St. Francis in the Buff

St. Francis in the Buff
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor, 10/2/10
Good Shepherd, Berkeley


My very first course at Seminary at the Franciscan school, was The Early documents of St. Franacis of Assisi. The professor told us with some exictement, that we would be reading some texts that had been suppressed for 800 years, because they reveaked the less than saintly side of St. Francis.

This encouraged me very much, because I had always felt greatly inferior to the vast generosity and spiriuality of St. Francis. I struggled with an addiction to things and to nice jackets and coats in particular, from which I am recovering one jacket at a time. I knew that Francis only wore brown burlap robes, with a coarse rope for a belt. But in this course I learned that Francis in his youth was actually quite a dandy.

One of his followers, Thomas of Celano, wrote an early life of Francis in 1229:

“Francis miserably wasted and squandered his time, almost up to his 25th year. Maliciously advancing beyond all his peers in vanities, he proved himself a more excessive inciter of evil and a zealous imitator of foolishness… in his flamboyanrt display of vain accomplishments, wit, curiosity, practical jokes and foolish talk, songs and flowing garments.”

He “was still boiling in the sins of youthful heat” when an illness fell upon him, which lasted a long but unspecified length of time.

When he finally began to recover, Francis found to his surprise that the worldly things that had so enraptured him before brought him no pleasure whatsoever. So he decided that if his life as a dandy no longer gave him pleasure, that he would go to war and be a great and famous warrier. But in the night he had a horrible dream, that his whole room was filled with the instruments of war, swords and shields, saddles and spears. He refused to go to war, and withdrew to the countryside, where he had a long dark night of the soul, hiding out in caves and desperately praying for God’s guidance. After a long struggle, he had a powerful and transformative experience of God, and he went to sell everything he owned, and not incidentally, some things actualy owned by his father, a wealthy merchant of fine fabrics.

He gave it all away to a poor priest he met on his travels, who was living in the ruined church of San Damiano. Francis begged the priest to let him stay there, and the priest reluctantly agreed.

Francis’ father began searching for his son, and finally found him living a life of happy poverty with the old priest. His father prompty dragged Francis before the bishop, claiming that Francis had stolen a large quantity of precious fabric from him, which was actually true. He screamed at the bishop to remove all rights of inheritance from Francis, and to force him to return to his father all he had. Francis did just that with great glee. He pulled off every stich of clothing he had, not yet the brown robe, but the expremely begragged garb of a nobleman, until he was standing stark naked in front of the bishop and his astounded father. The bishop, perceiving him to be a holyman, at once took off his own ornate robes and put them on Francis. Thereafter he was his friend and protector.

One day in church Francis heard these familiar dictates from the Gospel of Matthew: that the disciples should not “possess silver of gold or money, or carry on their journey a wallet or a sack, not bread nor a staff, nor have shoes nor two tunics but that they should only preach the Kingdom of God.

Francis, according to Thomas of Celano, burst out in ecstacy “This is what I want, this is what I seek, this is what I desire with all my heart.”

Then Francis had his famous brown robes made, gave away his staff, and exchanged his leather belt for a rope. He then began gathering his brothers, and building his humble order of servants.

But although Francis truly and loving embraced Lady Poverty, as he called her, he never really lost his taste for fine things. It seems that our Francis had a taste for cooked chicken, and every once in a while he would manage to sneak some into his cell and, with great delight, eat it. But then his guilt would torture him so that he would beg one of his brothers to help him atone for his sin.

“He commanded the brother to tie a cord around his neck and drag him through the whole city, a though he were a theif, loudly crying out, “Look! See this glutton who grew fat on the flesh of chickens without your knowledge!”

Francis lived a beautiful life of giving, reaching out and ministering to lepers, anyone in need, and famously, even the birds of the air, those animals that creep upon the earth, and even the lowly earthworm.

And after a lifetime of poverty, of denying himself, of radical giving, Francis on his deathbed wanted three things: he wanted almond cookies, he wanted a satin pillow for his head, and he wanted the company of Lady Jacobi, a female devotee about whom very little has survived the sensorship of the papal decrees. But she, the cookies and the satin pillow were all there when Francis finally passed into paradise.

I take comfort in hearing these less than saintly things about Francis. Maybe he was no more a real saint that any of us, but he certainly did his best. He was only human, but he paid attention to his calling as a Christian, he read the fine print of the gosples.

There is one biblical text that I never connected with St. Fancis until I heard my daughter’s interpretation: The rich young man comes and asks Jesus what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus says to keep the commandments and the young man says that he has always kept them, since his youth. Jesus looks at him with love, (the guy is probably 19) and says, “One thing more- sell what you own and give the money to the poor. Then come and follow me.” The text goes on to say that the young man went away grieving, for he had many possessions

My daughter, had a good midrash for this story. She thought it was obvious that the young man went away sad, gave his possessions away, became joyful and came back to follow Jesus! Like Francis, he went through a transformation.

I believe that Jesus gives us all a forge for our transformation, which is our faith, which is our existence as the bodly of Christ. It is our own personal miracle- praying as Francis did, to hear God’s call and then acting on the answer to the question: What is God calling me to do?

Amen.