Daily Reading for October 4 • Francis of Assisi, 1226
Francis broke radically with his wealthy class and its lifestyle in 1206, when, standing publicly before his own bishop, with his father looking on unhappily, he threw off his garments, the signs of his wealth and social standing, and revealed himself to be wearing a hair shirt, the sign of a new commitment to poverty on his part. He then threw off that shirt, too. Thus he began his new spiritual vocation—naked, with no possessions whatsoever. For some time he lived as a hermit, supporting himself by begging and reaching out, on occasion, to the poorest of the poor, even to lepers. In 1208 Francis heard Jesus calling him, as the Savior had called the first apostles, to take to the highways and byways to witness to the kingdom of God, all without any possessions of his own.
In his new apostolic ministry, Francis immersed himself in the emergent urban culture of his time, a setting that the spirituality of the then-declining feudal monasteries was generally ill equipped to influence. In this sense, Francis was an urban minister, first and foremost, not a spiritual recluse or a nature mystic. His mission was not to retreat to a solitary life in the wilderness, a still viable spiritual option in his time. Nor was it to retreat to a protected monastery, where he might have imagined himself to be living anew in Paradise, surrounded by a hostile world, awaiting the coming kingdom of God, also a spiritual option that many in the Christian West had been choosing for centuries. No, Francis’s spiritual retreat was in fact an advance into the rising urban culture of his time. His solitary life was in fact a commitment to seek out the lonely and the godforsaken, who were flocking to the cities. Even more comprehensively, the monastery where he awaited the coming of God’s kingdom was in fact the whole world, not just its cities. Francis had become a latter-day apostle who believed that he had been sent by Jesus to preach the Gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15).
From “The Spirituality of Nature and the Poor: Revisiting the Historic Vision of St. Francis” by H. Paul Santmire, Ph.D., in Tending the Holy: Spiritual Direction Across Traditions, edited by Norvene Vest. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com