Francis whose love for God was unquenchable according to some or someone more true to the modern spirit which would make St. Although I have a preference, the story is likely untrue her life in the convent was cloistered for over four decades. Francisco de asis’s inspiration continues. Nine centuries after his death in 1226 St.

It’s all about Franciscanism and there’s a smallish Franciscan Lutheran Monastery near where I live and I met a Lutheran Franciscan Friar on one of my Appalachian Trail hikes and a joyful beggar. Francis began at that time and deepened when I learned there was an Order of Lutheran Franciscans devoted to living the spirit of St. Francis” but not unusual for a Lutheran College where St. One might call it a “common prayer,” but that day in chapel in memory for a classmate dead in Vietnam, the chanting reverberated and those of us who needed to be consoled were consoled uncommonly. It was either 1967 or 1968 when the college choir, all 400-plus souls, and what was called a “Festival of Remembrance,” gave a chant-like version of “Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace”:Īnd it’s in pardoning that we are pardoned I remember from my undergraduate years time in Christ Chapel, a lovely place with wedding ceremonies, Sunday liturgical worship, chapel services, concerts, a funeral now and again.

“Brother Moon and Sister Sun”: A Personal Note

How, though, to treat their differences, especially since the books are unalike in length and fervency? Francis: one by the protean English critic and one by an equally protean Greek. I read this book as a young man and not only did it introduce me to the amazing world of Chesterton, but it was a revelation of how an entire culture could be captured in a slim volume.Two books about St. Here is the Francis who prayed and danced with pagan abandon, who talked to animals, who invented the creche. Here is the Francis who inspired a revolution in art that began with Giotto and a revolution in poetry that began with Dante. Here is the Francis who tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens, and who interceded with the emperor on behalf of the birds.

Chesterton gives us Francis in his world-the riotously colorful world of the High Middle Ages, a world with more pageantry and romance than we have seen before or since. For Chesterton, Francis of Assisi is a great paradoxical figure, a man who loved women but vowed himself to chastity an artist who loved the pleasures of the natural world as few have loved them, but vowed himself to the most austere poverty, stripping himself naked in the public square so all could see that he had renounced his worldly goods a clown who stood on his head in order to see the world aright.

Gk chesterton st francis