Meditations on the Transitus of St. Francis: Go Rebuild My Church

From a Pilgrimage in 2017

Towards the end of his own life, St. Bonaventure wrote a Life of St. Francis which culminates in the Transitus. This was a kind of prolonged funeral procession of his mortal remains from where he died at St Mary's of the Angels to his childhood parish of St. George in 2026 to their final resting place in the Basilica of St. Francis in 1230. During the transitus, mourners were astounded to discover that St. Francis's dead body was wounded with the stigmata, the actual wounds of Jesus Christ mystically visible in his hands, feet and side. The wounds were infused into the body of St. Francis by a seraphic angel during a moment of ecstatic prayer about two years before his final illness. Until his death, no one had actually seen these wounds outside of the brothers who took care of him in the last two difficult years of his life During the the funeral procession through three different churches, the public was utterly amazed at this extraordinary mystical phenomenon. Though many had initial doubts, after seeing these marks of Christ in him, profound conversions shook the whole region. By beholding Francis, they beheld Christ again - the mystery of the Crucified God was represented in the flesh of the Holy Man of Assisi.

This extraordinary grace discloses an important dimension of the Franciscan charism that we need to rediscover today. Namely, by baptism, every Christian is mystically marked by the passion and death of the Lord. Normally, these marks are not visible in the flesh but hidden in our weakness and struggles. Yet the power of Christ over sin and death is meant to be made known through our faithfulness to Him, and whenever it is, this power actually renews the whole Church and brings hope to a dying world. Christ's total gift of self on the Cross, a cruciform love, animates the Christian life so that every Christian might live "no longer [his] own life, but the life of Christ" (see Galations 2:20).

In many ways, St. Bonaventure's Life of St. Francis, helps us understand the deeper significance of these sacred wounds on the body of St. Francis. He has his own techniques as a teacher and loves to organize important theological ideas into tryptics. In the Life of St. Francis, he also structures St. Francis's life in multiple tryptics with each life event having a theological and spiritual truth associated with it. This literary device allows St. Bonaventure to connect the Transitus of the Poverello to the very beginning of his mission. This connection, moreover, opens up a beautiful dimension of the Franciscan charism and the Christian life.

St. Bonaventure sees the Franciscan charism as a tryptic of structure, a rule and teaching. Just as the transitus involved three churches - St. Mary's of the Angels, St. George and the Basilica - so too was there a tryptic of churches at the very beginning of St. Francis's mission. The implication that St. Bonaventure draws out is that Francis became a living icon of Christ even after death because he was personally, intimately and obediently in conversation with the Lord at the very beginning of his mission. This conversation is the foundation for the threefold structure of the Franciscan charism that St. Bonaventure unfolds in terms of a solidarity of hearts that the charism is structured around, a discipline of life that is the basis for the Rule and a contemplation of heaven, the source of prophetic teaching.

The solidarity of hearts that Francis recieves in his ongoing conversation with Christ begins in solitude. It demands coming out of a pit of shame and cowardice, and learning to proclaim the Lord's praises no matter the cost. This is the courage the rallies the Church. Solidarity is a social friendship where hearts are implicated together in a common good. This friendship is meant to be authentic and sincere, and, because of our mutual tendency to evil, this requires great courage -- Francis learned from Christ himself to embrace this courage.

Alone in the Church of St. Damiano, St. Francis heard Christ command him to "Go, rebuild my Church." St. Damiano at the time was actually in ruins, the home of a fearful parish priest who did not really want St. Francis's help. St, Francis himself believed that Christ intended him to rebuild the physical building and after confronting some difficult family issues, St. Francis did just that. Disowned by his father, he set about begging for money and stones, and with his own hands, began to repair the ruins. Towns people, who at first believed he was crazy, eventually came to his generous support, won over by his own generous poverty. A community began to form even as St. Damiano's was restored. St. Francis began to see that rebuilding the Church was more than an architectural feat than one that involved real relationships of flesh and blood.

The next church building to be rebuilt was St. Peter's Abbey Church. St. Francis had devotion to St. Peter and the Apostles, pondering their whole way of life. If the solitude of San Damiano opens up the beginning of a renewed solidarity in the Church, this solidarity is deepened by the discipline of apostolic poverty to which St. Peter witnessed. Just as St. Peter, the prince of the apostles, left everything to follow Christ, so now St. Francis would "not keep gold or silver or money," "nor have a wallet," "nor two tunics," "nor shoes," "nor staff" (St. Bonaventure cites Matt. 10:9). For St. Francis, this meant a life of penance - that is, living by a love that attempts to respond to the Love who saved him from death.

