On the Road with Francis of Assisi (29 page)

We connect with Francis again in La Verna’s dramatic and almost surreal natural surroundings. Down a steep flight of exterior steps is a chasm leading into a tree-topped jumble of huge, moss-streaked boulders, balanced precariously one on top of another. One edge of an upper rock protrudes over the chasm in a seeming mockery of gravity, and I gingerly follow Father Roy ever deeper into what is known as the Sasso Spicco (projecting rock), past a wooden cross and taus scratched into the rock walls by pilgrims, to the impossibly wild spot where Francis often withdrew to pray. “This is a wounded mountain,” says Father Roy. “Francis felt he was entering into the wounds of Christ.”

Looking straight up is even more surreal. The mountain seems to be split cleanly in two and is spanned, high overhead, by a small bridge. That man-made bridge has replaced, appropriately, the log that Francis crossed to achieve the solitude he was seeking during the fast of St. Michael when he received the stigmata. The solitary ledge he achieved, visited only by Brother Leo, is also overhead and has since been enclosed and transformed into the Chapel of the Cross. It bears within a haunting wooden figure of the wounded Francis sitting on a log beside his companion falcon, staring heavenward in pain.

We feel as though we are living inside the medieval legend at La Verna. Around the other side of the ledge overhead is a plaque on the edge of a sheer precipice. It marks the spot where, sometime during those forty days, Francis had such a violent encounter with the devil that he had to flatten himself against the cliff face and implore God to save him from being thrown to the rocks below. God responded, according to the
Little Flowers,
when “suddenly by a miracle, the rock to which he was clinging yielded to the form of his body and received him into itself.” As proof, the absorbent rock is said to bear the imprint of “the shape of his face and hands”—though we had to stretch our imaginations to recognize the shapes.

We follow Father Roy back up the steps to the first church here, the tiny, spare chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, just off the central courtyard. To the credit of the Franciscans at La Verna, no one has tarted up the primitive stone chapel. The only addition, inserted into the altar, is an old stone protected by glass.

A legend recounted in the excellent English-language guide to La Verna holds that Francis used the stone as a table for his paltry meals until the day Jesus miraculously appeared to him—“while he was eating lunch,” says Father Roy—and sat on the stone. When Jesus withdrew, Francis summoned Leo and said: “Wash this stone first with water and then with wine, oil and milk and last of all with balsam . . . because Jesus Christ was seated upon it.” Not surprisingly, the sacred rock has been venerated ever since and was inserted into the altar in 1719.

La Verna has a plethora of Franciscan historical memorabilia, including the cells of St. Bonaventure and St. Anthony of Padua. But we remain focused on Francis and his legend, which is bringing us closer and closer to the actual spot where he received the stigmata.

We pass quickly through the fourteenth-century basilica, pausing only in the seventeenth-century Chapel of the Relics, where there are some real treasures: the tablecloth, eating bowl, and drinking cup used by Francis when he visited Count Orlando in nearby Chiusi, and the count’s belt, which Francis is said to have blessed when he girted the count upon his entrance into the Third Order. The belt, described as leather in the thirteenth-century deed awarding these treasures to the Franciscans, is actually made of gold cloth. But no matter.

Another treasure contained in a bronze-and-glass urn is a small piece of linen, which is said to be stained with Francis’s blood, having been used to cover the weeping wound in his side. But the relic Father Roy is most excited by is in another glass case: the tattered, ragged habit Francis was wearing when he received the stigmata.

The story of the habit, recounted by Father Roy, involves a rich man who somehow knew that Francis did not have long to live when he prepared to leave La Verna and managed to trade Francis a new habit hastily made by his tailor for the old one. Trades like this were not uncommon. Many people sought Francis’s clothes as relics and were eager to pay the cost of a new habit. But after what transpired at La Verna became known, this particular habit was deemed such a treasure that it ended up in Florence for close to eight hundred years. It was only in 2000 that the habit was returned to the Franciscans at La Verna.

