Salvation

Saint Francis (and Me) in Assisi

I was spellbound by Valerie Martin’s Salvation: Scenes from the Life of Saint France, each one depicting a crucial moment in St. Francis’ life. The book begins with a procession of friars bringing his broken body home to Assisi to die, then goes backwards, ending with the moment he meets the leper in the road and gives himself to Lady Poverty. Martin’s gorgeous writing viscerally captures not only the the saint’s physical and spiritual agony but also blessed moments of mystery and transcendence. The resources she lists at the end testify to the depth of research she did on St. Francis’ life and times.

Or San Francesco, as I’ve come to think of him since I began coming to Assisi each summer as a faculty member of Art Workshop International in 2009. Each visit deepens my fascination with the city and its saint.

San Francesco is everywhere here—from Giotto’s glorious fresco cycle at the Basilica to miniature shrines tucked into stone walls along narrow passageways. You can stand in the square where he renounced his father’s wealth.

Climb or taxi to the Hermitage, way up Mount Subasio, where he retreated with his Franciscan brothers to pray. Where once, I stood all by myself and the light shifted, turning the dark, dense trees the same blue-green in Giotto’s frescoes.

You can walk down to Santa Maria degli Angeli, where the exquisite Portiuncula is preserved, inside the town’s uninspired cathedral. From here, San Francesco looked up at Asissi as he died.

Alas, you can find him in dozens of gift shops throughout his hometown.

The commercialization of San Francesco’s life never fails to make me sad—all the more this year because I reread Salvation before I came. I’m not religious but I respect a true believer—and nobody could deny that, however crazy San Francesco might seem to us today, he believed in Christ and dedicated his life to serving Him. It was all he wanted to do.

How he’d hate the way his city and his church have used him.

But I’m guessing he’d think Valerie Martin, also not religious, saw what he wanted the world to see. Like Giotto, whose scenes of the saint’s life are so compelling that, looking at one, you feel as if you’ve entered it, Martin created his world with words that bring him so fully to life that, reading, we see the world through his eyes.

#artworkshopintl

# assisi