St. Francis embraced all journeys of life—and even his own death—with a willing heart.
The walls of my room when I was a child were covered with pictures of saints—at least from the time I was 10 and discovered books that told the lives of the saints. I know that must sound silly, especially at a time when most boys are collecting baseball cards. Even I think it was silly from the vantage point of my mid-80s. But that’s who I was and that’s what I “played”—acting out the lives of the saints.
It was a piety that took me years to grow out of, or maybe I never really did. I just grew into a deeper understanding of who the saints were, especially the mystics who fascinate and intrigue me even now. These are the saints and sacred objects I continue to walk with and whose intercession I rely on. I dialogue with them and continue to explore the contour of their lives and the depth and clarity of their seeing. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is a mystic to me, and Francis and Clare of Assisi have been a preoccupation since I was 13. I have written books on both St. Francis and St. Clare, and they each have a chapter in my book Mystics: Twelve Who Reveal God’s Love (Franciscan Media).
I am not as conversant with, nor have I read extensively, the works of St. Teresa of Avila, but I love her image of the inner life as an interior castle. I like, too, her feisty outspokenness when she said to God, “No wonder you have so few friends, the way you treat them.” Who has not felt that at times—when God seems not to be listening or seems not to care? I also admire her practical treatment of the interior life, as when she said of prayer that it is an ongoing conversation with Jesus.
Mysticism itself has intrigued me since I was a teenager and was introduced to the mystics through my reading of the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton. In time, I came to my own definition of a mystic as someone who has been touched by God in such a way as to want to live life in union with God and in love for neighbor.
The Divine Duet
I think about the poem I wrote titled “St. Francis on Dying,” which can be found in the book on which this article is based. It is hard to romanticize death, exactly, even the death of St. Francis, though his life was one long song of love, a love of God that was made real for him in Jesus Christ. Death is death, and just as Francis’ lover, his very Lord, died a painful death on a cross, so Francis of Assisi died bearing the wounds of Christ, legally blind with what was probably trachoma, suffering the last stages of tubercular leprosy, and disillusioned by what he perceived as some of his brothers’ betrayal of Lady Poverty.
How lonely that picture is—and yet it has elements of the romantic, too, because, like Jesus, Francis was surrounded at the end by his brothers and others who loved him, including Lady Jacoba de Settesoli, whom he had called “Brother” Jacoba. And so, in the end, his life was one of the great Romantic deaths (Romantic in the 19th-century conception of the perfect Romantic paradox): joy that is pain and pain that is joy.
What is romantic is what is also almost unbelievable: joy in the face of suffering and death. What is real is the love that becomes joy when it is wed to the Beloved. And the love is made real in the ultimate surrender to the Beloved.
Jesus says in his dying moments, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Francis asks his brothers to read aloud from St. John the Evangelist’s rendering of the final words of Jesus at the Last Supper: John 13:1–9, 12–15. And then Francis asks his brothers to help him pray aloud Psalm 142…
With my own voice I cry to the Lord;
with my own voice I beseech the Lord.
Before him I pour out my complaint,
tell of my distress in front of him.
When my spirit is faint within me,
you know my path.
As I go along this path,
they have hidden a trap for me.
I look to my right hand to see =
that there is no one willing to acknowledge me.
My escape has perished;
no one cares for me.
I cry out to you, Lord,
I say, You are my refuge,
my portion in the land of the living.
Listen to my cry for help,
for I am brought very low.
Rescue me from my pursuers,
for they are too strong for me.
Lead my soul from prison,
that I may give thanks to your name.
Then the righteous shall gather around me
because you have been good to me.
What a profoundly painful and yet joyful dialogue at the end of his earthly life! It is a divine duet in which first the Beloved speaks and washes the feet of his human loves, then the Lover sings his final song of love.
Love Song
In his “Canticle of the Creatures” Francis has already sung his love song to God by praising God through and with every creature God has made. And now as his death draws near—“Sister Death,” as Francis dubbed her—he sings a duet with Christ in anticipation of this final passage from this life to the life Christ has prepared for those who love him. Francis is not a pretty picture as he lies dying, but he is beautiful with love. He is every one of us, as we, too, are in our last moments on earth.
Both Christ and St. Francis show us that they suffered what we suffered, but they suffered in love, and that makes all the difference. And the love is in the surrender of my will to God’s will.
St. Francis was once asked what kind of death he wished to have: a quick and sudden death or a slow, lingering death in which he can prepare for his passage into heaven. His answer was, “I want whatever death God wants for me.”
That is the ultimate love; that very act is itself the love song.
