Read On the Road with Francis of Assisi for Free Online Page B

Franciscan hermitage consists of seven crude and tiny wooden cells, each barely five feet long and wide, that Francis and his friars built along the edge of the mountain next to a twelfth-century chapel dedicated to St. Catherine of Alexandria. The cells are not gussied up, as are so many of the Franciscan sites in Assisi, but are as simple and stark as the life Francis set out to live. It is easy to imagine him here, stooping slightly to enter the four-foot-high door, sleeping on the wooden plank that remains in one of the cells, looking out the small casement window to nothing but sky. How much farther from the “world,” as Francis called it, could he get?
    He is just as present in the “Sacred Grove” outside the convent, where we follow a path through a stand of giant ilex whose roots radiate aboveground, some high enough to sit on, for at least thirty feet. The ancient Romans decreed the mountain a holy place because of these trees and limited their cutting to one day a year. A replica of the third-century B.C. order carved in stone just inside the entrance to the Sacred Grove (the original is in the Archaeological Museum in Spoleto) warns in archaic Latin that anyone disobeying the order must pay a fine and sacrifice an ox to Jove.
    Francis would have approved of the Roman sentiment to protect the trees, though he would also have championed the protection of “Brother” Ox. I feel much closer to Francis in this natural sanctuary of peace and beauty, as I would in all the hermitages we visit, than I do in the hill towns, including Spoleto and even Assisi. The old towns, though beautifully preserved for the most part, are up-to-date communities where the residents watch television, park their cars, talk on their cell phones. It is easier to picture Francis in the more ageless surroundings of nature, praying without interruption or distraction and walking with his friars under the canopy of the trees.
    The sound of guitar music drifting out of the convent lures us back into the courtyard. A friar named Angelo is on his way to the 6:00 P.M. Dominus prayers and invites us to accompany him. Regretfully, we decline. The sun is setting in brilliant streaks of burnt orange, and we have to navigate back down the narrow, winding mountain road to Spoleto. But we can’t help lingering outside the window of the little building as the friars inside begin to sing a chant—“Alleluia . . . alleluia”—the same chant Francis and his friars might have intoned here more than eight centuries ago.
    Francis was not feeling as harmonious when he was well enough to return to Assisi from Spoleto in the spring of 1205. Gone was his dream of becoming a knight, and he had, as yet, no other dream to replace it. He evidently sold his armor en route and arrived home, most probably, in humiliation. Celano does not record Pietro Bernadone’s reaction to his son returning without the glory and status of knighthood—and without the armor he had paid so dearly for. The assumption has to be that Pietro was furious at his son, who presumably pocketed at least some of the money for the armor, because soon after he arrived home Francis was back out on the street with a full purse, entertaining his friends.
    Francis was such a soft touch it seems inevitable that, soon after he returned from Spoleto, his friends chose him to be “king” of Assisi’s revels, a traditional summerlong debauch of eating, drinking, and carousing—which Francis bankrolled. “He was chosen by them to be their leader, for since they had often experienced his liberality, they knew without a doubt that he would pay the expenses for them all,” Celano writes. It was out of the “obligations of courtesy,” Celano claims, that Francis hosted one final “sumptuous banquet, doubled the dainty foods; filled to vomiting with these things, they defiled the streets with drunken singing.”
    But something happened to Francis that early summer night that began his conversion