On the Road with Francis of Assisi (27 page)

20

The Beautiful Rieti Valley

F
ONTE
C
OLOMBO,
the hermitage where Francis writes the Rule of
1223,
only to have it mysteriously lost ·
G
RECCIO,
the hermitage where he stages the first living Nativity

T
here is silence, absolute silence, as I enter the impossibly narrow rock cleft at the sanctuary of Fonte Colombo. Marked only by a rude wooden cross, the cleft is barely three feet wide and maybe nine feet long. There are no distractions, nowhere to go, nothing to look at save the dizzying view through a crack in the rock straight down the side of the high mountain. I can feel Francis in this extraordinary isolation, praying to the Lord to instruct him on the new Rule.

Right next to the fissure is the stark white cave where Francis prayed and slept during his forty-day vigil. Above the fissure, at the top of a steep path, is the tiny twelfth-century stone Chapel of the Magdalene, where Francis heard mass from Brother Leo. Barely big enough for ten people, the chapel still bears a tau cross, supposedly painted by Francis, in the recess of the window.

Francis had come to Fonte Colombo with his closest brothers, Leo, Rufino, and Angelo, as well as Brother Bonizzo, a canonical lawyer from Bologna. Leo presumably stayed in another cave, known as the Grotto of Brother Leo, along the steep mountain path. There is a third cave as well, identified as the Chapel of St. Michael, where perhaps the the friars prayed together while Francis stayed in solitude.

Meanwhile, the order’s ministers were getting very impatient—the rewriting of the Rule was taking far too long. But Francis did not move to an earthly timetable. And so he prayed and fasted and talked to the Lord in this stark rock fissure. His close companions knew not to disturb him, and they waited and waited and waited. Finally he emerged.

Back up the path toward the little chapel is a three-hundred-year-old holm oak, very like the tree Francis sat under in 1223 while he dictated to Brother Leo the Rule the Lord had spoken to him. (The original tree was felled by a heavy snowstorm in 1622 and its wood used by a master carver to replicate the scene. The intricate carving is in the thirteenth-century church at the entrance to Fonte Colombo, and it tells the entire—and sorry—story.)

The new guard of Franciscan ministers suddenly decided the Rule was going to be unacceptable. It was obviously again going to be too long or Francis would have long since finished it. And it would undoubtedly be too hard, much too hard. In what can only be seen as a mutiny, several of the ministers decided to go to Fonte Colombo to confront Francis, using the head of the order, Brother Elias, as their reluctant spokesman.

Francis was startled to see Brother Elias, even more startled to see the ministers, whom he did not recognize. “Who are these brothers?” he asked Elias. Elias’s reply, as recorded in the
Mirror of Perfection,
broke Francis’s heart. “These are ministers who heard that you are making a new rule. They fear you are making it very harsh and they say, and say publicly, they refuse to be bound by it. Make it for yourself and not for them.”

One can only imagine the pain Francis must have felt. Turning his face toward heaven, he cried out: “Lord! Didn’t I tell you they wouldn’t believe me?” And suddenly, the legend goes, the Lord’s voice was heard throughout the forest: “Francis, nothing of yours is in the Rule; whatever is there is mine. And I want the Rule observed in this way: to the letter, to the letter, to the letter and without a gloss, without a gloss, without a gloss.” The Lord’s pronouncement had the desired effect, and the ministers fled, “confused and terrified.”

The Rule of 1223, which Elias mysteriously lost after Francis delivered it to him, forcing Francis to rewrite it yet again, was heavily edited by Brother Bonizzo, Cardinal Ugolino, and even Pope Honorius III. The Rule is short, only twelve chapters, as opposed to the twenty-four in Francis’s rejected Rule of 1221. It is not laced with writings from the scriptures, as the earlier Rule was, and it is considerably toned down.

Gone is any mention of caring for lepers, though that was a central and nonnegotiable requirement for the early friars. Gone is the directive from Luke for traveling friars to “take nothing with you for your journey.” The formerly barefoot friars can now wear shoes, if “forced by necessity.” And the language, at least, about women has been softened. Whereas the chapter about women in the earlier Rule was titled “Evil Relations with Women Must Be Avoided,” the parallel heading in the later Rule states simply: “The friars are forbidden to enter the monasteries of nuns.”

