Novena of Saint Francis of Assisi Day One

The Message of Christ at San Damiano 

It is a Catholic custom to prepare for a feast with a novena, nine days of prayer. The feast of Saint Francis of Assisi is on October 4, although he died on the evening of October 3. So today is the first day of the novena to honor Saint Francis.

In 1973, I took the summer off and bicycled around Europe (mostly, France, Italy, and Greece).

One of the highlights was my time in Assisi. One day I went down to San Damiano, the church where Francis heard Jesus speaking from the cross, “Go, repair my church, which you see is falling into ruins.” Francis began to work on the repair of the church.

The church of San Damiano

At San Damiano, I encountered a British Franciscan friar who spoke with me and a few young people. He told the story and remarked that Francis’ response was what the saint needed. 

Francis had spent time as a prisoner of war, after an unsuccessful war between Assisi and its nearby rival, Perugia. He returned a broken young man. After an attempt to join the army in support of the pope, he returned home after a strange dream. He also went on pilgrimage to Rome where he spent time with the beggars at St. Peter’s Basilica. 

Returning again to Assisi, he wandered the countryside, where he came upon the ruined church of San Damiano and experienced the call to Jesus. 

The Franciscan friar explained that Francis needed the physical work in order to be healed. I now wonder whether Francis was experiencing a form of trauma, suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Getting out of himself, doing something was what he needed. 

This made a lot of sense to me – and I see the wisdom of God in calling Francis, the privileged son of a prosperous textile merchant, to begin to heal.

After spending some time at San Damiano that day, I went up to the Basilica of Saint Francis where the saint is buried and where the frescos of Giotto in the upper church detail his life. 

There I heard a Conventual Franciscan friar speaking to a group of pilgrims. He described the event at San Damiano but added that Francis got it wrong. His real mission was to repair the universal Church. 

My immediate reaction was that the friar in San Damiano had it right, not the friar in the grand basilica. Francis needed physical work, needed to repair what was around him, so he could be healed.

The way of healing begins where we are.

Any future mission arises from a faithful response to the small mission at hand. For Francis, this meant hauling rocks to the site and rebuilding the walls of the church. 

By working with his hands, Francis experienced the healing power of God. This was his mission at that moment. Rebuilding the universal Church by living a life of poverty and preaching to the people flowed from his response to the voice of Christ that day at San Damiano.

Can we repair the church if we don’t undertake the simple tasks of rebuilding the church around us? This includes letting God repair us, heal us. 

It is a temptation to think we have to wait for a grand mission to begin the work of Christ in our lives. 

This reminds me of one of the entries in Markings, the notebook of Dag Hammarkskold, the United Nations Secretary General who was killed in a plane crash in the Congo in 1961.

“The ‘great’ commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one — and can all too easily shut our hearts to the latter. A willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice can be associated with, and even produce, a great hardness of heart.... 

“The ‘great’ commitment all too easily obscures the ‘little’ one. But without the humility and warmth which you have to develop in your relations to the few with whom you are personally involved, you will never be able to do anything for the many. Without them, you will live in a world of abstractions, where your solipsism, your greed for power, and your death-wish lack one opponent which is stronger than they – love. Love, which is without an object, the outflowing of a power released by self-surrender, but which would remain a sublime sort of super-human self-assertion, powerless against the negative forces within you, if it were not tamed by the yoke of human intimacy and warmed by its tenderness. It is better for the health of the soul to make one [person] good than ‘to sacrifice oneself for [hu]mankind.’ For a mature [person], these are not alternatives, but two aspects of self-realization, which mutually support each other, both being the outcome of one and the same choice.”

Francis responded to the immediate need – and thus opened himself to a mission larger than himself.

Where is God calling us – in little missions of our daily lives– to serve, and to let God repair us, the Church, and the world?

San Damiano in the mural of St. Clare in the church of Dulce Nombre de Copán, Honduras