On the Road with Francis of Assisi by Linda Bird Francke Page B

they gave him was questionable if not insulting. “When he saw his bowl full of all kinds of scraps, he was struck with horror,” writes Celano, “but mindful of God and conquering himself, he ate the food with joy of spirit.”
    A particularly awkward transaction took place when Francis, who had also taken to begging for oil to light San Damiano’s lamps, arrived at one house to discover his former fellow revelers partying inside. In one of the more human moments recorded by his biographers, Francis was struck with “bashfulness and retraced his steps.” He then “rebuked” himself and, after passing “judgment on himself,” returned to the scene of his humiliation and successfully begged for the oil “in a kind of spiritual intoxication.”
    His father and brother were evidently embarrassed beyond measure by Francis’s antics. And understandably so. The snickering in Assisi about the fancy man-about-town transformed into a tattered, French-spouting beggar for God must have been mortifying. There is no further mention of Francis’s mother in the early biographies, but his brother, Angelo, merits at least one venomous story. Seeing Francis shivering with cold one day and struggling to carry a load of stones, Angelo turned to a friend and said, “Tell Francis to sell you a pennysworth of sweat,” to which Francis cheerfully and predictably replied, “Indeed, I will sell my sweat more dearly to my Lord.”
    Pietro di Bernadone remains the same, particularly unpleasant, character in the early biographies. Every time the status-seeking merchant saw his former son on the streets of Assisi, according to Celano, he “would lash out at him with curses.” To protect himself from his father, who must still have frightened him, Francis persuaded a local outcast, with whom he shared his alms, to stand in for his father. Every time Pietro di Bernadone cursed him, Francis would ask—and receive—a paternal blessing from the ragged father figure.
    But it was the restoration of San Damiano that Francis cared about the most. And slowly, with the masonry skills he had presumably learned as a teenager from building the defensive walls around Assisi, he finished. It was the spring of 1208, almost exactly two years after he stripped naked outside the bishop’s residence and traded in Pietro di Bernadone for a heavenly father.
    His biographers claim that others helped Francis rebuild San Damiano, drawn perhaps by his joy and good humor, not to mention his melodious singing voice. And perhaps that is true. Or perhaps they were drawn by his grandiose and quite outrageous prophecy, delivered loudly in French, of course, that San Damiano was no mere church but would someday be a monastery, as Celano puts it, for “the holy virgins of Christ.” In other words—for women.

6
    Clare’s          Prison”
    S AN D AMIANO,
where Francis will install Clare; she will be cloistered here for forty-one years
    F ather Antonio is struggling to maintain his composure. The attractive, young, English-speaking friar is in charge of San Damiano, and his cell phone never stops ringing. There’s a tour bus about to arrive and a group of nuns from Africa and cars pulling into the parking lot and people arriving by foot along the walkway from Assisi. And there are Harvey and me, with our cameras and notebooks.
    He sincerely wants to show us around San Damiano, and in between arrivals he hurries us along the covered entrance portico. “San Damiano was once a hospital for lepers, and because of that, no one ever came here,” he says, telling us a bit of information, albeit somewhat breathlessly, that we did not know before.
    What we do know is that Francis’s prophecy for San Damiano came true. In 1212, four years after he finished the restoration, Francis installed Clare, his most recent and illustrious convert, in San Damiano, with the consent of the bishop of Assisi. We’ll get to the details of that story later, but it was here,