Infirmity & Tribulation

…and bear infirmity and tribulation.

Blessed be those who live in peace,

for by You, Most High, they shall be crowned.

The angel descended, wings flowing like reeds in water, and touched his hands.  In her hands she held two crimson sashes, and with utmost tenderness, she took these and tied them over his palms.  Wounds appeared, and as they pierced his hands, a suffering which he had not known before (and he had known great suffering) overtook him.  

Another angel came, dressed in white, dancing from the skies with the grace of child.  She carried two more blood red sashes, and with great care she tied them to his feet, and his feet were pierced.  At last another seraph came to him, golden hair twirling about her in an unseen wind, and pinned her red sash to his side, and kissing it gently.  

He sat in silence, wounded in his hands which had built so much, wounded in his feet, which had taken him places he’d never dreamed he would go, wounded in his heart, which had loved so greatly.  But in this suffering, this sweet and beautiful and tender suffering, a Love which he had never known before (and he had known great love) overwhelmed him.  Music from another world drifted through and time and space and settled in the air all around him.

“My God, and my All!”

I looked on in silence from the darkness around him, enraptured by the scene, snapping pictures on my digital camera.

I was nearing the end of my Franciscan pilgrimage.  I had come at last, by train and by chance and by the kindness of strangers, to Mount La Verna.  

The road had been long.  I’d stayed at a house at the bottom of the mountain the night before.  My ankle was still on the mend, but well enough to walk, so that morning I began the hike up the great hill, taking in a beautiful and ever-changing view of the Casentino valley surrounding La Verna. 

Finally, after one last ride from a kind Italian and one last, aching hike for the last 3 kilometres to the top, I arrived at the Sanctuary of La Verna.  (Or, ‘La Santuaria Della Verna’.  Things sound so much better in Italian.)  Here there was a relatively small church and pilgrim’s hostel.  The view from the lookout area by the church was incredible, and that evening I stood in the setting sun as it blessed the land and said goodnight.  

Soon after, I was sitting in the darkened church, surrounded by men and women in varying vocational attire.  There were women in blue habits, men in familiar brown habits, and still other men and women in uniformed shorts.  This last set of men and women were with the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.  The boys and girls of a local troupe were putting on a very special play tonight about the life of Saint Francis.

I didn’t understand much of the dialogue, but as scenes and songs of the life of Francis played out before me, I was enraptured.  For here were two of my favourite things in the world: the life of Francis, and kids putting on a play.  There is perhaps nothing more engaging to me than watching children perform.  I’m charmed by the earnest simplicity and at the same time I’m crossing my fingers, praying they remember their lines.  Perhaps it’s partly because I remember both the thrill of charming an audience and the terror of forgetting my lines.  I was the comic relief king in Parkdale Baptist’s Church’s production of Three Wee Kings.  I killed.  My best line was when one of the other kings talked about going to Jericho:  “Geritol?  I’ve got some right here!”  But over-confidence from my triumph in Three Wee Kings led to under-rehearsing my lines for a production the following year.  I stood frozen on the stage, begging for my line from the director, trying to decipher her loud whisperings.  I learned my lesson well.  This production also had its comic relief with the portly little fellow portraying Brother Leo.  He never missed a beat, and he knew how to work a crowd.

The location was, of course, an apt place to produce a play about Francis.  The church we were in had been here since shortly after the time of Francis, and was built just a hundred yards or so from the actual place where Francis received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ.  

Of all the stories of Francis, some of which are history, some of which are whimsical legends, the story of the stigmata may be the most difficult to truly understand.  But there it is, passionately affirmed as history by his closest friends, confounding the modern mind.  Ultimately, however, it is the story which best defines him, and without it, we are left with a Francis devoid of his power and his longed-for reward.

