Saturday, December 10, 2022
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The supernatural life (and death) of St. Francis
Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight his paths: All flesh shall see the salvation of God.
Margaret spent the morning at our apartment saying goodbye and praying with our friend Sandy, and I went to Wendy’s for their $3 breakfast deal and some coffee. Too much coffee! I was reading the last three chapters of GK Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis. He talked about Francis’ last days:
We shall miss the whole point of St. Francis if we do not realize that he was living a supernatural life. And there is more and more of such supernaturalism in his life as he approaches towards his death. This element of the supernatural did not separate him from the natural; for it was the whole point of his position that it united him more perfectly TO the natural. And it was the whole meaning of his message that the power that did it was a supernatural power.
Later, as I walked through Costco (new member, exploring the hundreds of aisles), I felt the caffeine spreading through my cells, and I thought about living supernaturally, as Francis did. What does that mean?
Jesus might have been explaining it to his friends:
Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him. So also will the Son of Man suffer at their hands. And the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist.
When I am in my everyday practical mode of thinking, these words confuse me. But when I switch over to my supernatural self, the words swirl around me and carry me away. Upwards, hopefully, like Elijah, into heaven or at least to a waystation on the way.
Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved. Once again, O Lord of hosts, look down from heaven and see; take care of this vine (that would be me … or you), and protect what your right hand has planted.
When Francis returned to Italy from his attempt to make peace with the Saracens (Muslims), at a party he was strangely given an entire mountain by its owner. Alverno of the Apennines became his place to fast and pray. It was there he had a vision something like that given to Daniel and John:
a vast winged being like a seraph spread out like a cross … filling the whole heavens, he saw some vast immemorial unthinkable power, and all that winged wonder was in pain like a wounded bird … Finally after some fashion the apocalypse faded from the sky. Silence filled the morning twilight and settled slowly in the purple chasms and cleft abysses of the Apennines. The head of the solitary Francis sank, amid all that relaxation and quiet in which time can drift by with the sense of something ended and complete; and as he stared downwards, he saw the marks of nails in his own hands.
Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, El Greco, 1585-1590
After he received the stigmata, Francis soon began to go blind. And not long after that he lay down on the ground in his hairshirt and waited to die, surrounded by his friends.
He was clad as he had first gone forth into the wintry woods from the presence of his father. It was the final assertion of his great fixed idea; of praise and thanks springing to their most towering height out of nakedness and nothing … Then there was a sudden stillness, where all the brown figures stood like bronze statues, for the stopping of the great heart that had not broken till it held the world.
I also watched Francis die, from Wendy’s and then from Costco, letting my mind lean toward eternity as best I could, as Chesterton must have also done as he wrote. As I drove home I noticed a familiar stoplight, but I couldn’t tell if it was red or green. I squinted. Green, I thought, and accelerated just a bit. But the cars in front of me didn’t move.
Red, I thought, and hit the brake! The colors of Christmas were blending into one another. Maybe I too am going blind. I closed my eyes, sitting there in traffic. Sugarplums danced in my head.
Like a fire there appeared the prophet Elijah, whose words were as a flaming furnace. By the Lord’s word he shut up the heavens and three times brought down fire.
I thought of Chesterton’s idea about living the supernatural life. I opened my eyes again. On the bumper of the light brown SUV in front of me was a strange sticker.
PERSIST, it said.
OK, I said.
I will.
Chesterton persisted in writing biography out of his own from-childhood love affair with Francis, but still, his last sentences about Francis expressed his personal feeling of insufficiency:
Standing under such a deluge of a dead man’s marvels, with nothing to set up under the overhanging, overwhelming arches of such a temple of time and eternity, I can bring nothing but this brief candle, burnt out so quickly before his shrine.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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