Life of St. Francis

I've known St.  Francis since I was a young girl:  my hometown parish was staffed by Franciscans; my parish school was St. Francis of Assisi, and almost as much as Halloween we looked forward to hauling the family pets over to the parish parking lot to get them blessed.  Francis was the hippie-saint: the real nature-lover guy who rejected materialism.  You could almost see him strumming a guitar and humming his "Canticle of the Sun."  Francis to me was a sweet, simple saint:  a real nice guy . . . and then I read Chesterton's biography of him.

Saints lives, I should say, are not my taste.  Even when I was a serious medievalist, lives seemed a bit, well, over-the-top for my kind of faith (I tend to lead with my head rather than my heart, though I'm working on that!).  Those earnest, emphatic lives led me to question (and in nastier moments) to mock and scorn the torments of the martyrs and miracles of the saints.

Chesterton's portrait of Francis--like much of his work--shattered all of my preconceptions of lives.  Biographies, too (I probably like biographies less than lives:  a stacked-up construction of facts, boring in every way, presenting some facade of a person.  Meh).  But for Chesterton, he really wanted to make Francis wholly human, and his presentation of that life, holy and devoted as he was, is as human as I've ever read.

Right away in the biography it's clear that Chesterton gets St. Francis.  St. Francis was no warbling folk-singer:  he's a passionate, humble, tenacious person.  St. Francis knew what was true and good, and he pursued it in every way that God allowed him to here on earth.  If he went to extremes, it was only because he knew in his heart that obedience and faithfulness and utter selflessness--to the point of want and dependence were the ways to show humanity how to return to God.

St. Francis exudes holiness--God's will in everything--in a way that is attractive and inspiring to believers.   Most Catholics and even some Protestants admire him.  Even to non-believers, St. Francis' passion, conviction and consistency is remarkable.

Today I'm thinking of St. Francis, and how Chesterton's vivacity brought this caricature of a saint alive for me.  Reading his life and biography helped me to understand more fully, too, what other saints' lives attempt to do:  they aim to show a saint's holiness, and sanctity is no easy quality to depict.  In Chesterton, though, I can see clearly how God's grace touched Francis and inflamed those natural qualities and gifts that he had been given.  It was his natural passion and conviction that God transformed --qualities that Francis allowed Him to use, once he surrendered pride and embraced humility.

What an instrument Francis was!  What a marvelous gift of a person!  Through his full embracing of grace, he was able to reform and revitalize and re-energize generations of Catholics.  Here was a man who genuinely loved creation--especially his fellow man.  Francis lived the Gospel.  Francis worked tirelessly to bring others home, loving and merciful and robust in his zeal.

St. Francis:  pray that we might be willing to surrender our gifts into God's hands for the good of humanity and the glory of His Name!