On the Road with Francis of Assisi (18 page)

Even Celano seems taken aback by Francis’s negative attitude toward women and their “inappropriate chattering.” “Indeed the female even troubled him so much that you would believe this was neither caution nor good example, but fear or terror,” Celano writes. He may have been right. But it wasn’t that Francis feared women per se; it was that he loved them too much. He would spend anguished hours begging forgiveness for the “sins of his youth,” which most certainly involved the pleasures of the flesh. And in more than one sermon, he would portray himself as unworthy of flattery because he might yet father “sons and daughters.”

Francis revered women, perhaps to a fault. He had been very close to his mother, Lady Pica; he “married” Lady Poverty; he worshiped the Virgin Mary and founded his community at St. Mary of the Angels; and it was his decision, after all, to welcome Clare into his fledgling order.

It was not just his personal weakness but the management of his Second Order for women, and the inherent temptation posed by the rapidly growing number of Poor Ladies, that threatened Francis. “God has taken away our wives and now the devil gives us Sisters,” he once remarked. He never really resolved his inner conflict about women, but in one wonderful story, he did come to peace with his feelings toward Clare.

According to the
Little Flowers,
a tired and troubled Francis was resting with Brother Leo by a well on the night road from Siena when Francis suddenly said: “Brother Leo, what do you think I have seen here?” Leo replied: “The moon, father, which is reflected in the water.” And Francis replied: “No Brother Leo, not our sister Moon, but by the grace of God, I have seen the true face of the Lady Clare, and it is so pure and shining that all my doubts have vanished.”

Clare, by contrast, seems never to have had any doubts about Francis. She referred to him as “Blessed Francis” and to herself as the “little plant of the most blessed Father Francis.” She readily embraced the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience at San Damiano, which Celano calls “this harsh cloister.” Her only regret seems to have been the absence of Francis.

Francis had written a very short rule for the Poor Ladies soon after Clare and her growing number of followers had settled into San Damiano. Known as “The Form of Life Given to Saint Clare and Her Sisters,” the one-sentence missive simply states Francis’s promise to the “daughters and servants of the most high King” that they will have the “same loving care and special solicitude” from him that he has for his friars. But that solicitude, while undoubtedly genuine, did not translate into action. For all that Francis “cared” about the sisters, he prayed with his friars, fasted with his friars, instructed his friars, and left Clare and the Poor Ladies pretty much on their own.

There are very few accounts in the early biographies of any face-to-face meetings between Francis and Clare, but the ones there are were all instigated by Clare. One such famous meeting involved a lonely Clare yearning to have a meal with Francis. He kept refusing until his friars intervened on her behalf. Making the argument, as recorded in the
Little Flowers of St. Francis,
that Francis owed her at least the favor of a meal, Clare having given up “the riches and pomp of the world as a result of your preaching,” the friars finally persuaded Francis to honor her request. He even made the grand gesture of inviting her to the Porziuncola for the occasion, because she would “enjoy seeing once more for a while the Place of St. Mary where she was shorn and made a spouse of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

When the day arrived, Francis sent some friars to escort Clare and a sister companion to the much-anticipated meal. But it was never eaten. No sooner had they all sat down on the ground to share whatever crusts of bread there were than Francis began to speak about God “in such a sweet and holy and profound and divine and marvelous way” that the dinner guests were overcome by rapture. The food was forgotten as their spiritual fever reached such a pitch that it lit up the night sky over the Spoleto Valley.

People in the surrounding towns, including Bettona, on the far side of the valley, thought the Porziuncola and the forest that surrounded it were on fire, and they rushed to put it out. But seeing Francis and Clare and their entourage in religious ecstasy, they quickly realized that it had been “a heavenly and not material fire” and they withdrew, with “great consolation in their hearts.” (We tested the Bettona part of the legend and found that Santa Maria degli Angeli was indeed clearly visible across the valley.) The dinner party ended when “later, after a long while,” Francis and his guests regained their senses, and Clare and her escorts returned to San Damiano, sated from that untouched “blessed meal.”

