An excerpt from Praying with the Saints
by Jerry Moye

I shall give You thanks, O Lord, most Holy Father, King of heaven and earth, because you have consoled me. You are God my Savior; I will be full of confidence and without fear. My strength and my song is the Lord, and He has become my salvation.

Selah
These are the words of a psalm composed by Francis for matin, the first prayer time of the day. It reveals adoration as his basic mode of communing with God. He teaches us not to barge into the presence of God with our agendas. While it is good to speak to God throughout the day, often in natural short sentences, there must be those occions when we take time to be still in God's presence.

No matter how familiar we become with prayer forms, we should constantly remind ourselves that prayer is related to a profound mystery: we humans can connect to a reality we cannot totally understand. We must pause often to reflect on this wonder; God is beyond our taming and even our conceiving, but God somehow connects to us. We are loved and called to fellowship with God, which pulls from us all we can give.

Francis was a man of constant prayer. He observed Holy Office, a liturgical daily calendar of set prayers and scripture readings. In addition to the established routine of praying, he often withdrew for long periods of meditation. He had a rhythm of using free prayers spoken spontaneously and liturgical prayers that were done with the brothers.

Some of his prayers are full of beautiful images and rich thoughts, as he had the spirit of a medieval troubadour. His imagination was rich as he prayed of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Lady Poverty, and others. Some of his prayers were simple words or phrases repeated over and over again in a sense of wonder, for example, the prayer of adoration "My God, My God."

In reflecting on the life of Francis, we notice how christocentric he was. His faith was not a Platonic gathering of concepts. He read the Gospels continuously and took quite literally the commands of Jesus. He envisioned the life of Jesus and celebrated each episode of the earthly savior. He adored the human Jesus, who was his brother as well as the Son of God. Of course, he related to the father God, the focus of Jesus' own prayers. His prayers to the Creator God reveal unusual sensitivity to the world of the Creator.

Adoring the Human Jesus
Francis was intimately united with Jesus-Jesus always in his heart, Jesus on his lips, Jesus in his ears, Jesus in his eyes, Jesus in his hands, Jesus in all the other members of his body. . . . Often when he was on a journey, meditating or singing about Jesus, he would leave the road and start inviting all creatures to praise Jesus. (Celano, First Life, 115)

Selah
Francis had the deepest reverence for the humanity of Jesus. His devotion included probing the mystery of the infant Jesus, the adult Jesus, and the crucified Lord. He is usually given credit for constructing the first Christmas nativity creche in Grecc for midnight mass in l223. Accding to the report, Francis invited a friend, John by name, to make a creche:

For I wish to recreate the birth of the Babe born in Bethlehem, so that we will see with our own eyes how he did not even have the barest necessities, how he lay in a manger, how with an ox and an ass standing by, he lay upon the hay where he had been placed.3

People from the neighborhood came, dressed in festive costumes and carrying candles and torches. A manger was filled with hay, and an ox and an ass were led to stand by the manger-crib. Everyone was filled with delight; Francis was particularly filled with joy to see the Christ represented in such honor. Celano, the reporter, gave an interpretation that perfectly describes the mind of Francis:

Then was gospel simplicity resplendent, poverty exalted, humility commended, and Grecc, as it were, a new Bethlehem. . . . The saint of God stood ecstatically before the manger, his spirit trembling with compassion and ineffable love. Then the priest celebrated the solemnity of the Eucharist over the manger, and he too experienced a consolation he'd never tasted before.4

Celano commented on the remarks Francis made at that memorable Christmas Eve mass. He spoke of the poor vulnerable King Jesus and about the little humble town of Bethlehem. Everyone was ravished with heavenly desire, for many people had not reflected on God come to us as the poor "Little Babe of Bethlehem."

When we pray, focused on the Lord Jesus, most of us envision a strong adult male. Pictures of Madonna and Child might remind us that the Christ went through all of the stages of life we have undergone. It would be good to view a picture of the Christ child sometimes and thank God that His Son experienced the vulnerability of infancy, the needs of a child, and the growing pains of leaving home and launching into a proper vocation.

Francis not only celebrated the love of God made incarnate in a vulnerable babe, he also celebrated and tried to imitate the loving work of the adult Jesus. If Jesus were celibate, poor, and an itinerant evangelist, so should Francis be. And he called his brothers to the same life. From the first days of the order, he sent his brothers out, two by two, to preach and teach. He literally followed the instruction of Jesus to his disciples, as found in Matthew 10.

Franciscan preachers performed a great ministry to an illiterate population. Few could buy books, and few could read. While the church touched everyone's life at crucial moments such as birth, marriage, and death, neither church nor society had enough schools to train the bulk of the population. People feasted on the pictorial presentation of the gospel in stained glass windows, carved wooden and stone sculptures, or paintings on mural walls. But with the coming of Franciscan preachers into the villages and towns of Europe, people were given moving explanations of the gospel stories and commands. These preachers fed a people hungry for spiritual food.

It should not seem strange that people emptied the towns, wanting to follow the way of Francis. He again was forced to provide some kind of organization for devout laity. He wrote a Rule for a third order that made it possible for dedicated laypersons to observe some spiritual disciplines while still being responsible for their families and jobs. Some Protestants mistakenly label the vow of celibacy as impractical or unworthy.