The central spirit of the Rule remains constant, however. The friars are still bound to live in “obedience, without property and in chastity,” though a chapter devoted to the condemnation of a friar for “fornication” has been dropped. The requirement continues for friars to work and “avoid idleness,” never to accept money, and to beg for alms. “This is the pinnacle of the most exalted poverty, and it is this, my dearest brothers, that has made you heirs and kings of the kingdom of heaven, poor in temporal things but rich in virtue,” the Rule reads.

The stern directive also remains that the friars “are to appropriate nothing for themselves, neither a house nor a place, nor anything else,” though a way had already been found around that. Shortly after Francis threw the friars out of the convent in Bologna and condemned the learned, bookish minister to death, Cardinal Ugolino took ownership of the house and invited all the friars back as his guests. The practice would continue of property being “loaned” to the Franciscans, just as Lord Ripon did at San Damiano in the nineteenth century.

But the Rule, at last, was done. As I stand at the spot under the tree where Francis dictated the Rule to Leo and look down the mountain path at the rock cleft where Francis talked to the Lord, it seems almost unbelievable that that same Rule governs the Franciscan Order today.

Francis performed one last, great public act shortly after the Pope approved the Rule on November 25, 1223. It was getting on toward Christmas, and Francis decided to spend the holiday at one of his favorite hermitages, Greccio, also in the Rieti Valley. As a younger man, Francis had gone often to Greccio “to relax or tarry,” according to the
Legend of Perugia.
He was so fond of the devout and poor people in the little cobbled village—and they of him—that Francis had told a village boy to throw a stick and wherever it landed, he would establish a hermitage. The stick flew a miraculous one and a quarter miles through the air and landed on the sheer rock wall of a nearby mountain. Lord John of Velita, who held sway over Greccio, promptly gave the mountain, with its series of interconnecting caves, to Francis. And it is to those caves, since converted into a substantial Franciscan sanctuary, we are headed.

From the road below, the complex seems as huge as it does gravitationally impossible: three- and four-story unfaced stone buildings rising straight from the edge of a sheer cliff and seemingly holding up the mountain behind. As we negotiate the last hairpin turns, I realize the road should have given us a clue that this is to be no ordinary hermitage—unlike any other sanctuary road we had been on, the road to Greccio is wide enough to accommodate tour buses easily.

One hundred thousand people a year visit Greccio. Our arrival coincides with that of a busload of Italians from Campobasso, and together, in reverential quiet, we tour the sanctuary. Though I should long since have gotten over it, seeing again the discomfort Francis and his early friars courted continues to amaze me. Francis’s rough-rock cell is no larger than four feet square, and his friars evidently slept sitting up along the narrow corridor outside his cell, under crosses carved in the walls to mark their individual “beds.”

Among the many legends that draw visitors to Greccio is a lesson in humility Francis taught his friars. Francis was so upset when he saw his friars sitting comfortably at a well-set table for Easter that he disguised himself as a poor pilgrim and entered the room, begging for alms. The obliging friars soon recognized the pilgrim as Francis, who chose to eat his alms on the floor by the fire. “Now, it seems to me, I am seated like a brother,” he said to his companions. The story, as told in the
Assisi Compilation,
does not say what happened next, but it seems safe to assume that the chagrined brothers joined Francis on the floor for the rest of their meager holiday meal.

Greccio also has its share of animal stories, like the one about “Brother Rabbit,” whose life Francis saved on the way to the cooking pot, and the miracle of the local cattle whose lives Francis indirectly saved during a plague when a farmer “pilfered” his wash water and sprinkled it on the cattle. “From that moment, by the grace of God, the contagious pestilence ceased and never again returned to the region,” writes Celano.

Another favorite story at Greccio involves Francis, secluded in prayer, sensing the presence of a friar who had walked ten miles from the city of Rieti to see him and Francis suddenly emerging to bless the dispirited, departing friar. Another is the bout an ailing Francis had with the devil, who was hidden in the feather pillow Lord John had given him for comfort during one of his illnesses.

Unable to sleep or pray because his head and knees were shaking so hard, Francis finally summoned a brother for help. “I believe there’s a devil in this pillow I have for my head,” he told him. The brother picked up the cursed pillow and was walking away with it when he became paralyzed. For an hour the friar stood frozen, unable to speak and powerless to drop the pillow. It was only when something miraculous moved Francis to call out to him that the friar’s senses returned and he could drop the pillow.