Another bittersweet legend about Francis and Clare explains her love for roses. Again, it is Clare who desperately wants to be with Francis, and again, it is Francis who rebuffs her. This time the two of them are walking back to Assisi from Spello, an impossibility, of course, because Clare was cloistered at San Damiano, but regardless, the two of them are walking along in the winter snow and cold, and they are both depressed. They have evidently stopped at several houses to beg for food and water, and though they were given it, they also heard lewd insinuations about their relationship. The ever-sensitive Francis then told Clare that they would have to walk apart on the last part of their journey.

A disconsolate Clare took his words to mean for the rest of their lives, and after trudging on alone through the snow, with Francis following at a respectful distance, she suddenly cried out: “Francis, when will we see each other again?” to which he replied: “When summer comes and the roses are in bloom.” And suddenly, roses in full bloom sprouted from snow-covered bushes and trees. Clare carried a bouquet back to Francis but knew in her heart they would be parted. Which is why her favorite flower became the rose, which still blossoms every summer on the bushes in her tiny garden at San Damiano.

True to his sense of decorum, Francis withdrew even further from contact with Clare. Did she pine for him? Probably. But she never deviated from the path she had chosen. Year after year, decade after decade, she remained cloistered at San Damiano, making altar cloths, caring for the sick who were brought to the convent’s infirmary, praying, and looking after her sisters. It was for them, perhaps, that she sent message after message to Francis, entreating him to come to San Damiano to preach and instruct her and her followers on how best to serve the Lord. He finally came in 1221—but left them with a puzzle.

Clare and the Poor Ladies were waiting eagerly in San Damiano’s choir to hear Francis utter the words that had stirred so many. When he finally entered the tiny church, they watched expectantly as he knelt, raised his eyes to heaven, and began silently to pray. But then, instead of loosing his golden tongue, he called for ashes to be brought to him, some of which he sprinkled on his head and the rest around him in a circle. The Poor Ladies held their breaths, waiting to hear his explanation, but instead he recited the Miserere, the penitential psalm asking God for mercy—and left.

Though Clare must have felt disappointed, she evidently understood the lesson of the pantomime. The universal interpretation of Francis’s performance is that he, like everyone else, is a sinner and worth no more than ashes. The only path to the Lord is through prayer and not through the words of an intermediary, however stirring. Some biographers also suggest that the ailing Francis knew he was nearing the end of his life—he delivered the odd “sermon” five years before his death—and wanted the Poor Ladies to wean themselves from any spiritual dependence on him. It seems to have worked, for after Francis left Clare and the Poor Ladies sitting in the choir at San Damiano, it is said that Clare doubled the already considerable time she spent in penance and prayer.

What a fascinating and poignant relationship Francis and Clare shared. It is easy to read all sorts of innuendo into it, especially in their early years, but such snickers do not lend themselves to Francis’s hard-fought war against temptation and Clare’s deeply committed spiritual life. Their relationship does not appear to be the steamy and forbidden stuff of
The Thorn Birds.
Theirs was a shared passion for Christ.

The deep devotion that joined Francis and Clare had extraordinary ramifications. Together, they humbled the arrogance of the Church by embracing the path of holy poverty and caring for the sick and needy. In modern jargon, Francis and Clare talked the talk and walked the walk, and they inspired the foundation of hundreds of Franciscan missions throughout the world, many of which continue to this day.

The rapid spread of Francis’s visionary influence is also due largely to Clare. At one point after she entered San Damiano, Francis had a crisis of purpose. Part of him wanted to be a hermit and spend his days and nights in solitary prayer. The other part wanted to preach and save as many souls as he could. To resolve his “agony of doubt,” according to the
Little Flowers of St. Francis,
he sent Brother Masseo to two of his followers with a request—to ask God in their prayers the question of what he should do and come back to him with the Lord’s message.

The second person on Francis’s list was a particularly devout friar, Brother Silvester, who was living in solitude on Mount Subasio. The first was Clare. And each came back to Brother Masseo with the same message for Francis from the Lord: “He wants you to go about the world preaching because God did not call you for yourself alone, but also for the salvation of others,” the
Little Flowers
reports.

