What Saint Francis Didn’t Get

I don’t mind if an author’s opinion differs from my own. Far from it. I read to inform my opinion, perhaps even change it, in light of greater understanding and deeper insight. What frustrates me is when I turn to a “scholarly” article¹ written by a specialist, who nowadays gets more money for such work than it would be healthy for me to know, only to find text that impoverishes. An experience of this sort occurred when I picked up an article which, from its title, promised to be about a topic for which I harbor great interest: joy.

I am interested in the topic mainly because of something my cousin related to me about Saint Francis of Assisi some time ago. Now, I may have gotten the story a little wrong or my cousin’s account may have been enlarged by her own reflections and insight on the Saint or the story, but I will relate the form in which my mind stored the account away, to wit:

In announcing to Brother Leo that he was about to tell him what true joy was, Saint Francis began by instructing him as to what true joy was not. It would not be when all the heads of state and church finally joined hands and came into the order. No, that would not be true joy. It would not be when all the faithless suddenly saw the light and believed. That would not be true joy. It would not be if Saint Francis himself was suddenly able to heal all the sick of the earth and perform many miracles. That, Saint Francis declared, would not be true joy. True joy consisted in none of these things. What then is true joy? Brother Leo asked. True joy, replied Saint Francis, would be when I am beaten and persecuted and have been nailed to and am dying on our Savior’s cross and, looking down from it onto my brothers who did this to me, felt only love and compassion and pity for them all. That, Brother Leo, would be true joy.

The actual account² of Saint Francis’s words couches all this in much milder terms. And I realize Saint Francis would never put himself in the place of Christ on the cross; it would carry the blasphemous vanity that Saint Francis believed himself capable of enduring the holy suffering and death of Christ that transformed the world. The very suggestion would have been, to Saint Francis’s mind, sacrilege.

No, the situation Saint Francis painted of true joy was much humbler. He said if he came to the city gates in the middle of a bitter cold night, so cold that icicles hung from his habit and struck the bleeding sores that had developed on his ankles and legs, and knocked at the gate and begged entry and was turned away with reviling insults by the gatekeeper, if he had patience in the face of that rejection to not become upset, that would be true joy and true virtue and salvation of the soul.

My subsequent pondering instructed me that this joy would have emanated from SaintFrancis’s ability to turn a wretched situation into a fount of love and peace brought into being by a miraculous perception that could transform insult into understanding, abuse into compassion, and fill his being with love, which then poured out to lave and soothe, cradle and comfort every living creature, including the abusive gatekeeper, including the trees, including the birds, including the rock summits, including the clouds themselves, whether they needed it or not, a love to fill the world. That would be true joy. That is, at any rate, the private lesson I have extracted from the story so far. I may have missed the essential point. I often do, but it has been food for thought over the years, and continues to be.

With that background, you can imagine my response when I saw an article all about joy, black on white, clear and concise, in an illustrious journal highly reputed for its intellectualism, which may sound like a contradiction to our jaded ears, but that’s the bald truth of it: it was full of intellectualism, it peddled intellectualism, it reeked intellectualism, and many, many thousand stouthearted subscribed to it to get a healthy dose of that intellectualism, if only to spit it out afterwards as being too intellectual to be true. All authors appearing in this publications were widely acclaimed as leading lights. This particular author was highly touted for intellectual reach, poetic prowess, and insightful penetration, with her main skill as a novelist, from what I’ve read, being her extraordinary ability to imitate literary styles of all kinds, coming out with a novel of this sort, coming out with a novel of that sort, then turning right around and coming out with a novel of a different sort, just like that. I suspect she got paid a great deal of money for this article. The journal’s Web site does not even include the word “submissions,” which tells me it keeps a tightly guarded stable of elite writers, for which one pays in sterling.

None of which, however, kept me from turning to the article with the great expectations no one has dared to admit having ever since Dickens wrote that great novel. But that is exactly what I felt: great expectations.

In approaching the topic of joy, the article chose to tell me first about pleasure, such as how nice it is to eat a popsicle, or to imitate funny people to her presumable equally illustrious husband, or to talk for the dog. I passed over all this uninformed. She then went on to joy. These were personal experiences she had had on drugs or falling in love. End of article. I remained uninformed.

The poverty of the treatise lies in the intensely selfish compass the author granted joy. There was no view to anything larger than the individual and the sensations impinging directly on its greedy, durable skin. There was no community, no world, no universe, only one person dancing to punk rock on ecstasy and just so loving it as to call it one of the handful of times that poor creature experienced joy. Has joy changed? I wondered. Is there not much to say about it anymore? If that is what our existential petri dish had reduced joy to, we are not just impoverished. We are lost.