My heart begins to race with anticipation as we near the climax of Francis’s spiritual experience at La Verna—the Chapel of the Stigmata. I imagine approaching his isolated cell, as he did, on a modern version of the medieval log over the precipitous chasm. I plan to stand on the edge of the cliff, as he did, look heavenward, and imagine the bright light in the sky bearing down on me. But my imagination has run away with me.

The approach to the sacred site is enclosed, and has been since 1582. The Corridor of the Stigmata, as it is called, was constructed after a sixteenth-century blizzard prevented the friars from making their twice-daily pilgrimage to the site. Legend has it that the animals of the forest made the pilgrimage for them, attested to by the tracks the friars found in the snow the next morning.

The corridor, frescoed on the cliff side with scenes from Francis’s life and enclosed on the other by leaded windows, gives a glimpse of what medieval La Verna must have been like: Halfway down the corridor and behind a nail-studded door is a precarious cave where Francis often slept. In the center of the cave’s supporting rocks is the horizontal stone he used as a bed, protected now from relics seekers by an iron grate.

We pass two more chapels at the end of the corridor, including the Chapel of the Cross, which we had seen from below and which is said to be the site Francis chose for his cell in 1224. And suddenly, there we are, in the small anteroom to the Chapel of the Stigmata. I imagine we’ll round the corner to emerge onto the wild outcropping of rock that Francis’s medieval biographers and thousands of subsequent paintings have imprinted on my mind. But no.

The Chapel of the Stigmata turns out to be exactly that: a chapel. In front of the altar, over which hangs the enormous and beautiful Andrea Della Robbia
Crucifixion,
is a small, six-sided hole in the floor, framed in red marble and covered with glass. This, then, is the ultimate destination at La Verna. I feel somewhat let down, but then again, what else could the Franciscans have done with the press of pilgrims to La Verna? Brother Leo had marked the spot with a wooden cross, but as more and more people were drawn here, the tiny chapel had begun to rise around it way back in 1263.

I retrace my steps and join my husband and a friend outside in the waning afternoon sun. Father Roy has to leave us, and we heap thanks on him and exchange e-mail addresses. But I still feel sort of down until I suddenly hear the sound of singing. Two lines of friars appear, flanking a friar in the middle carrying a wooden cross. An older friar wearing a green shawl is singing a Laud, to which the others sing responses as they move along the corridor. I follow them and their beautiful, simple sound, in what I learn later is called the Procession of the Stigmata and has occurred every day since 1431.

The procession, made up of twelve friars, a few nuns, and a visiting delegation from Africa, pauses in the anteroom to the Chapel of the Stigmata, where the older friar rings the chapel bell. The procession then enters the chapel, so narrow that there is room only for single carved wooden choir seats on either side of the nave. After a few prayers, the procession moves out of the chapel and back down the corridor, their voices calling back and forth in song. At that moment I realize that it doesn’t matter a bit if the stigmata site is merely a hole in the ground. The spirit of Francis continues to burn brightly at La Verna.

Francis would live another two years after receiving the stigmata, but the painful wounds added an almost unbearable burden to his already ravaged body. Having not achieved the traditional martyrdom of death, he became a living martyr for Christ.

How he kept going is beyond reckoning, but he did, albeit slowly. Because of the wounds in his feet, he could barely walk, and when he prepared to leave La Verna with Leo at the end of September, his friars had to borrow a horse from Count Orlando. Francis knew he would never again see La Verna and the friars he was leaving behind at the sanctuary, and according to one account, which may or may not be authentic, he gathered them in the little chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli to say good-bye.