Francis’s rationale for the devil’s attack, as recorded in the
Assisi Compilation,
is wonderfully complex. The cunning devil knew he could not hurt Francis’s soul because of God’s grace, but he could hurt Francis’s body by denying its need for sleep and the strength to stand up for prayer. All this was devilishly designed, said Francis, “to stifle the devotion and joy of my heart so that I will complain about my sickness.”

Francis was again not well on this trip to Greccio in 1223, presumably his first since he’d returned from the Middle East. His deteriorating condition is captured in a haunting portrait at the sanctuary in which he is wiping his weeping, diseased eyes with a white cloth. It is the only image, anywhere, of Francis and his eye affliction and was commissioned before his death by “Brother” Jacopa de Settesoli, the pious widow of Rome who is buried near him in Assisi. The original was lost, but this fourteenth-century copy shows Francis, sadly, as he actually was toward the end of his life.

His spirit, however, was high this Christmas season. He was planning a surprise and asked his friend Lord John to do something special at the hermitage that “will recall to memory the little Child who was born in Bethlehem and set before our bodily eyes in some way the inconveniences of his infant needs, how he lay in a manger, how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he lay upon the hay where he had been placed.” And so the first, or at least the most recognized, living Nativity took place.

Celano’s description of the ensuing pageant in a cave, which has since been incorporated into the Chapel of the Crèche, is as vivid as it is moving. The friars came from all their various hermitages. Men, women, and children came from the village, while farmers with candles and torches came up the mountain from their fields. “The woods rang with the voices of the crowd and the rocks made answer to their jubilation,” Celano writes. “The brothers sang, paying their debt of praise to the Lord, and the whole night resounded with their rejoicing.”

Francis must have been ecstatic to have re-created the birth of Jesus for so many people. Little did he know that he had started a tradition that would be celebrated all over the Christian world for centuries to come—and continues at Greccio to this day. That same Nativity scene is reenacted four times during the Christmas season and draws some thirty thousand people carrying candles and singing. It is also memorialized on the rough cave wall of the Chapel of the Crèche with two beautiful side-by-side frescoes, one of Francis at the Nativity in Greccio, the other of Mary and Joseph with the baby in Greccio’s twin city of Bethlehem. The still-vibrant thirteenth-century frescoes are the work of the Giotto School and rival those in the basilica at Assisi.

Francis had such reverence for Christmas and for the animals that attended the birth of Christ that he toyed with petitioning the emperor to declare an amnesty for animals on Christmas Day. Not only would the imperial edict spare animals from being captured or killed but it would guarantee them a Christmas feast. Francis wanted wheat and other grains scattered along Italy’s roads by law on Christmas Day “so that our sister larks and other birds may have something to eat on such a solemn feast.” Similarly, oxen and ass, the animals that flanked Jesus in his Nativity crib, were to be provided “a generous portion of the best fodder.” Lest poor humans be overlooked on Christmas Day, they, too, would benefit from the law and “be fed good food by the rich.”

There is no record of Francis actually delivering his case to the emperor, but the concept of rewarding animals at Christmas is a lovely one and particularly valid in Italy, where the appetite for hunting is second only to a passion for
futbal.

We linger at Greccio, as did Francis. Above the Nativity cave is a beautiful, tiny thirteenth-century chapel with blue and red stars painted on the vaulted ceiling; it is allegedly the first church dedicated to Francis after his canonization in 1228—despite the claims of the friars at the Isola del Deserto. And near the tiny chapel is the original thirteenth-century wood dormitory built by the friars shortly after Francis’s death in 1226, with twigs still visible in the hardened mud walls as well as pages from medieval books plugging holes in the roof.

However disappointed Francis may have been by the institutionalization of his order and the sorry behavior of the new breed of friars, he must have left Greccio with gladness in his heart. He had done what he knew best: brought the joy of Christ to the hearts of the people. And he must also have felt relieved: The final Rule was written, and he had been freed from the management of his order. Francis could return to preaching the Gospels that he lived by and spending more time in the isolation of nature, where he felt closest to God. And so, in the late summer of 1224, Francis made his seminal journey to the sanctuary of La Verna in Tuscany. He would never be the same.