When La Croix suggested that I follow in the footsteps of Francis of Assisi in Italy, my first impulse was to say no. It must be said that I had just spent an entire year in the company of Charles de Foucauld with a view to an upcoming book. The saints did not give up on me. I was a little tired of the litanies and the miracles. And then at the time, because I had never explored it, the figure of the Poverello (Little Poor Man) didn’t inspire me much.
I only knew of him the images from Epinal – the sermon to the birds, the call for universal fraternity or peace in the world. This collection of good feelings seemed both nice and a little cutesy to me. From time to time, in Paris, I also saw Franciscans passing by in the aisles of the Observatory where I was playing ping-pong, flanked by sandals and strange robes; I found that they looked like extras from The Name of the Rose. In short, my resistance was not small.
An aura beyond the borders of the Church
Driven by some instinct, however, I asked for a few days of reflection. I took the opportunity to delve into the classics of Franciscanism (Éloi Leclerc, Jacques Le Goff, Julien Green, etc.). Reading these texts, swallowed in one go over two sleepless nights, I quickly understood that I had underestimated our man. In the order of holiness, there were the saints, and there was Francis… Towards this sparkling beggar all the superlatives converged. The meteoric journey of this young Italian who became crazy about God (1182-1226) had changed the face of the world.
François Cheng called him “the great living one”. Freud, usually unfriendly towards religions, praised “his disposition to universal love”. Nietzsche said he was “the only disciple Christ ever had.” The Orthodox thinker Berdyaev did not take half measures either: his life “represented the most important fact in the history of Christianity after the life of Jesus”! As for Julien Green, he maintained that with the Poverello, Christ had offered us the Gospel a second time…
The writer Charles Wright (left) and his friend Serge, with whom he walks the Di qui passo Francesco path.
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What was striking about this concert of praise was its ecumenical side. Emanating from this luminous figure, emerging from the great clarity of the Middle Ages, was a power of universal attraction. In any case, his aura happily went beyond the boundaries of the Church. Like Luther King or Gandhi, he was one of those rare personalities to transcend divisions.
In the history of Christianity, there were no saints so popular and so fond of unbelievers. The writer Joseph Delteil, a notorious atheist, said that “any man could be a Franciscan, without believing in the holiness of Francis”, and called for, in reference to the third order, the advent of “a fourth order for agnostics and atheists”. François belonged to the world heritage of humanity.
This son of a good family, who had renounced all possessions and all power to follow the poor and humble Christ and who, flanked by a band of barefoot people, had set out on the roads of Italy to announce peace, fraternity and the wonder of all Creation, never ceased to inflame the imagination. The saint of Assisi was “the eternal contemporary” (Francis Cheng).
The joy of Saint Francis, a help?
The June heatwave, the missiles launched at kyiv and Tehran, the financial speculation, the hubris of world leaders, thirsty for power, there was hardly any news that did not find answers in his fraternal and disarmed gesture. It was strange: this medieval man, nourished with chivalrous literature, managed to shed light on our postmodern societies marked by war, the destruction of resources and greed.
Obviously something had happened in this corner of Umbria eight hundred years ago. In The Divine Comedy, Dante said that a sun was born. Witnessing the birth of a star doesn’t happen every day! And then this man had achieved the feat of making Christianity desirable and meaningful. This too was not common. This aroused my curiosity. You had to go see.
A more personal reason ultimately won my decision. Let’s just say I discovered that love wasn’t always loved. Andréa, the woman I wanted to marry, had just rejected me. Since she left me, the sun had died. I was carrying dark thoughts. I felt extreme loneliness. Marjane Satrapi had just reminded us: we can die of sadness. We had to react. I then remembered that there are only roads to calm sorrow. This travel proposal came at the right time. Especially since I had the intuition that the patron saint of Italy had something to tell me. His joy, bright like a child’s laughter, had cut through despair. Maybe it would be a help?
This is how I found myself on the heights of Mount Alvern, an austere sanctuary, surrounded by deep forests, in the east of Tuscany. My plan was to leave this high place, then go to the saint’s tomb, in Assisi. I knew that a path, the Di qui passo Francesco (“Francis passed through here”), marked by a yellow tau, crisscrossed the paths of central Italy, almost two hundred kilometers through the Apennine chain, the Upper Tiber valley, marking on its route a string of hermitages, sanctuaries, forests and most of the places where Francesco had left memories.
