On the Road with Francis of Assisi by Linda Bird Francke Read Free Book Online

and made that feast his last. According to all his biographers, he was struck dumb and unable to move, remaining rooted on the street while his friends went on. They came back for him when they realized he was missing and interpreted his trancelike state as a fit of lovesickness. “Francis, do you wish to get married?” his friends teased him. Jolted back to consciousness, Francis gave the reply that is central to his legend. “I shall take a more noble and more beautiful spouse than you have ever known,” he told them, according to Celano. “She will surpass all others in beauty and will excel all others in wisdom.”
    Francis’s vision of his coming betrothal to “Lady Poverty” is commemorated at a festival every year in Assisi during the week following the first Tuesday in May. Eight hundred years ago it marked the moment when he began his conversion from sinner to saint.
    Mount Subasio rises steeply above Assisi, its oak, pine, and ilex forests laced with caves and streams and hiking trails. Two and a half miles up a very steep pilgrim footpath from Assisi’s Porta Cappuccini, or by car on the Via Santuario delle Carceri, is the Eremo delle Carceri, one of the earliest Franciscan hermitages and a refuge, for hundreds of years before that, for hermits and priests fleeing persecution from eastern Europe.
    Francis was not fleeing persecution from anyone when he first sought out this lovely, serene spot, but confronting himself. The
carceri,
or prison, is believed to be the location of the cave he secretly frequented with an unidentified friend after seeing the vision of Lady Poverty that night on the streets of Assisi.
    The beginning of Francis’s conversion from playboy to penitent “in a certain grotto near the city,” according to Celano, was a slow, painful process. Francis spent long hours on his knees praying to God to hear again the voice that had instructed him to return to Assisi to await the vision that promised him “spiritual fulfillment”—but there was only silence and Francis’s considerable guilt. “He repented that he had sinned so grievously and had offended the eyes of God’s majesty,” writes Celano, “and neither the past evils nor those present gave him any delight.”
    But Francis was still of this “world,” and not yet fully confident that he would be able to resist the temptations of the flesh. According to the
Legend of the Three Companions,
the devil took advantage of his uncertainty by tempting him with a horrible image. There was, in Assisi, a “humpbacked and deformed woman and the Devil recalled her to Francis’s mind with the threat, that unless he turned from the good he had embarked on, he would free her from her deformity and cast it upon him.”
    That image, and other “inopportune ideas,” plagued Francis in the cave and “greatly worried and distressed him.” The struggle within himself evidently took a considerable toll. He couldn’t rest, and he often wept for hours. “Consequently, when he came out again to his companion, he was so exhausted with the strain, that one person seemed to have entered, and another to have come out,” notes Celano.
    There are no devils at the
carceri
during our visits. On one occasion we meet a small group of elderly nuns from Germany, clambering with some difficulty up and down the narrow, slippery paths to the caves marked by the names of Francis’s first followers—Brothers Leo, Rufino, Silvester, and Masseo—and to the now enclosed grotto overlooking a gorge where Francis prayed and slept.
“Grüss Gott,”
each nun greets us.
“Grüss Gott.”
    Along Leo’s path we also we meet up with a group of Franciscan academicians from America, some forty of them, who are touring Umbria’s Franciscan sites under the auspices of www.franciscanpilgrimages.com. Their leader, Father John, is explaining the significance of a curious bronze sculpture grouping of three life-size friars looking up at the sky.
    Some of the early