Francis was immediately transformed at the news. “As soon as he heard this answer and thereby knew the will of Christ, he got to his feet, all aflame with divine power, and said to Brother Masseo with great fervor: ‘So let’s go—in the name of the Lord.’ ” And off Francis went—again—to ever more beautiful places in Umbria and Tuscany.

13

Eating Well and Tuscany’s First Hermitages

L
AKE
T
RASIMENO,
where Francis spends forty days with a rabbit ·
C
ELLE DI
C
ORTONA,
the hermitage where he gives away his new cloak ·
C
ETONA,
now an inn and restaurant ·
S
ARTEANO,
where Francis foils the devil by sculpting a snow family

T
he first glimpse of blue water is tantalizing. We have been up and down so many mountains and hiked the steep cobbled streets of so many hill towns that seeing the vast, flat, blue expanse of Lake Trasimeno elicits a disproportionate thrill. Just six easy miles west of Perugia, the lake is the fourth largest in Italy and seems almost an inland sea, rimmed by villages both new and very, very old.

Francis arrived on the shore of Trasimeno, then known as the Lake of Perugia, in the early spring of 1211. He had not come for the sport or recreation that currently draws summer hordes to its shallow, balmy waters. Francis was here to spend the forty days and nights of Lent secretly fasting in prayer and solitude on one of the three small islands in the lake, the Isola Maggiore.

Making sure his Lenten vigil would be undisturbed was characteristic of Francis. He did not want to be interrupted in any way during the periods when he communicated most directly with the Lord. So he persuaded the man he was staying with on the mainland to row him out to the island “during the night before Ash Wednesday,” according to the
Deeds of Blessed Francis and His Companions,
“so that no one would know about it.” The man was to return for him on Holy Thursday.

We are looking not for someone to row us out to the Isola Maggiore but for the passenger ferry that leaves every hour or so from the resort town of Passignano. The town’s public parking lot seems a long way from the ferry pier, which is some indication of the crowds in summer, but we are here in October and miraculously find a parking place in town, almost directly across from the pier. It’s a good omen for what turns out to be a magical day.

The morning haze begins to burn off as we board the 11:50
A.M.
ferry for the twenty-minute run to the island. There isn’t a whisper of wind, and the glassy surface of the lake reflects the passing clouds overhead. Cormorants are busy diving for their midday meal, but there are only a few fishing boats around, nothing like the swarms of summer speedboats that make swimming offshore a risky contact sport.

Unlike Francis, who landed on the thickly forested shore of Isola Maggiore and found—nothing, we disembark at the island’s tiny, one-street fishing village lined with tourist kiosks, restaurants, and a hotel. “Since there was no shelter where he could rest, he crawled into a dense thicket where thorn bushes had formed an enclosure,” continues the
Deeds of Blessed Francis and His Companions.
He would stay here for the next forty days and forty nights, “neither eating or drinking,” his only company a wild rabbit that never left his side.

We set out to look for the “dense thicket,” following the Lungo Lago, a pleasant perimeter dirt path hugging the lake’s shore. We come upon a statue of Francis in such short order that it is almost anticlimactic. The modern statue is of a young Francis raising his hand in a blessing, his youth confirmed by his prestigmata hands and feet. We feel quite let down until we continue along the path to discover a much older stone shrine with a small, ragged wooden statue of Francis set in an alcove and, under it, a grilled opening into a small cave. We have arrived.

A narrow path leads up the hill behind the shrine, and we follow it to a second old stone shrine, with a bigger grille enclosing a larger cave. The carved sign just under the peak is almost illegible, but the inscription definitely ends with the words “Francesco d’Assisi.” This must be the two-cell hermitage his friars later established on the island, where perhaps Francis had sought shelter in 1211. Local legend holds that he weathered a fierce storm on the island, and this cave is well above the water and far more protected than the one below.

There is a wonderful smell of earth and pine needles at the shrines and the persistent cry and wingbeat of a nearby male pheasant. We linger in the lovely spot, looking out over the lake, struck as ever by Francis’s fortitude in spending more than a month here, all alone save for the rabbit.

We have a ferry to catch, however, and we hurry up the path and over the hill, pausing briefly in an olive grove to admire the lovely twelfth-century church of San Michele Arcangelo. But we’ve lingered too long and miss the 12:50 ferry by seconds. And that turns out to be a gift. We have an hour and a half before the next ferry—and lunch is being served at the end of the brick-paved main street under white umbrellas outside the Da Sauro hotel.

