Once, many eight decades ago now, when I felt lost and confused in my burgeoning adolescence, Jesus gave me St. Francis as my brother and friend, and I began to trade my own self-absorption for the adventure of the Holy Quest: the ascent of Mount Subasio on whose eastern side Francis was born and lived his youth in the armed and walled city of Assisi. 
What I mistook for an immediate ascent of that holy mountain began first with a descent from the high city of Assisi to the plain below where the lepers lived.