The Franciscan tau, in yellow, serves as a signpost throughout the journey on the Di qui passo Francesco path, to Assisi.
Charles Wright
This journey was missing only one comrade. Because the Franciscan epic was a collective adventure, a brotherhood of wanderers. Francis took particular care in choosing his brothers. I set my sights on Serge, a friend from Ardèche. He was no longer a partridge of the year – he was 70 years old – but there was something Franciscan about this retired chicken breeder, whose ingenuous, playful and fanciful character was reminiscent of that of Leon or Junipere, the Poverello’s favorite brothers.
A very Franciscan failed act
The first evening at the dormitory was not easy. When paying for my overnight stay, I realized that I had forgotten my identity papers in France. It was a very Franciscan failed act: at the dawn of the journey, I stripped myself of my civil status! But this blunder raised concerns that I mulled over all night. Without a passport, would I be able to cross the country of Dante? And then were we sharp enough, Serge and I, even though we were carrying around a few extra kilos, inherited from the winter? Snoring, the culprit of which I was unable to identify, even though Serge did not seem innocent, ended up ruining my sleep…
In the early morning, with drawn faces, we visited the chapel of the stigmata where Francesco received the marks of Christ’s passion. Saints, I tell myself, are those beings who offer their bodies so that God appears there. Then the mass, led by a squad of Franciscans, began. I didn’t understand anything about their sabir, but the accents of their language enchanted me. In France, when we say the word “Lord”, we stand at attention, while “Il Signore” immediately arouses outbursts of tenderness.
From the homily, chatty like an Italian, I only retained two words, strada and salvezza, which I associated with each other: salvation is in the path. Gratified by this word, we packed our bags, and in a mood both worried and cheerful, like the Friars Minor that Francis sent on a mission two by two, we set off through the majestic forests, The Fioretti in our pockets, determined to reconnect with the prim and proper spirit of the early days.
“The Flowers”
Most Franciscan sources present a tamed, watered-down Francesco. But if we want to rediscover his spirit, there is The Fioretti, the collection of his great deeds written in the 14th century by an unknown author. Francis and his brothers live in this anthology as they lived in the valleys of Umbria. There we find the climate that animated them at the very beginning of the order: ingenuousness, simplicity, the spirit of childhood, poetry, fantasy, a sort of playful freedom and fresh candor.
Close
We walked thirty kilometers in a symphony of greens and the heavy burn of the Tuscan light. At the hermitage of Cerbaiolo, perched on a hill, where we hoped to spend the night, the host of the place, a cantankerous priest, claimed that there was no more room and threw us out like trash. Francis called this “perfect joy.” We weren’t there yet and pitched our tent in a bumpy field filled with dung and stones, complaining about fate.
Ten days of travel
Serge had a fitting word: “I don’t know what joy is, the only thing I know is that the ground is hard. » We laughed out loud. Before us, a landscape that stretched as far as the eye could see, summoned the memory of sacred commerce, a story from early Franciscan literature, where “Lady Poverty” comes to visit Francesco and his brothers so that he can show her their convent. The companions then lead her to a hill and show her a vast panorama: “Madam, here is our cloister. »
Driven out of the hermitage of Cerbaiolo (Tuscany), the duo slept under the stars, at the foot of the Apennines.
Charles Wright
Who can understand the spirituality of the Little Poor Man until he has seen, in the splendor of a summer evening, the light of an Umbrian sky? Few saints are so linked to a region (Tuscany, Umbria). For ten days, these landscapes where Francis has left so many traces will be our cloister. Basically, we are betting on geography. Because beings resemble the horizons they contemplate.
By plunging into the territories of the saint, crisscrossing the hills he traveled, we will try to penetrate his mental space, spurred by this enigma: where did the charm of this celestial wanderer come from and the source of his incredible aura, he who knew, like no one else, how to make the Gospel desirable, to liberate the creative youth of Christianity and to exert an attraction which has never dried up? The evening light had covered everything with its peace. As I contemplated the lands that stretched endlessly before us, anguish gripped my heart. All the writers who had made the journey to Assisi had returned changed. And what was going to happen to me?