I hesitate to interrupt the narrative of Francis’s legend on the Isola Maggiore to wax on about lunch, but it turns out to be one of the best meals we have on that trip to Italy. Our research schedule is such that we do not usually have the time to indulge in Italy’s leisurely, multicourse cuisine. Our norm is to eat lunch either on the road, at the frequent Auto-Stops, otherwise known as gas stations, or at coffee bars in whatever town we have followed Francis to.

We are hardly deprived. There’s nothing lacking in a prosciutto, mozzarella, and arugula sandwich on freshly baked bread, washed down by a glass of freshly squeezed blood orange juice and cappuccino. Dinner, too, is often at the restaurant nearest to whatever hotel we are staying in, and though the food is always good, it is not always memorable. But this simple lunch is. My perfectly cooked crisp whitebait,
latterini fritti,
with a fresh salad, and my husband’s pasta and rich
vitello tonnato,
accompanied by a glass or two of the house white wine, turn an already wonderful day to perfection. We ask the waiter to take a photograph of us, and I keep it on my desk as a reminder.

My digression into lunch is not, however, that far off course. Food, or the lack of it, is central to the legend of Francis’s Lenten fast on the Isola Maggiore. He is said to have arrived on the island with two small loaves of bread—and nothing else. In what is considered a miracle by some, and an example of the utmost piety by others, he had eaten only half of one loaf when he was picked up by his secret boatman forty days later. And that tiny portion out of deference to Christ. “It is believed that Saint Francis ate part of one loaf so that with a little bread he would expel the poison of vainglory and thus the glory of a forty day fast be reserved for the blessed Christ,” records the
Deeds of Blessed Francis and His Companions.

However humble it was of Francis to eat just a little bread, so as not to emulate the forty-day fast of Jesus, it was not good at all for his health. Already sickly from bone tuberculosis and recurring bouts of malaria, Francis is thought to have developed chronic gastritis and a gastric ulcer from his ongoing anorexic regimen. Add to that his reluctance to drink water “even when he was burning with thirst,” as Celano notes admiringly, and the scene is set for the slow degradation of all his internal organs. In the religious fever of the Middle Ages, such abstinence was believed to feed the soul, and there was no concept at the time of the harm it did to the body.

We leave Lake Trasimeno and head north into Tuscany, where Francis would establish three hermitages near Cortona, Cetona, and Sarteano. All hermitages, we soon discover, are not alike. A surprising number, like the Celle di Cortona, are still working convents, with resident friars and regular masses open to the public; several other Franciscan hermitages and convents, including the one at Cetona, house social programs like Mondo X, a Franciscan-led community for troubled youth; still others, like Sarteano, are little more than caves.

Regardless of what the hermitages are now, they were lifelines for Francis. Always frail, he needed time to recover both spiritually and physically from his far-ranging preaching tours. His friars, too, needed solitude and contemplation. The Franciscans spent so much time on the road that they required retreats along the way for camaraderie and spiritual renewal. New converts to the order, whose numbers were doubling every year, also yearned for places they could gather in their own locales. And so the number of hermitages grew and grew.

We are never sure what we’re going to find on our hermitage quest; we simply circle on our maps the approximate locations of the hermitage names we have taken from the medieval texts. The treasure hunt through the Italian countryside, however, is always beautiful. Especially our drive to Cortona and its nearby hermitage through the rolling vineyards of Tuscany.

The Celle di Cortona is nestled into the end of a wooded gorge halfway up the side of Mount Egidio. There is no sign directing us to the
celle,
which makes the first sight of the extensive stone complex at the end of a windy mountain road all the more extraordinary. Nothing has prepared us for the beautiful and immaculate Franciscan convent, straddling a rushing mountain stream and a waterfall. There are terraced gardens, arched bridges over the stream, and wooden-railed paths lacing the grounds. The
celle
is the most “uptown” sanctuary we’ve found to date, though we don’t see a soul. A sign at the entrance tells us there are friars in residence, and there is a bell to pull to summon them, but the solitude is such that we don’t want to disturb it—or them. Besides, we miraculously find an English-language guide in a wall rack, so we are able to show ourselves around.

