Recently I got an email from a friend who had just spent some time with her
ex-husband. She wrote: “That whole energy seems so...odd to me now....and it's
simultaneously tragic and beautiful...like life, I guess.” [I didn’t cut
anything out; that’s how she writes.]
Simultaneously
tragic and beautiful. Yes! Lately I have been seeing how everyone’s life
has some tragedy or sadness in it. I’ve met a lot of people in the last six
months and everyone seems to have some sad story to tell. Many are recently
divorced, another’s foreign wife took his children to her country when the kids
were 5 and 7 and he’s never seen them since, a couple others have children in
jail or addicted to drugs, another found out the woman she thought was her
mother wasn’t…
Most of us operate under the
illusion that there are people who don’t suffer. We think there are people who really
have their act together and don’t have the problems we do.
The news that Mother Teresa lived with depression for
years shocked me, and I imagine, most people. We think someone with that kind
of spiritual dedication should be beyond the sufferings of ordinary people like
us.
St. Francis of Assisi is one of the best-known saints of the Catholic Church,
widely admired today for his humble embrace of poverty and his peaceful
attitude towards nature. Statues of St. Francis are ubiquitous in gardens. Here
was a golden life, without tragedy, right?
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| St. Francis with Sultan al-Kamil Wikimedia Commons |
A review
of two new biographies of St. Francis of Assisi in the New Yorker reveals the tragedy in the saint’s life. [“Rich
Man, Poor Man: The Radical Visions of St. Francis,” by Joan Acocella, New Yorker Jan 14, 2013] Francis was
from a wealthy family, and when he was about twenty-one, in 1202, he went to
war. His side lost and he spent a year in prison. When he came out he was
changed; he was no longer interested in partying with his friends, but spent
entire days praying.
By 1206
he had renounced his inheritance and gained two followers. He believed that
property aroused envy and conflict and was, Ms. Acocella writes, “the one thing
most destructive to peace in the world…To be part of the [Franciscan] group, a
man had to sell all his goods, give the money to the poor, and, like Francis,
sever all ties with his family.”
In ten
years his order of friars became incredibly popular, and grew to number in the
thousands. Francis began sending friars to France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and
the Middle East.
St.
Francis went to Egypt in 1219 to try and convert the Sultan of Egypt, Syria,
and Palestine to Christianity in order to end the Crusades. He returned (the
Sultan didn’t convert) with malaria and trachoma, a painful eye infection. He
was also vomiting blood. During the last six years of his life he suffered
tremendously from the pain of his physical ailments.
