his life, join Brothers Leo and Rufino in writing the
Legend of the Three Companions
after Francis’s death, and be buried near him in the crypt of the basilica in Assisi.

Proof of Francis’s extraordinary charisma came shortly after his return from the Rieti Valley when four more men from Assisi left their homes, gave all their possessions to the poor, and joined the “companions” at the Porziuncola. Many believe it was the joy and camaraderie exhibited by the early companions that fostered the growth of the all-male movement. Celano describes the “spiritual love” among the “members of this pious society” in detail: “Chaste embraces, gentle feelings, a holy kiss, pleasing conversation, modest laughter, joyous looks, a single eye, a submissive spirit, a peaceable tongue, a mild answer, oneness of purpose, ready obedience, unwearied hand, all these were found in them.”

Francis demanded three vows from his charges—obedience, poverty, chastity—vows that are exhibited to this day in the three knots each Franciscan friar ties in the cord of his habit. They built their own thatched huts of mud and wood, raised as much as they could of their own food, and begged for the rest. Going door to door in Assisi for food handouts was particularly humiliating for the new friars, who had often been the ones to offer food to the poor. Quite naturally, they were frequently met with scorn and incredulity from their neighbors. If these crazy men hadn’t given away all their property to the poor, the derision went, they wouldn’t be at the door with their begging bowls.

But the nucleus of brothers, now eleven or twelve in number, remained steadfast, and seemingly content, in their voluntary poverty. Because they owned and wanted nothing, they had nothing to lose. “They were therefore, everywhere secure, kept in no suspense by fear; distracted by no care, they awaited the next day without solicitude,” writes Celano.

But with the growth of Francis’s following came danger. For all the good works of the friars, they were still for the most part evangelical laymen, wandering the countryside without license and preaching the word of God. They were bound, at some point, to become visible to the Church hierarchy in Rome and thus risk being branded as heretics. The Church was already at war with various breakaway sects, like the Cathars, which lived by their own rules. The Pope had tried to negotiate with the extremist Cathars, who had taken it upon themselves to administer the sacraments and to preach against sex and food of any kind, but to no avail. In 1208, the same year Francis went to Poggio Bustone, a particularly vehement Cathar responded to the Pope’s overtures by murdering the Papal legate dispatched to talk to them.

Francis’s regimen for himself and his friars was also considered extreme by Assisi’s clergy. Bishop Guido had urged him to ease his dedication to ultimate poverty, but Francis refused. The rule Francis followed, after all, was from Jesus himself in the Gospels. He had no intention of adopting one of the rules of the already established orders: the Benedictines, for example, owned vast amounts of property and were cloistered for the most part, and the Augustinians concentrated on apostolic activity in the churches and universities.

Francis was determined that he and his followers remain pilgrims for the Lord, carrying their message of peace and repentance to ordinary people in the smallest villages and most remote forests. But he also wanted recognition from the Church. So one morning, in the spring of 1209, the cheeky Francis gathered his friars together and announced they were going on a trip: they were leaving immediately for Rome to see the Lord Pope.

Francis’s body lay hidden for six hundred years deep under the Basilica of
St. Francis in Assisi. We listen to Mozart here among the Giottos.

Spoleto’s beautiful cathedral, where we don’t find Franci
s
’s famous handwritten letter to Brother Leo.

The convent of
San Damiano, whose little church Francis rebuilt after the cross there spoke to him. Clare would be cloistered here for forty-one years.

Francis stripped naked and renounced his father right here in front of the Bisho
p
’s Palace in Assisi’s Piazza del Vescovado.

Gubbio is famous for the story about Francis taming the wolf—but more important, a family here saved his life.

The Abbazia di Vallingegno is now an inn on the road to Gubbio, but in Franci
s
’s time it was the Benedictine monastery of
San Verecondo. The inhospitable monks here put him to work as a scullery boy.

The skyscraping chapel at Pòggio Bustone, where Francis, standing on a rock, wrestled with his conscience.

Francis turned from playboy to penitent and emerged a humble pilgrim from the chapel’s Grotto of
Revelations.

Francis preached to the birds here at Pian d’Arca, the simple and hard-to-find roadside shrine near Cantalupo.

A fissure in the rocks at Sant
’
Urbano, one of
many such crevasses in which Francis prayed and felt closest to the Lord.

Francis fasted here on the Isola Maggiore in Lake Trasimeno for the forty days and nights of
Lent.

My husband didn’t.