“ ‘Farewell, farewell, Brother Masseo. Farewell, farewell, Brother Angelo,’ ” Masseo quotes Francis in the description he wrote of the leave-taking. “And in the same way he took leave of Brother Sylvester and of Brother Illuminato, adding, ‘live in peace, my dear children. Farewell. For I return to the Porziuncola with Brother God’s Little Sheep [Leo], never to return again. My body goes away, but I leave you my heart.’ ”

Francis was just as emotional about leaving the mountain itself. “ ‘Farewell, Mount La Verna! Farewell, Mount of the angels, beloved mountain!’ ” Masseo quotes. “ ‘Farewell, Brother Falcon: once more I thank you for your kindness to me. Farewell, great rock. I shall see you no more.’

“We all broke into sobs,” Masseo concludes. “He went away, weeping, bearing our hearts with him.”

Francis and Leo made the journey to Assisi in short stages, stopping to rest at various hermitages along the way. So weakened was Francis by the loss of blood from the wound in his side as well as all his other infirmities that the journey, which normally took a week, this time would take him a month.

22

The Painful Road Back to Assisi

M
ONTE
C
ASALE
and
B
UON
R
EPOSO,
the hermitages where Francis rests ·
S
AN
D
AMIANO,
where, very ill, he writes the famous Canticle of Brother Sun

S
ansepolcro is nestled in the mountains on the border of Tuscany and Umbria. The town is best known as the birthplace of the fifteenth-century artist Piero della Francesca, but it played a haunting role in Francis’s trip home from La Verna. Crowds turned out to welcome him, but Francis was so ill that he did not even acknowledge them. He did not register, in fact, that he had reached Sansepolcro. After passing through the town, he is said to have asked Leo: “When will we reach Sansepolcro?”

Francis seems to have revived when he reached the nearby hermitage of Monte Casale, where he immediately cured a friar of seizures. He performed another miracle the next day, albeit in absentia. A woman in labor was lying near death in one of the villages Francis had passed through on his way to Monte Casale, but he was long gone by the time the villagers realized that the holy man had come their way. Their hopes soared when his friars reappeared from Monte Casale on their way to return Count Orlando’s horse but were dashed when they realized Francis was not with them. It fell to an enterprising friar, realizing Francis had touched the horse’s bridle, to place it on the woman’s stomach, whereupon she immediately, and painlessly, gave birth.

In happier, healthier days, Francis had taught his friars at Monte Casale an essential lesson in Franciscan morality. According to his medieval biographers, a notorious band of robbers was living in the woods and terrorizing travelers. When the brigands came to the hermitage begging for food, the indignant friars turned them away. Francis chastised the friars when he arrived, reminding them of the Rule he had written governing just such circumstances: “And whoever comes to them, friend or foe, thief or robber, should be received with kindness.”

As penance—and a lesson in strategy—Francis ordered the friars to take good bread and wine to the forest and to call out: “Come, Brother Robbers, come to us because we are brothers.” Not only were the friars to lay out the food on a tablecloth but they were also to serve the robbers. Francis’s strategy was to convert the robbers in stages—to extract their promise after the first meal not to “strike anyone” and, after a second free meal, of eggs and cheese, the next day, to suggest that it would be better for them to serve the Lord than to hide in the forest “dying of hunger” and doing “many evil things for which you will lose your souls.” Needless to say, the robbers saw the light, gave up their wicked ways, and promised “to live by the work of their hands.”

The aura of Francis’s kindness and charity seems to live on at little Monte Casale. We don’t see a soul around the stone buildings or the well-tended terraced gardens, so we let ourselves into the small stone chapel to find the altar covered with fresh flowers. A flight of stone steps leads we know not where, so we climb it with some trepidation, imagining our uninvited entry into the living space of this Capuchin sanctuary.

Instead we emerge into a dimly lit rough stone cave, with yet another set of steep stone steps leading to a sort of rock loft. A crude wooden cross on the wall of the loft, the stone slab bed, and wooden “pillow” log define the space as Francis’s cell, as do the offerings scattered about—candles, wilted roses, a snapshot of an older couple, another of a young boy eating toast, an old thousand-lire note, a smattering of current euros. We are all alone in this wonderfully intimate space, which easily evokes Francis, especially the darkness he sought in his waning days to protect his light-sensitive eyes.

