What was Francis of Assisi like in person?
… “How fair, radiant and glorious was…the simplicity of his words, the purity of his heart, his love of God and his neighbor, his unquestioning obedience and his fidelity to his Master! To this must be added his angelic appearance, the charm of his manner, his natural gentleness, the kindliness of his conversation, the delicacy of his admonitions, the loyalty with which he treated anything told him in confidence, the wisdom of his counsel, the energy of his actions and his general lovableness...
“He was a man of great eloquence; the expression of his face was gay and kindly, equally free of torpor as of arrogance… his speech was winsome but fiery and spiritual, his voice powerful, pleasant, clear and harmonious…His sleep was brief, his hand ever open to give. He was the humblest among the humble, mild in his manner towards all men and able to adapt himself to the behavior of everyone. ... Who would be able to describe the measure of the love which he bore to all that is God’s?”
One is struck by his utter simplicity and austerity, and complete reliance on “Lady Poverty.” …. One would have to imagine a latter-day Francis choosing to live, not a hand-to-mouth existence on the road, but a life that included rat-infested slums, the scanty medical care of our most inadequate charity wards, long hours spent in the lines of the welfare bureau. In short, one would have to think of a man who had deliberately [abandoned his family’s high station of wealth and] deliberately inserted himself in the terribly degrading apparatus of [our modern-day] urban poverty. There was nothing romantic about this concept of voluntary poverty.
Francis showed not only a remarkable humility, but an incredible willingness to be humiliated. But lest we think of Francis only as an overly-serious, life-denying ascetic, we should also know that he was frequently expressing tremendous gratitude to God for everything, and had a magnificent love for God’s creatures, taking great joy in them, whether these be human, animal, plant, mineral, or celestial. As Saint Bonaventure writes: “Everything incited him to the love of God, he exulted in all the works of the Creator’s hands and, by the beauty of His images, his spirit rose to their living origin and cause. ... To him all creation was a stairway which led him up towards Him who is the goal of all desires.”
Theologian Chesterton…commented on what some of us might call Francis’s “Zen-like” appreciation for the “suchness” (tathata) of each and every being and thing, illumined from within by Divine glory. For St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We might say that his mind had no background except perhaps that divine darkness out of which the divine love had called up every colored creature one by one. He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting… A bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose… A bush could stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as ready to accept the brigand as the bush. In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing, being a child of God and therefore a brother or sister of man…. He did not call nature his mother; he called a particular donkey his brother or a particular sparrow his sister…. They were particular creatures assigned by their Creator to particular places; not mere expressions of the evolutionary energy of things. That is where his mysticism is so close to the common sense of the child….
St. Francis was a mystic, but he … was emphatically [also] a realist…. I have said that St. Francis deliberately did not see the wood for the trees. It is even more true that he deliberately did not see the mob for the men…. He only saw the image of God multiplied but never monotonous…. What gave him his extraordinary personal power was this: that from the Pope to the beggar, from the Sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never a man who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was really interested in him… that he himself was being valued and taken seriously…. Now for this particular moral and religious idea there is no external expression except courtesy… a certain grand manner which may be called good manners. We may say if we like that St. Francis, in the bare and barren simplicity of his life, had clung to one rage of luxury: the manners of a court. But whereas in a court there is one king and a hundred courtiers, in this story there was one courtier, moving among a hundred kings.” (G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi..." - Copyright © 1982/2006 by Timothy Conway, Ph.D.
http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/support-files/francis_of_assisi.pdf
Photo - Scene from 'Brother Sun Sister Moon', with Judi Bowker and Graham Faulkner
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