Local legend has it that Francis was directed to this rugged spot by someone he met in Cortona, just two miles away, and that he came to the
celle
for the first time in 1211 after his Lenten fast on the Isola Maggiore. There was already a cluster of small mills along the stream, but what evidently attracted Francis was a fan-shaped recess in the mountain’s rock face. Like the rock cleft we had seen at Sant’Urbano near Narni, and similar split rocks at many of his retreats, the natural stone niche at the
celle
became a favorite place of solitude and prayer for Francis. The niche is incorporated now into the substantial building that houses the convent’s current oratory, but portions of its rough face remain exposed.

Francis’s physical presence at the
celle
is confined to two rooms: the sanctuary’s low, timbered-ceiling oratorio, which served as a dormitory for the early friars; and Francis’s tiny stone cell, enlivened with baskets of fresh lavender, a copy of his famous portrait by Cimabue, and a somewhat garish painting of the Madonna and Child. The cell, with its familiar stone slab bed, stone pillow, and wooden plank for a mattress, seems carefully re-created to evoke Francis, and it could be an exhibit in the Smithsonian. Even the coarse cloth or
impannate
covering the windows is authentic to the preglass times Francis lived in. The painting of the Madonna and Child on the cell wall is not; the thirteenth-century original was stolen some years ago, and this is a copy. The cell is fenced off now, effectively discouraging common thieves and devout pilgrims from taking fragments of plaster and wood as souvenir relics.

Francis’s spiritual presence, however, is everywhere, along the paths and by the waterfall, making the legends about him at the
celle
seem perfectly plausible. One centers on a new cloak that his friars had gone to some trouble to find for him, only to have Francis give it away to a poor man who came to the
celle
grieving for his dead wife. Francis was smart enough to realize the man would probably sell the cloak and cautioned him not to “hand it over to anyone unless they pay well for it.” But his friars, seeing the man leaving the
celle
with their hard-won cloak, were moved to act in a very uncharacteristic way. They tried to wrest the cloak away from the poor man so they could give it back to Francis, but the man “clutched it with both hands and defended it as his own.” The legend says that the friars finally had to pay the man the price he demanded to get it back, which is also curious in that the friars were forbidden even to touch money.

But the friars were probably at their wits’ end trying to keep Francis adequately clothed. He was forever giving away his mantle or parts of his tunic to anyone in need, and often to people, including his own “brothers,” who simply asked for something he was wearing. The belief was that anything the holy Francis had touched would bring good fortune to its new bearer and ease his suffering, a belief so strong that often people did not even ask but simply plucked at his tunic to secure a lucky relic. Francis had to patch and repatch his tunic, but he remained so eager to “offer to others things he had denied his own body, even though they were extremely necessary for him” that he was finally ordered by the minister general of his order and the brother appointed as his guardian not to give away his clothing without their permission.

Knowing Francis’s penchant for giving away his clothing, his friars must have been ecstatic on this first trip to Cortona at the generosity of their wealthy host. Known as Guido, the man promised to use his wealth to pay for all the Franciscans’ future cloaks and tunics. Whether he did or not is unknown, because Guido shortly became a Franciscan convert himself and spent the rest of his life in a cave along the stream at the
celle.
That cave, too, has been incorporated into one of the buildings and is now the convent’s library.

The
celle
is also closely associated with Francis’s most controversial friar, Elias of Cortona. Elias, who would become head of the order in 1221, after Francis resigned, lived off and on at the
celle
and added a third level and five more cells, which still have ceilings made of reeds. But that isn’t what made him controversial. The debate remains whether Elias was Francis’s most loyal disciple or, as many think, his Judas.

The positive argument could readily be made that, without the farsighted Elias, there would not be a Franciscan Order today. Francis was a dreamer, not a CEO. He would reluctantly make some changes to accommodate the order’s burgeoning number of friars—in 1217, for example, he would abandon his relaxed approach to his evangelical vision and accept the geographical division of his flock into “provinces,” each with a provincial minister—but Elias would go further, much further.