Francis’s life had been a constant struggle to live out as closely as possible the poverty of Christ, to incarnate in his own flesh, inasmuch as a sinful human can, the life of Jesus.  (Some stories even affirm that this journey began for him from birth, with Francis being born in a stable below his family’s home.)  Sometimes this led him to extremes which he’d later repent of, but, mistakes and all, these choices led him into the very heart of Jesus.  He tried with every ounce of his strength, to embody Christ’s incarnational love, and denied to himself any comfort which Christ himself had been denied.  And like Jesus, he sought to alleviate the suffering of others by embracing their suffering himself.  

For truly, what more could Love do?

Is love ever seen more clearly than when it embraces the tribulations of another?  Is love ever felt more deeply than when it chooses to bear the sickness of the beloved?  It was for this Love that Jesus died, and for this Love that Francis lived.  It was not a fanatical sense of duty that made him live as he lived, nor a somber sense of self-denial.  It was Love.  For Francis, it was an honour and a joy, a privilege in fact, to feel with the living Christ the broken heart with which Christ loves the world.  

I sat in silence one day at his tomb in Assisi, and read a prayer he’d written in the last years of his life:

O my Lord Jesus Christ, I beg from you two graces before I die:

the first, that during my life I may feel in my body and soul, so far as it is possible, the pain that you suffered in the hour of your most bitter passion;

the second,

that I may feel in my heart, in so far as it is possible, that overbrimming love with which You, Son of God, were enflamed so as to bear willingly for us sinners such suffering.

It was on the mountain that this prayer was answered most dramatically, but Francis had lived a life that was itself an answer to this prayer.  Each day he made a choice to embrace poverty, to embrace the suffering of others, to embrace his own suffering.  In these choices, in this one great embrace, he was enflamed with Love.  He lived in peace not by avoiding suffering and violence, but by absorbing it, transforming it, and creating something beautiful where there was previously only discord, darkness, doubt, and injury.

His embrace of suffering and violence was not just spiritual, however.  It was embodied in him physically.  

It had been a year since he received the wounds of Christ in his body.  A disease of the eye had taken his sight from him, and his eyes burned with pain at the slightest brightness.  His body was racked with pain and weakness, and the stigmata persisted.  It would be this suffering that gave birth to his most beautiful song.  As he lay on a sickbed in a small garden in San Damiano, the place where he had first heard that joyous invitation so long before, he wrote his greatest hymn of praise to the God he so loved.  Nearly blind, and perhaps too weak to lift pen to page even if he could see, he sang his song while his close friend, the ever-faithful Brother Leo, took down the words:

All-highest, almighty Good Lord,

to you be praise, glory and honour and every blessing;

to you alone are they due, and no man is worthy to speak your Name.

Be praised, my Lord, in all your creatures, especially for sire Brother Sun, who makes daytime,

and through him you give us light,

and he is beautiful, radiant with great splendour,

and he is a sign that tells, All-Highest, of you.

Be praised, my Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars;

you formed them in the sky, bright and precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, for Brother Wind, and for the air and the clouds,

and for fair, and every kind of weather,

by which you give your creatures food.

Be praised, my Lord, for Sister Water, 

who is most beautiful and humble and lovely and chaste.

Be praised, my Lord, for Brother Fire, 

through whom you light up the night for us;

and he is beautiful and jolly, boisterous and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, for our sister Mother Earth,

who keeps us, and feeds us, and brings forth fruits of many kinds,

with coloured flowers and plants as well.

Be praised, my Lord, for those who grant pardon for love of thee,

and bear infirmity and tribulation.

Blessed be those who live in peace, for by you, Most High, they shall be crowned.

Bless and praise my Lord, thank Him, 

and serve Him in all humility.

Francis sang, and as he did, Brother Sun came and stood behind him, lifting his hands to heaven.  Sister Moon danced in the sky above him, dressed in white, her golden face shining with light.  Brother Wind and Brother Fire, Sister Water and sister Mother Earth, danced around him, caught up in his chorus of creation.  The heavens opened, and angels joined the song.