We blink ourselves in the bright sunlight when we leave the cave and wander around Monte Casale’s tiny cloister. A cat is prowling the tiled roof. There are pots of geraniums and a papyrus plant. We can smell woodsmoke and hear a rushing stream but still don’t see a soul—save the whimsical, life-size sculpture of a young Francis perched on a stone wall overlooking the valley. On the way back to the car, we look down on a collection of goats and chickens and something white flashing in the air. The white turns out to be a wheeling formation of white doves around their dovecote, a perfect symbol of Francis to carry with us as we leave.

The wounded Francis went on slowly with Leo to Città di Castello, Umbria’s most northern town. His health was such that he had to stay a month in this walled town in the Tiber Valley and above, in the hills, at the hermitage of the Buon Reposo. He often passed through Città di Castello on his way to and from La Verna and, on one such visit, miraculously drove the devil out of a possessed woman.

We experience a small miracle of our own in the city. We want to visit Buon Reposo, the hermitage so named because Francis had an especially good night’s sleep there on his way back from La Verna, but we don’t know where it is. Our hopes are dashed when the Franciscan friar we meet outside the San Francesco church tells us that the hermitage is closed, but they lift when a door suddenly opens in a house along the street and the miraculous Francesca emerges.

Francesca turns out to be the cousin of Buon Reposo’s caretaker, Bruno. She whips out her cell phone and has an animated conversation with Bruno, but when she announces that he will receive us the next morning, our spirits droop again because we won’t be in Città di Castello the next morning. With a lot of shrugs and “too bads” in various languages, we set out with Francesca’s directions to try to see Buon Reposo anyway, if only from a distance. “Maybe St. Francis will work a miracle for you,” the friar half-jests in parting. He does.

Somehow, at the end of one of the gravel roads crisscrossing the hills above the town, we arrive at a big house with a cross on the driveway posts. We decide it must be the Eremo di Buon Reposo, but when we knock on the front door, there is no response. We are on our moody way back down the hill when we meet a car heading up. It is Bruno returning from an afternoon out with his wife. “Ah! Americano,” he says—and leads us back to Buon Reposo.

Perhaps it is the series of miracles that led us here that makes Buon Reposo seem so magical. Or it might be the fading light, which adds a patina of mystery to everything we see—the old chapel, whose frescoed walls were stuccoed over by austere friars in the seventeenth century; the grille in the old stone floor, under which the bones of a dozen friars were found. But the centerpiece of Buon Reposo is the cave, just off the crumbling cloister, where Francis had such a good night’s rest. In a seeming contradiction, the cave is known as the Grotta del Diavolo to mark yet another struggle Francis had with the devil, which would not seem to lend itself to a peaceful sleep.

We contribute to the chapel’s restoration fund, which earns my husband a blessing and a kiss on the forehead from Bruno, and we leave, feeling as refreshed as Francis did, or could, in his perilous state of health.

The Francis who finally arrived back at the Porziuncola in November 1224 was a shadow of the man he had been before he went to the Middle East and to La Verna. Yet he soon departed on a donkey for a preaching tour through Umbria, accompanied at times by an increasingly anxious Brother Elias. Leo kept his hands and side bandaged and made sure Francis wore the slippers Clare had made for him, but it was obvious that Francis was very ill. He had migraines, could barely eat, and his eyes had become so painful that his friars had fashioned an oversize hood to keep his face in perpetual shade.

Elias relayed his concerns about Francis to Cardinal Ugolino and the Pope, who collectively summoned the ailing friar to the city of Rieti, some forty miles north of Rome, to be treated by the Pope’s physicians. (Rieti had become the temporary refuge for Pope Honorius III and his pontifical court following an insurrection in Rome in April 1225.) Bowing to the combined edicts of the Pope, the protector of his order, and the order’s minister general, the ever-obedient Francis reluctantly agreed to go to Rieti—but only after he said good-bye to Clare at San Damiano. That good-bye would stretch out for three months while Francis lay close to death.

