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When Saint Francis met the leper, it was Jesus he’d met, and the Lord was saying, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25:35–37).
A very early Franciscan document, Sacrum Commercium, The Sacred Exchange, begins with words reminiscent of the Bible’s Song of Songs: “Francis began to go about in the streets and crossings of the city, relentlessly, like a persistent hunter, diligently seeking whom his heart loved.
The mystics have been touched by God in an extraordinary way and in some cases have written extraordinarily well of the inner journey. Every mystical text is the story of an individual’s encounter with God. In those words we can find inspiration and motivation to seek, with the same single-minded perseverance, to be open to God’s voice. Not every mystic will appeal to everyone, but one or the other may strike a chord in the heart of someone trying to live the Gospel and know God.
Francis was becoming a happy man, not giddy, but a man whose whole being radiated joy. He had endured hatred and abuse in patience for two years already, and yet his spirit seemed more steadfast with the passing weeks and months and years – and Bernard looked and listened, and then one day he saw. He saw that what was happening to Francis was not madness but a great grace of God—a grace that had begun to draw Bernard himself. He began to see that what was happening was the religious conversion of Francis Bernardone. Bernard remembered the words of the Gospel he’d heard at Mass.
The idea of a live Nativity scene might seem common nowadays. But in St. Francis’ time, it broke new ground and opened up ways to deepen our spirituality during Christmas.
In one sense, what the Voice said to Francis is what he already knew, that beneath what appears on the surface is the priceless gold of what everything really is: God’s precious creation. And even greater than the created thing is its re-creation in eternity. Everything will be a new heaven and a new earth and it is struggling to be so even now. Humans who join in the sufferings, the birth-pangs, of all creation become transformed through their patience and long suffering and see at once that God’s future kingdom is already being realized in and with them.
Francis was a man born of wealth, a leader who dreamed of knighthood and who went to war on a high steed only to be brought low to the earth in defeat and imprisonment that marked him with what has been the fate of countless soldiers and prisoners of war throughout the centuries.