I’ve seen a lot of films about Francis, read a tonne of books, even taken in a professional production of a musical about him while I was in Assisi, but this humble play by a Boy Scout troupe was perhaps the most profound expression of the life of Francis I’ve ever seen.  It captured something about him that the others could only attempt to grasp.  For all of the suffering he faced, all the infirmities of the world that he embraced, Francis had remained passionately simple in his struggle to live out the Gospel of Christ, profoundly unsophisticated in his attempt to walk in the little footsteps of Jesus.  He remained a child, and the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

I smiled with joy at the comic relief kid.  His cheeks were squished into the cardboard face of Brother Sun.  He stood behind a 12-year-old Francis, and as Chubby Brother Sun lifted his hands in song with the rest of Cardboard Creation, tears filled my eyes.  Here was the saint I had come to love, the saint who in many ways had helped to form my character and my approach to Christ himself, full of life in the embrace of his suffering, singing out his song of praise, stigmatic sashes adorning his hands, his pain turned into the glory of God.

I whispered a prayer in the darkness.

“My God, and my All.”

Our Sister, Mother Earth

Praised be my Lord for our sister, Mother Earth,

who keeps us and feeds us,

and brings forth fruits of many kinds,

 with grass and flowers bright.

Bless and praise my Lord,

thank Him, and serve Him in all humility

There is something inexpressible about the heart of Nature and the heart of Man.  It is right and well that Francis called her “our sister, Mother Earth”.  We are made of the same stuff, as siblings, and we are born from her dust as children, formed from her clay by the hands of God.  Indeed, when we are in communion with her, it is also a communion with the Father himself.  To see this communion at play (often quite literally “at play”) is lovely.

The city is a hard place to live, and for those who live there with little to no opportunity to escape from it from time to time, it can be downright deadening.  The noise of incessant traffic, the glint of steel, the hardness of concrete beneath your feet.  The “F” word is as common as the clamour of construction as the drama of dysfunction plays out constantly before your eyes;  the hardened heart of the city seeps into your own, calcifying tenderness and petrifying love.  These things work a terrible, cacophonous song into the soul of a person whose life is already marked by seclusion, by pain, by isolation.

But it’s a strange and wonderful magic when that discordant tune gives way to the song of sister Mother Earth.  Noise gives way to silence, confusion gives way to clarity, and callousness gives way to tenderness as you are swept into the arms and cradled in her maternal embrace.

My friend has been to prison more than once.  His life has been hard in more ways than I will ever know.  He has lived the life of a criminal, a working man, a hobo and a wino.  It was the wino that I first met, so many years ago.  His story, which is still being told, is a novel in itself; let it be enough to say here that it is a story of friendship and redemption.  It was a redeemed man that we brought that day to Knight’s Ferry, a beautiful conservation area that’s just a 40 minute drive from downtown Modesto.  A redeemed man, to be sure, but one (like all of us) still prone to the temptation of living in old patterns of hardness and isolation.  Sometimes such a man needs to rip off his shirt and dive into the ice-cold waters of a mountain-fed river.  Sometimes such a man needs to be baptized again.

I wish I could adequately describe the picture I still see in my mind of that moment, the unexpectedness of the moment when three friends standing by the riverside became two friends watching and laughing while the third is throwing off his clothes and jumping with abandon into the frigid waters.  I wish I could share without words the picture of that man floating on his back, eyes to the sky, his face the very picture of a hobo’s peace.  That day the river held him like a newborn son, and the old drunk was like a weened child with his mother.

—

Richard is a man I’m still coming to know, someone I’ve met on the streets of the Canadian town I’ve been tentatively calling ‘home’ since my return from my Italian adventures.  His eyes are soft and kind, his fingers stained with nicotine, his heart carrying a terrible burden.  He’s lived on the street for a very long time, and has rarely had the opportunity to leave the city.  But he has the soul of a truck driver, a profession he held for over thirty years, and his heart still longs for the open road.  I asked him, one blustery January day, if he’d like to take a drive.

“Where are we goin’?” he asked.

“Away from the things of man,” I said.

He threw his backpack in the back seat, and wobbled into my borrowed black PT Cruiser.