Francis and his first order of brothers were celibate and thus free to move anyplace at anytime. Celibacy, like marriage, is a calling and a gift. Celibate Christians joined the first order of Francis or the second order established by Clare-women called to a life of intercessory prayer. The third order made a place for married persons. Francis, influenced by the monastic life of his day and a tendency to duplicate literally the life of Jesus, chose to be a celibate itinerant evangelist.

Using the words of Jesus in his Rule, Francis gave a way and expressed an attitude for his brothers to follow:
When the brothers go about through the world, they should carry nothing for their journey, neither (Luke 9:3) a knapsack (Luke l0:4), nor a purse, nor bread, nor money (Luke 9:3), nor a staff (Matt l0:l0). And into whatever house they enter, let them first say, "Peace to this house" (Luke l0:5). And remaining in that house, they may eat and drink whatever their hosts have offered (Luke l0:7). They should not offer resistance to evil (Matt 5:39), but if someone should strike them on one cheek, let them offer him the other as well. (Matt 5:39; Luke 6:29)5

We see how the Rule is simply a compiling of sayings from Jesus regarding the work his disciples were to do. Attention was paid to resistance and hostility. Francis, in his longing to imitate Jesus, considered martyrdom a high calling.

Francis gives guidance to those adults who pray for wisdom in choosing a vocation and knowing whether or not to marry. Some of us choose celibacy because the nature of our work and the shape of our personalities find this mode to be the best way to serve God. Some of us choose marriage and find the discipline of living with another a way to grow in love. We should pray for perseverance because we will encounter resistance and hostility in all vocations. Once we are committed to a work that we believe is pleasing to God, we speak to God often about the work, finding strength to acct the hardships and with them the strange joy God gives.

Francis then not only honored the work of the adult evangelist Jesus, but also his sacrifice. He spent much time meditating on the crucified Lord. We recall his dramatic moment of commissioning when he believed Christ spoke to him through the old Byzantine crucifix hanging in San Damiano. As he grew older, he thought more and more about the crucifixion. We have this remark from The Little Flowers of St. Francis:

He wanted somehow to suffer with Jesus, and so, two years before he died, this prayer rose from the depths of his love for the crucified Lord: "O Lord, I beg of you two graces before I die: to experience personally and in all possible fullness the pain of your bitter passion, and to feel for you the same love that moved you to sacrifice yourself for us."6

In 1224, shortly before his death, while meditating alone on Mount Alverna, Francis received the gift of the stigmata. The stigmata is a phenomenon dear to many Catholic hearts and incomprehensible to many Protestants. The stigmata are five wounds borne by a person in the two hands, two feet, and side, corresponding to the five wounds of the crucified Jesus. Some devout Christians so identify with the crucified Jesus that they come to share his suffering literally.

Obviously the Catholic church has felt the need to speak carefully of this matter. Raphael Brown, a third order Franciscan and editor of an edition of The Little Flowers, is a good representative voice. He acknowledges that some people, who are not necessarily religious, evince signs of body abnormality in critical situations. Mothers have performed superhuman feats when their children were in danger. People identifying with disabled people may develop body symptoms like those they love. Though some cases may seem explainable, others are not. There is room for belief that sometimes God miraculously grants the stigmata to a chosen saint.7

This issue, of course, would not be so open to doubt in the medieval period. This, by the way, is not necessarily a negative judgment on the faith of an earlier generation. There was soon published along with The Little Flowers a work called The Considerations on the Holy Stigmata. It was a series of five meditations, corresponding to the five wounds received by Jesus, then by Francis.

The third consideration discusses the vision Francis received of the crucified Lord at the time he received the stigmata:

And the fervor of his devotion increased so much within him that he utterly transformed himself into Jesus through love and compassion. And while he was thus inflaming himself in this contemplation, on that same morning he saw coming down from heaven a Seraph with six resplendent and flaming wings. As the Seraph, flying swiftly, came closer to Saint Francis, so that he could perceive him clearly, he noticed that he had the likeness of a Crucified Man and his wings were so disposed that two wings extended above his head, two were spread out to fly, and the other two covered his entire body.8

This is a strange fused picture. Seraphs belong to the celestial realm, their very form signifying the terrifying, beautiful power of God in his otherness, his distance from the everyday world of men. But the fiery creature embraced the human Jesus, caught up to God.

Perhaps the best way to evaluate the worth of unusual visions or experiences is to see how they connect to the will and lives of those affected. Francis longed with all his heart to walk in the steps of Jesus, to make his life a model for his own. His intentions and prayers issued forth in a remarkable life of love and service. His visions point to the awesome, unspeakable glory of God.

Francis reminds us constantly that the awesome sovereign God of the universe is revealed in His suffering son and suffering disciples of His son. Our prayer life, if it has the intimacy with God enjoyed by Francis, does not shrink from thinking on the pain of love. Suffering is not accted for its own sake, but as a means to understand what God felt in the death of Christ and as a sign that our work and love for God will surely bear fruit.