ASSISI. OLIVE TREES WITH RUGGED TRUNKS, THE UNDULATING LANDSCAPE OF HILLS. HOUSES REACHING FOR THE SKY, MEDIAEVAL. BACK-ALLEYS, THE CHANGING OF SILVERY WONDERS INTO DROSS.
Francis, the Saint, the daydreaming son of the richest merchant. He is longing for glory; fame and success, but he has a vision in the crumbling monastery of San Damiano, not far from home on his way to the Holy Land: “Francis, go and mend my house.”
He first chooses the obvious way and reconstructs San Damiano. He assembler some of God’ sheep and calls for an intimate relationship with nature. He preaches to birds and calms the wolf of Gubbio. He has enmity towards only one creature: he behaves distantly towards his brother ants, because they collect all the time. “Do not worry about tomorrow”, he says. “Be like the birds of the sky,” he thinks. “Give to all those, who ask of you” and He could give.
He evokes brother Sun, sister Moon, brother Wind, sister Water, brother Fire and sister Mother Earth, praying to them, requesting service. He propagates equality for women as early as the 1200s, the Clarist convent flourishes. He teaches the love of work and preaches an intimate relationship with the objects we use. He pursued the reform and revival of his spirit, because he knew that was the only way to renew the world. He often retreated to meditate and he fasted for forty days on an uninhabited island in the Lake of Peruggia. He heals lepers and starts building a monastery on top of the hill of La Verna. The wounds of the Crucified One appear on his body in the cave in the “forest of Francis”.
He Works miracles and he preaches: “First you have to heat up in the inside, otherwise you just say cold words.”
Anthony of Padua, the excellent orator, is a faithful disciple of his. Bonaventura, the theoretician of the order wrote the notes that Dante used when writing his literature masterpiece: the Divine Comedy. The cells of both saints are in the monastery of Alverna, about a hundred kilometres north of Assisi. Francesco died on 4th October 1226 in his modest cell beside the Portiuncula chapel, which was built on soil brought from the Holy Land. The church of Santa Maria degli Angeli was constructed on that.
The life of St. Francis still holds an important message for the consumer society of today: be thrifty on your own accord, do not heap up false treasures, help those in need and live in harmony with yourselves and the world.
The tomb of Dante is in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce in Florence, not far from that of Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The Gesu II Jesuit church in Rome, a gem of baroque architecture, also veneratesthe memory of St. Francis with a chapel. Many may know that Franz Liszt was also a member of the Third (secular) Order. His Tast request was to be buried in a Franciscan cassock. Assisi. The node of peculiar lines of force. It is Christmas Day, the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus. We are walking towards the monastery in beautiful, clear weather.
The Church unveils itself, the emerging nativity scene sparkling in the colours of the rainbow, built by St. Francis for the first time. There are stairs leading down from the crypt to the shrine of Francesco, which is a simple tomb held together with steel straps. Elijah carefully kid it from curious eyes in a huge stone column discovered only at the beginning of the 1800s.
Assisi Francesco