We drove.

It’s amazing to see where you’ll go when you have no particular place to be.  We listened to Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zeppelin.  We stopped by a bridge in a small village and looked out at the rushing river below.  Again I saw the familiar look of a man finding his soul.

A few weeks later, when good friends with boarding stables invited us out for a visit, I saw that soul kissed by the whiskers of a mare named Molly.  They would be friends for a long time to come.  We still make it out for a visit every other week or so, and at every visit he stands by Molly’s gate, and she saunters over to say Hello.  There is a mothering magic at work here, a whispering of the Kingdom into Richard’s soul as he nuzzles the nose of his favourite horse, for her horse breath is as the breath of God in Adam’s nostrils.

When I see his face clouded with confusion and cheap sherry, his eyes darkened by a lonesome gloom, I need only mention Molly and light breaks through.

“She sees me and youknowwhat?  She knows.”  And he smiles, and his soul remembers its source.


—

On the western side of the mountain of La Verna, Italy, there is a cliff.  At the top of the cliff is the Chapel of the Stigmata, built on the site of Francis’s vision of Christ’s Passion.  From here there is a small walkway that leads outside, built for visiting the small hole in the wall where Francis was known to seclude himself in prayer.  Here you can visit the small stone womb where he would restore himself as he watched the sun’s gold light fall down upon the hills around him.  This place is known as the Precipizio, the Precipice, and from Francis’s hollow, it is a long, shear drop down into the tree-spotted meadow below. (Once, the devil himself tried to throw Francis down to his death from this cliff, but as Francis fell, the face of the rock turned to putty and...  well, that’s another story.)

I stood on the Precipice, and watched the sun — that same ever-blessed sun that Francis saw — crown sister Mother Earth with another golden diadem.  If I had the words to describe every sunset I’ve seen, I don’t think the world could contain the books that would be written.  This one, this particular, never-to-be-repeated sunset, was of course unlike any I’d seen before.  My cane — that ever-blessed cane — lay atop the stone wall overlooking the golden green trees below, the blue-grey mountains in the near distance.  Birds chattered and sang songs about the close of the day, and I drank up all the sights and sounds in slow, savouring draughts.

The birds, the sun, the trees below, were beautiful of course, but not a surprise.  What did surprise me were the maple seeds, falling upward from the trees below into the sky above.  I watched in wonder as one by one, every few minutes, “helicopter seeds” ascended the face of the cliff, up, up and over the roof of the chapel above.  I noticed more helicopter seeds on the walkway around me.  Like a kid, I gathered them up, set them carefully on the stone wall, and flicked them one by one into the sky in front of me.  They would descend for a moment, only to be caught by the graceful wind and carried up and away.  With great joy I found that I was, like these seeds, caught up in something unexpected, carried along and brought back to a place of giggling wonder.

Once, 1200-or-so years before Francis sat here in the womb of the Precipice (undoubtedly watching with the same kind of wonder at the ascendent maple seeds), a pharisee named Nicodemus asked Jesus, “How can a person once grown old be born again?”  Jesus told him that no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.  “Do not be amazed,” he told the pharisee, “that I told you, ‘You must be born from above.’  The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

And here is a key, a secret, to life in the Kingdom, to rebirth, to life in the Spirit: the holy, holy Earth that God has given us; this sacred older sister who sustains us.  By her silent witness have countless souls been caught up like helicopter seeds into the Spirit of God.  She keeps us, and feeds us, and washes us in rivers.  She puts her fingers (which are soft and strong and smell like earth; like a china doll working in a garden) to our drooping chin, lifting our eyes to the golden sky and the miracle of seeds in flight.  And she sings, oh she sings so sweetly, songs of the Father into the hearts of hardened men.  She blesses Him, and praises Him, and serves him with all humility.  The Lord bids her send winds as whispers to carry us where the Spirit wills, that we who were born from sister Mother Earth, we who have sinned and grown old, may be born again of the Spirit, and born from above.