On the Road with Francis of Assisi by Linda Bird Francke Page A

hold his nose.”
    It is not surprising, then, that the story of Francis and the leper he encountered on the road just outside Assisi became one of the legendary turning points of his conversion. In one of the agonizing sessions in the cave outside Assisi during which he’d pleaded with God to tell him what do, God had evidently given him an answer in the form of a riddle: “O Francis, if you want to know my will, you must hate and despise all that which hitherto your body has loved and desired to possess,” recounts the
Legend of the Three Companions.
“Once you begin to do this, all that formerly seemed sweet and pleasant to you will become bitter and unbearable; and instead, the things that formerly made you shudder will bring you great sweetness and content.”
    So, coming face-to-face with the leper, the source of his greatest shudder, really put it to Francis. He knew what he wanted to do, but this time, remembering God’s admonition, he did not flee from the shrouded, stinking, rattle-shaking miserable or turn his face or hold his nose. “Though the leper caused him no small disgust and horror,” records Celano, “nevertheless, lest like a transgressor of a commandment he should break his given word, he got off the horse and prepared to kiss the leper.”
    Celano then adds a mystical dimension to the encounter, writing that when Francis remounted his horse and looked back at the leper, “though the plain lay open and clear on all sides, and there were no obstacles about, he could not see the leper anywhere.” Whatever the truth of this story, the historical reality is that for the rest of his life Francis would seek out leprosariums and lavish attention on their wretched inmates with such intimacy that it is widely believed he eventually caught the disease. “He washed all the filth off them and even cleaned out the pus of their sores,” writes Celano.
    Francis evidently saw lepers as a gift sent to him by God as a test of his humility. In his Testament, written shortly before he died, Francis said: “When I was yet in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers, and the Lord led me among them and I showed mercy to them.” His ongoing dedication to lepers would play a central role not only in his life but also in the lives of others who wanted to join his order. “When postulants presented themselves, whether nobles or commoners, they were forewarned that among other things they would have to serve the lepers and live in their hospitals,” records the
Legend of Perugia.
    We drive the short distance from Assisi to the site of one of those hospitals, San Salvatore della Parte, now a rather elegant, privately owned building called the Casa Gualdi. It sits near a crossroads on the old and well-traveled Via Francesca, the Road of the French, so named because it was the trade and pilgrimage route between Assisi, Rome, and France. But aside from a plaque on the building identifying it as a historic Franciscan site, there is nothing to suggest the suffering of the medieval lepers who were confined there, or the role lepers played in changing Francis’s life. “Strengthened by God’s grace, he was enabled to obey the command and to love what he had hated and to abhor what he had hitherto wrongly loved,” notes the
Legend of the Three Companions.
    It was the next directive from on high, however, in this same year of 1205, that started the sequence of events that would scandalize Assisi and catapult Francis along the road to sainthood. This one took place in a small, half-ruined, twelfth-century church named San Damiano, less than a mile from Assisi, tended by an old, itinerant priest. It was not the priest who transformed Francis the day he wandered into San Damiano, but the twelfth-century Byzantine cross, painted by a Syrian monk, that hung over the altar. In one of the most critical moments in Francis’s life, re-created by Giotto in Assisi’s basilica, the crucified Jesus depicted on the cross spoke