St. Francis of Assisi

Saints rejoice in their common humanity, knowing that God’s word becomes flesh in fallible and ambivalent persons like ourselves.

As Bonaventure writes, God is “totally submerged in the waters from the sole of the foot to the top of the head…. [God] appeared to you as your beloved cut through with wound upon wound in order to heal you.”

The first Franciscans believed that God was in the world, actively shaping human experience, and inspiring birds’ songs and wolves’ howls.

At the heart of Francis’s and Clare’s biblical vision was the Sermon on the Mount, and most especially the Beatitudes.

In keeping his eyes on the leper, in thinking only of this person before him, Francis forgot himself.