In fact, there were many penitents at the time who felt the need to live a simpler life in the service of the Lord, but they were not organized. Sometimes they were susceptible to false teachers. Occassionally, they seemed disconnected and even disrespectful of those with authority in the Church. Disunity and distrust resulted. They needed someone filled with the Holy Spirit who could lead them into a closer following of Christ.

Rebuilding the Church of St. Peter's opened up a rediscovery of a penitential life under obedience to apostolic authority, grounding its exercise in the lived poverty of the Lord himself who humbled himself and took the form of a slave. It is as dispossessed slaves that Christ sent the apostles to preach the Gospel. St. Francis embraced a rule of life that enfleshed this apostolic self-dispossession so that it could be lived anew in the Church, and within the dynamic of the new solidarity that emerged at San Damiano, this began to attract those who yearned to live the life that the apostles themselves once lived.

The third Church in St. Bonaventure's tryptic of the genesis of St. Francis's mission is St. Mary's of the Angels. The physical rebuilding of this Church is a visible sign of the gift of Franciscan contemplation and preaching. St. Francis believed that Our Lady and the Angels actually came down and visited the site. In deep prayer, he contemplated the light of heaven shining on the spot in a way that drew others to contemplate it with him. He in fact preached words with prophetic power, the kind of power that moved hearts to conversion and to deeper love for one another. This power brought peace and reconciliation. This work starts in the most intimate relationships and then ripples out through society. Indeed, the preaching of St. Francis stood against the power of hell that constantly threatened Medieval Europe with war and conflict.

The peace that Christ gives is the only lasting peace our war torn world has ever known. Christ himself gives it through the ministers that He appoints. Yet, so often, those entrusted with the ministry struggle to be the instrument of peace that Christ appointed them to be. There are many reasons for this. One, in particular, is neglect of the gift of prayer. Prayer, personal conversation with the Lord, is an inestimable gift but it requires a whole discipline of life, a return to the apostolic life that St. Francis lived. Without prayer, preaching lacks the confidence that only intimacy with Christ knows. Once personal and intimate prayer has taken root in the heart, however, one's whole humanity is caught on fire with the love of God. It is this love, a cruciform love, that establishes peace.

To this end, the early friars joined St. Francis with the conviction that Christ was speaking personally and prophetically to St. Francis through the Scriptures. He prayed with the Scriptures, pondering their meaning, confident that God had something that He yearned to say to him through them. When he preached, he spoke the language of the Scriptures so that the full weight of divine revelation could be recieved in the heart, in an intimate and personal way. Intimate and personal prayer is the source of a prophetic form of preaching that changes hearts in the most personal and intimate ways. These early friars became caught up in St. Francis's holy contemplation of heavenly things and the battle against evil that it entails.

A cruciform love ties together the structure of solidarity, discipline of life and prophetic contemplation of St. Francis. The love of God revealed on the Cross also connects the tryptic that St. Bonaventure attempts to relate. He tells of a visionary who had a threefold vision of a golden cross coming out of the mouth of St. Francis. In each vision, the splendor of the cross coming from the mouth of Francis to put the devil to flight. This vision captures a powerful truth: St. Francis preached the Cross with such radiant force that his prophecy (for preaching and teaching, at their best, are forms of prophecy) went out over the whole world dispelling evil. A prophecy is a word spoken with such power that what is spoken actually comes to pass with dynamic force. Grace evokes a response of the heart. If one sanctions this response by grace, the soul is raised above itself and finds a freedom that it did not know it could have. If, on the other hand, one disavows this movement, one's life is forever diminished. Cruciform love, put in another way, demands the response of total conversion of life because this love, revealed by God, helps us see everything that is at stake in this short time we have together in this world.

This year is the 800th anniversary of the Transitus of St. Francis and it is well past time that we remember the love that he bore in his own flesh. The mystery that came through St. Francis's words eventually overcame his whole body - so that the very wounds of Christ mysteriously appeared in his body to renew for us the great mystery of Christ's death and resurrection. His mortal remains, we might say, continued to preach in the transitus even in the silence of death. If St. Francis preached the Cross to dispell darkness for those who needed a word of hope, we too must listen to the Cross in our own troubled times - for the words that Christ speaks from there are the source of lasting peace.

From a Pilgrimage in 2017