Every day here in Assisi I go across the street to the lower level of the Basilica and down the steps to the tomb of St. Francis. I have always been drawn to this saint. This is the third time I have visited Assisi but I still tear up when I go to his tomb. My heart says that this huge, elaborate Basilica is not what he would have wanted nor a church so caught up in riches and fighting equal rights for gays and against full participation for women and against condoms in Aids-stricken Third world countries.
Yet I return again and hope to again. There is such papible energy in this place where his remains are above the altar and so many have come to pray over the centuries. I sit there each morning in the silence before the many arrive.
Will continue later as it is time for me to pay for my lovely monastery room and head back to Florence. OK, I'm in Forence but my heart is still in Assisi. As much as I love Forence I believe I love the small cities better. Of course, I have fallen in love so much on this journey that my heart doesn't know what to do. It just keeps growing and including more and more.
Back to Assisi:
Below is the cross that was at the small chapel in ruins San Damiano just outside the Assisi city walls. After renouncing his family and their wealth, Francis was asking Jesus on this cross what he wanted him to do and the cross said: Rebuild my church. Francis took the command literally and started rebuilding San Damiano. Only later did he come to understand that it was the entire church structure that needed reform and renewal. This cross is now in the large church of Santa Chiara, his companion Clare who also renounced her family to follow Francis.
This was my view from my room. I want to come back sometime for at least a month. Maybe I could finally become fluent in Italian.
Yesterday I made my own 'pilgrimage' of sorts to the place most loved by Francis and his companions: the wild forest of Mt. Subasio that rises above Assisi. In 2004 I started out on a stormy afternoon to get to Francis' Eremo delle Caceri or hermitage and luckily was able to catch a ride with a Spanish/Italian couple who were coming back for their 25th wedding anniversary to the place of their honeymoon. They were lost and I needed a ride. So we went together and I told them about a rustic restaurant on the way back and we got inside just as the storm broke loose. I beguiled them so completely about the story of how Francis saved the populace of nearby Gubbio from a wolf by just talking to the wolf that the couple offered to take me in the morning. Talk about luck! Gubbio is 30 minutes away by car and takes about a day by bus because you have to go to Perugia, ie, you can't get there from here. So I got to Gubbio and had a wonderful lunch with the couple before they headed back to Switzerland.
Well, this didn't happen yesterday. And believe it or not I was happy because I could spend as much time as I wanted in this place that Francis had loved and had tread. I know he also 'tread' in Assisi, but I felt so much closer to him here. He and his companions each had primitive caves for solitary prayer. .
Looking down on valley from hermitage.
In the later centuries some buildings were added and a small community of monks lives up here but it is still so simple and "Francis-like" compared to the Basilica or heavens forbid, the monstrosity that I witnessed today of the enormous shrine they built over where he lived and died in the lower valley at Santa Maria degli Angeli (where Los Angeles got its name). It is built to receive the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims that flock here during the special feast days.
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