The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi

URL:  http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2...

He said: Early in my Jesuit training, if pressed, the most I would have been able to say about him was this: He renounced his father's wealth, founded the Franciscans, loved nature, sang songs, wrote some poems, and undoubtedly died a happy death. (Oh, and he lived in Assisi.)



But as much as I found him a charming figure, my understanding of the world's most popular saint was the rather sentimental one that is common today, as a sort of dopey but well-meaning hippy who talked to birds. As Lawrence S. Cunningham notes in Francis of Assisi: Performing the Gospel Life, such a view is "most completely summed up by the ubiquity of those concrete garden statues with a bird perched on the saint's shoulder found in everyone's garden center." In this conception, Francis was cheerful no doubt, but also a little bland. "Such an understanding is coterminous what I would call spirituality lite."

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/brt7