… His lonely home was way up high in the humid Italian mountains …
On the way to the Tuscany provincial town of Assisi our art history teacher Peter Porcal showed us one painting which featured an army of soldiers at the head of which was a man holding forth a tiny cross.
This traced the Story of the True Cross all the way back to the days of Adam and his two sons.
From the time of the Queen of Sheba originally having recognized the wood of the abandoned timber from the Tree of Knowledge to the use of any fragment of this religious relic we came to the story of Saint Francis.
The Franciscan Order began with this ‘Alter Christus’, second Christ, humble monk’s insistence that all they needed was the simple sackcloth robes and maybe, a bible,.. and to emulate the life of Jesus Christ in replicated meditation.
Thus, this humble man’s targeting the Roman Catholic Church’s bent towards earthly treasure predated Martin Luther’s by several centuries.
There were two kinds of orders for monks to follow, one, like Francis, emulating the life of the Saviour himself.
The other sought to live by the principles of Christian belief.
As we carried on to a modern-day monastery built at the site of the original Saint Francis of Assisi’s, we all became curious about how anyone could survive these lofty climes, much less one sainted.
What we found was a damp cave with no fireplace and only a flat slab of hard rock about the size of a smaller table, where the man slept, when not meditating on the divine mystery of his Lord and Savior.
Although the high country where now sits the Papal Basilica of Saint Francis dedicated to him is subject to the cruelest of damp Italian winter there is a pocket of serenity right where he spent most of his days, when not leading his disciples to beg and preach the Word.
A set of his monk’s robes made of the roughest and patched up gunnysack cloth also told of this man’s humility in the service of heaven.
Saint Francis received his stigmata, the wounds of Christ on hands and feet.
The real ones do not heal, the live wounds needing to be covered, so he did not even wear sandals but for the last few years of his life.
How this simple kind of clothing can relate to the Second Christ, as Francis was also known, was pointed out to me when I saw the exact same kind of material, ordinary gunnysack used, by various Siberian Russian painters a few years later, especially by the hand of one Vladimir Rasputin, from whom I bought four.
He somehow transformed this coarsest of materials into a surface a-shine, like glass.
Far from the simple lover of the birds and all animals we have been taught to know, Francis the holy man was rather petite in stature, yes, but a terror to any and all who got in the way of his vision for a better life.
He even had pet vultures which he would gleefully sic on any of the church clergy he despised for their marked preference for costly robes and gay and ungodly manner.
In our travels to his native Assisi we also bore witness to the very barred dungeon where Francis’ father had him jailed for not wanting of the family merchant business future.
His mother freed him to go forth and do the good Lord’s bidding.