At this point, I have to observe that a thorough cynicism has permeated the minds of our population today. There is no belief in deep love without some thick, juicy substratum of the sexual, for instance. Disturbing in the prevalence of this opinion, and companion to it, is the unstated conviction that the pursuit of sexual pleasure, sexual gratification, erotic stimulation is the absolute measure, the incontrovertible driving force, of the human being. A second companion to this, which is even more puzzling, is the credulity that sexual satisfaction is the greatest pleasure a human being can experience, a rather shallow depth, exchanging shoals for seas. That may not be the private conviction of individuals who experience themselves as falling far short of being worthy objects of sexual desire, who in fact may be embarrassed by the consideration of sexual confrontation, who may be attracted to others not from their “sexiness,” but due to a passion for their intelligence, their spirit of humanity, their sense of heroic courage, strength, and sacrifice, which can transform the outline of an individual into shapes and colors of ineluctable physical eloquence and great beauty. However, current public opinion has it otherwise. Heavens, the dominant medium for selling just anything has proven it to be so. Led along this well-rutted path, our cynicism has been informed that true joy has nothing if not a strong admixture of personal gratification and perhaps the full coin, sexual arousal and consummation.

I do not believe this. And now, of course, I must say what I think joy is and will have trouble doing so because I do not remember when I felt joy. I believe I have, but it was so long ago that I must have been very young. What I can say is that it was characterized by an overwhelming sense of wholeness and harmony that encompassed a unit far greater than myself; it was a sudden sense that everything would be all right, for everyone, without the usual equivocation of this one here being sacrificed to elevate that one there. No. Those laws were suspended for good. The joy was that it would be all right for everyone, that we were all connected, that we were all safe, all contributing to universal growth and well-being; that we were all pulling together, pulsing together, glowing together, one heart, one mind, one soul. Like elk. Or buffalo. Oh, where are they now?

At the time I felt joy, I was a girl. I had no wisdom, as Saint Francis did, about the transformative power of patience or love to soothe resentments, heal hurt pride, bind up envy or greed or avarice, because at that time I was not consumed by such weaknesses. I was in the position of victim—a child, a pupil, a Sunday school goer, a visitor to my girlfriend’s strange house with the odd smells and deep shadows and mysterious corners, a guest at a birthday party where I was not the one to pin the tail on the donkey (hurt pride, indeed, made an entrance at that point, come to think of it), a participant in a pageant given a torn costume for which I greatly feared I would be held responsible, the little girl who tickled her friend at the wrong time, causing her to fall from the “jungle Jim” and chip her tooth and run crying into the school, leaving me in a paroxysm of terror that she would tell on me and that I would be hauled off to Mrs. Evans—a sweaty unripeness for such eventualities mercifully dimmed my mind on the threshold of that consideration.

Tender vessel that I was, I did not have the capacity to dwell on the absence of resentment, hate, envy, or greed as being composites of true joy. I had those emotions, certainly (the donkey debacle stuck with me, for sure), but not yet in the degree that would lead me to consider them torturing elements. And yet, even within that fragile child’s framework, I knew joy to be something that included others, that included the whole world. Joy would have been impossible had it excluded anyone or anything. That much wisdom I was host to.

Today when I think of joy, true joy, I ponder what Saint Francis said in the early 13th century. I do not ponder the words in the article written in that illustrious periodical for which the author got, I figure, up to $20,000, which put her safely this side of poverty for at least a month, during which she could with an easy mind give over that famous intellect to the subject of her exciting assignment: the nature of joy. Let us, however, not forget to add to that finite fee the millions pouring in from global sales of her books (one solid reason the journal pays her so much for her articles, I’d bet). Certainly, she had deadlines, but her success had been achieved. There were no critics to worry about. Nitpickers will tinker away on flimsy essays and publish them on obscure Web sites, but they are no threat. No threat at all. The illustrious writer was confronted with nothing more formidable than the pure joy of spinning a little straw out of all that gold. That apparently did her in.

Saint Francis has an unfair advantage. He did it all for free.

¹ Joy, Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books, January 10, 2013
² True Joy, The Wisdom of Francis and Clare, Translated and Introduced by Regis J. Armstrong, O.F.M. Cap, and Ignatius C. Brady, O.F.M. Cap, Paulist Press