On this 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis, my own thoughts were drawn back 30 years, to the precious visit to Assisi that Eileen and I made during our honeymoon. Back in the summer of 1996, we spent several weeks in Italy. It was a time to celebrate our marriage, to make a pilgrimage together and to revisit together places we had lived before (individually and in different years). We also visited friends and had adventures exploring and appreciating the art, architecture, and history of that ancient Mediterranean peninsula. I kept a journal during this time, as I often did in the days when I used to travel (and I’m so grateful to have had the physical energy and capacity to explore many places in my youth). As this was our honeymoon, parts of this 1996 journal are personal, but there are also many pages of my observations and thoughts on the environments we experienced together. I thought I would reproduce here a few excerpts from the journal that express the powerful impression Assisi made on me. It was striking and almost tangible how the events of the life and death of Saint Francis have shaped Assisi as a place. These excerpts from my notes of 30 years ago might clarify further what I mean. Assisi has a unique quality that resonates everywhere with the extraordinary witness and conformity to Christ of Saint Francis.
“After a week and a half in Rome, we left early on this morning [July 7] for a new destination in our pilgrimage — Assisi. As the train climbed into the Umbrian hills, we immediately sensed the change in atmosphere. We were leaving the chaos, the noise, and the contradictions (as well as the spiritual and historical vastness) of Rome, and entering into a place of quiet and simplicity of focus.
“Rome is the second greatest place of pilgrimage in all the world (second only to Jerusalem and the Holy Places), but it is also many other things: tourist center, historical, archeological, and artistic center, economic and political center, and now also — in our own time — immigration center. The proportions of Rome are everywhere huge — supernatural grandeur, human grandeur, but also “splendid vices” and — today especially — ever enlarging tunnels of physical and personal misery.
“Assisi is something markedly different. Assisi is a place of pilgrimage... and nothing else.
“The first thing that struck me in the train station (and that continued to strike me throughout the visit) is that everyone visits Assisi as a pilgrim. This does not mean that everyone knows why they have come here. But the whole of Assisi is centered upon one thing, and everyone comes here on account of that one thing. That ‘one thing’ is a man. One man who lived 800 years ago. One human being who fascinates everyone.
“Indeed, every saint generates fascination; it is of the nature of a saint to fascinate (because holiness is inescapably true and good and beautiful). But Francis seems to fascinate like no one else. His life remains a kind of “icon” of Christ and an “icon” of the human vocation in its purest and most transparent form — which is simply to love, to love "without measure," to love "madly" — indeed to love without measure because the Beloved is immeasurable, to love madly because the Beloved is good and beautiful beyond every limit of human calculation.
“We went up the hill from the train station (in a bus) to the Basilica of San Francesco, where we attended the high Mass and then visited the crypt. Here there is the tomb of Saint Francis, surrounded by the tombs of his first and most beloved brothers. I was struck by the power and the palpability of the affection of this most extraordinary companionship. Above all, however, I was amazed by the pilgrims. They prayed at the tomb, kissed the ground in front of it, and pressed their heads against the grating in order to draw closer, as though they could perhaps rest their heads in the bosom of Francis. Nowhere did I see mere curiosity. Hearts were exposed here; the unfathomable human desire was wrestling its way toward the surface of those faces that crowded around Saint Francis in the tiny crypt.
“Later, we went back to the upper church in the Basilica to marvel at the magnificent frescoes of Giotto portraying the life of Saint Francis. We were helped significantly by our guide book, but I was helped most of all by Eileen's deep spiritual attunement to the work of Giotto. It was incredible to think that these were painted within living memory of Saint Francis. All of the painting in the Basilica radiates the glory of the events themselves; it emerges from an immersion into the actual experience that had been generated by the grace of the Holy Spirit around Saint Francis and his original followers. This is perhaps the secret to the transcendent humanism of Giotto's figures; this is why they are so humanly real and so iconic at the same time.
“In the afternoon we strolled all around the town. Or, rather, at times we strolled and at other times we hiked. Everywhere there were beautiful vistas, hidden strade that wound thru little nooks between the buildings, and a pervasive sense of peace. We had a few moments in Saint Clare's church, and we watched the sun set behind the hills, the capolace, and the bell towers of Assisi from the heights of the Piazza Santa Chiara.
“The next day we visited Santa Maria Degli Angeli. This grand 17th century Basilica was built to surround and enshrine the Portincina chapel. In the early 1200's, this tiny chapel was all by itself in the woods outside the city. Francis loved to come here to pray; and later he came with his first friends to live. Finally, he came here to die — another chapel in the modern basilica marks the place (which had been the infirmary of the Franciscan brotherhood) where Francis died. In the painting, his disciples are kissing the holy wounds.
“There was something about Assisi that made us feel like we could stay there for the rest of our lives.”
