The Holy Joy of St Francis

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. GALATIANS 2:20

In 1923, a year after he became a Catholic, Chesterton published a short life of St Francis of Assisi. It is not in the Ochorus library, and nothing of it is quoted here, but it belongs in any account of his teaching, because in Francis he found the saint who most perfectly embodied the things he loved: wonder, gratitude, humility, poverty, chivalry and, above all, joy. He had loved Francis since boyhood. The book is less a biography than a portrait, and it tells us almost as much about Chesterton as about the little poor man of Assisi.

The troubadour of God

Francis was born in the Italian town of Assisi around 1181, the son of a rich cloth merchant. As a young man he was gay, generous, extravagant and full of dreams of knighthood. Then, by a series of crises — a captivity, an illness, a vision, an encounter with a leper whom he forced himself to embrace — he was turned around. He renounced his inheritance, stripping off his fine clothes before the bishop and his father, and gave himself to a life of poverty, prayer and preaching. Others joined him, and the order of friars that grew from his little band spread across Europe.

Chesterton saw Francis as a troubadour, a wandering singer of romance, who had transferred all the chivalry and courtesy of the troubadours from a human lady to God. He was, Chesterton said, a lover; and the secret of his strange life was that he was in love with Christ, and loved everything else for Christ’s sake.

Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. PHILIPPIANS 3:8

The world upside down

The most memorable image of the book is of Francis standing, as it were, on his head. Chesterton suggested that in the crisis of his conversion Francis had seen the whole world turned upside down, and in seeing it so he had seen it truly for the first time: every town and tower hanging, as it were, from heaven, held up by nothing but the will of God. A man who has seen the world like that will never again take it for granted. He will be both more humble and more grateful, because he knows that everything is held in being by grace.

This is the same wonder that runs through Orthodoxy, now embodied in a man. Francis called the sun his brother and the moon his sister; he preached to the birds and wrote a hymn of praise for all creation. He was no sentimental nature-lover. He was a man who saw every creature as a gift and a fellow-creature, because he saw all of them hanging from the hand of God.

Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light. PSALM 148:3

Poverty and joy

Chesterton insisted that Francis’s poverty was not gloomy. He gave up everything, not because he despised the world, but because he wanted to be free to enjoy it as a gift rather than possess it as property. His joy was the joy of a man who owned nothing and therefore had nothing to lose. He was, Chesterton said, a fool for Christ’s sake, and the gaiety of his holiness was a rebuke to every grim and anxious form of religion.

We are fools for Christ’s sake. 1 CORINTHIANS 4:10

Weighing it

There is much in Francis, and in Chesterton’s portrait of him, that every Christian may admire: his love of Christ, his humility, his joy, his care for the poor and the outcast, his delight in creation. The evangelical tradition has its own Franciscan figures — men and women who gave up everything to preach the gospel to the poor — and it is right to honour the original.

But the reader should be aware that Chesterton writes about Francis as a Catholic, and some of what he admires an evangelical will weigh differently. The medieval stories of Francis are full of legend, and Chesterton, as a poet, did not always separate legend from history. He treats the wounds of Christ said to have appeared in Francis’s body near the end of his life as a sign of extraordinary holiness; evangelicals will be more cautious about such claims. And the system of vows, orders and saintly intercession of which Francis became a part is one that the Reformation rejected, in the conviction that every believer has direct access to God through Christ, and that the life of holy joy is open to the ploughman and the housewife as much as to the friar.

Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. HEBREWS 4:14

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. What would it mean for you to see the world as Francis did, as hanging from the hand of God? Spend a few minutes looking at something ordinary in that light.

2. Is there something you possess that has begun to possess you? Consider whether God is asking you to hold it more loosely, or give it away.

3. Read Philippians 3:7–14 and notice the joy of a man who has counted everything loss for Christ.

4. Find one way this week to serve someone poor or outcast, as Francis did.

5. Read Psalm 148 aloud, as a hymn of all creation.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You had nowhere to lay Your head, and You made many rich.

Thank You for the saints who have loved You so much that they gave up everything, and found everything given back.

Free me from the things I possess and the things that possess me, and let me see every creature as a gift from Your hand.

Give me the holy joy of a heart that has nothing to lose because it has You, and make me a fool for Your sake. Amen.