A Man in Love
It is difficult for Christians to imitate and be intimate with Jesus when we view him as a theory and not as a partner in a relationship. St Francis lived as Christ by loving Christ.
“Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.”1
On our daily journey of trying to walk like Jesus, it is encouraging and enlightening to look into the lives of those who were great imitators of Him. One such man was St Francis of Assisi whom I recently read about in GK Chesterton’s biography of the same name.2
Chesterton’s portrayal of St Francis’ life provides a lucid example of what it practically looks like to imitate Christ.
St Francis loved humans and not humanity. He loved Christ and not Christianity. He had an “abstract ardour for human beings” and “he especially liked those whom everyone disliked him for liking.” “For he treated the whole mob of men as a mob of kings.” He had an “unearthly love.”
The Assisiani was “carelessly hospitable” … “he was above all things a great giver.” Chesterton names St Francis’ home “the home of the homeless.” And he speaks of him displaying the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving.
St Francis was emphatically “a man of action” flowing with spontaneity and audacity. “His life was one riot of rash vows; of rash vows that turned out right” … “a certain precipitancy was the very poise of his soul.”
After his father disowns him, his plan to rebuild a church miserably fails, and he loses all his possessions, St Francis is believed to have strolled into a nearby forest and “burst suddenly into song.”
The Italian was led by faith. He took “leaps in the dark.” He was “free from the world” and “as free as the wind; he was almost wildly free…”
He had an undying childlike wonder. St Francis looked at the world as if it were just created. He was “curiously young and clean.” “He was always going home.”
Chesterton repeatedly praises St Francis’ manners - his “impetuous politeness.” St Francis thought of equality as “camaraderie actually founded on courtesy.” “He acted out of an unconscious largeness.” He was a vivacious man and he “never knew the nature of scorn.”
A fascinating trait of St Francis was his spiritual blindness or his “brilliant blindness.” He didn’t see his own virtue. There was “something to which he was blind that he might see better and more beautiful things.”
St Francis was enigmatic, unusual, and a “challenge to the modern world.” “He had made a fool of himself” … “there was not a rag of him left that was not ridiculous.” He threw “a new supernatural light on natural things.” St Francis was “going his own way and doing what nobody else would have done.”
He was “a furnace of glowing gratitude and humility.” Chesterton speaks about a great discovery of “an infinite dept.” “The whole world is hanging on a hair of the mercy of God” … “For there is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.”
St Francis was content. He was “intensely individual and simple” and “a man satisfied with small things.” He had a “passion for simplicity.”
He was patient. We often think that there’s something great we have to do, but sometimes the best thing we can do is nothing. St Francis often had “nothing to do but wait for what should happen next.”
He was self-controlled. His “self-denial was not merely in the sense of self-control.” “He devoured fasting as a man devoured food.”
St Francis was a man of reason.
He was a “soldier and a saint.”
St Francis was “huge and happy.” He walked through the forest, “and behind him was the break of day.” When he lay down and died, “the stars looked down upon a happy man.”
Perhaps St Francis of Assisi’s greatest quality was that he was human. “It is only when we look at him as an ordinary young man, that we realise what an extraordinary young man he must be.” And he displayed the great paradox of being human: “His limitations made him larger.”
One of Chesterton’s main themes throughout his works is the romance of religion. He says, “there is a direct divine relation more glorious than any romance.” And when speaking of the secular world: “They will not believe that a heavenly love can be as real as an earthly love.”
Why do we struggle so much today to be like Christ? Why do we battle to be close to Him? It’s because we don’t view Him as a partner in a relationship, let alone a partner in a romance. A love affair is greater than any theories of God.
How did St Francis act the way he did and remain so close to Jesus?
“He will do these things when he is in love.”
1 John 2:6
St Francis of Assisi by GK Chesterton