The reed and mud hut the friars built for the ailing Francis in the garden at San Damiano is long gone, but its significance is as strong today as it was in the cold spring of 1225. Night turned into day and back into night to the unknowing Francis, who was undergoing a bout of complete blindness. Sightless and ill, he was also plagued by an infestation of mice. “There were so many mice running around here and there, around him and even on him, that they prevented him from taking a rest,” recounts the
Legend of Perugia.
“They even hindered him greatly in his prayer.”

In the midst of his suffering, Francis nonetheless composed in that reed hut his most joyous, and famous, poem: the Canticle of Brother Sun.

Most High, all-powerful, good Lord

Yours are the praises, the glory, the honor, and all blessing.

To You alone, Most High, do they belong,

and no man is worthy to mention Your name.

Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures,

Especially Sir Brother Sun,

Who is the day and through whom You give us light.

And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor;

And bears a likeness of You, Most High One.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars,

In heaven You formed them clear and precious and beautiful.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind,

And through the air, cloudy and serene, and every kind of weather

Through which You give sustenance to Your creatures.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water,

Which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Fire,

Through whom You light the night

And he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong.

Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth.

Who sustains and governs us,

And who produces varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Praised be You, my Lord, through those who give pardon for Your love.

Francis loved his canticle so much that he had his friars sing it every day, and often sang along with them. “When he was laid low by sickness, he often intoned this canticle and had his companions take it up,” the
Legend of Perugia
continues. “In that way he forgot the intensity of his sufferings and pains by considering the glory of the Lord.”

The canticle turned out to be a tonic for Francis’s health. He improved enough to add a new stanza in June, in the hope of heading off a looming civil war in Assisi between the backers of the bishop and the secular
podesta,
or mayor, over granting asylum to nobles fleeing Perugia. In short order he dispatched Brothers Leo and Angelo to sing the canticle to the bishop and the
podesta
along with the new verse:

Praised be You, my Lord, through those who give pardon for Your love

And bear infirmity and tribulation.

Blessed are those who endure in peace

For by You, Most High, they shall be crowned.

It worked. Evidently moved to tears, the bishop and the
podesta
forgave each other and dropped their bombastic charges. “Francis had stopped a war with a song,” writes his biographer Julien Green.

Francis did not forget Clare, who along with her sisters was helping to nurse him in the hut at San Damiano. After composing the famous Canticle of Brother Sun, he composed a second canticle, this one to console Clare and her sisters during his grave illness.

Listen, little poor ones called by the Lord,

who have come together from many parts and provinces:

Live always in truth,

that you may die in obedience.

Do not look at the life outside,

for that of the Spirit is better.

I beg you through great love,

to use with discretion

the alms which the Lord gives you.

Those who are weighed down by sickness

and the others who are wearied because of them,

all of you: bear it in peace.

For you will sell this fatigue at a very high price

and each one [of you] will be crowned queen

in heaven with the Virgin Mary.

Still Francis lingered at San Damiano, resisting Cardinal Ugolino’s order to go to Rieti for treatment by the Pope’s doctors. At heart, Francis was not looking for a scientific cure; he considered his suffering heaven-sent and a well-deserved trial for his sins. He was finally persuaded to leave San Damiano by a reassurance from the Lord. As recorded in
The Deeds of Blessed Francis and His Companions,
the Lord reportedly told him that his suffering was not a penance but a promise of the “treasure of eternal life.” “This infirmity and affliction is the pledge of that blessed treasure,” the Lord told him. Francis was ecstatic at the explanation and immediately summoned his companion to say: “Let’s go to the Lord Cardinal.”

And so, in late June 1225, Francis said a final farewell to Clare and set out for Rieti. It was the last time the two saints of Assisi would see each other.