Renewal

One of the best-known stories of Francis of Assisi concerns the moment when he heard the voice of Christ addressing him from the crucifix in the Church of San Damiano instructing him to: “Go rebuild my church which is falling down.” That he initially interpreted the words literally and began rebuilding the abandoned church of San Damiano only adds to the charm of the story. But it also reveals something important about the birth of Franciscan spirituality: that the extraordinary renewal movement that eventually emerged from Francis’ fuller understanding of these words began with a simple, concrete gesture, an embodied response. It also suggests how far one must often travel between an initial experience and a fuller, more mature response to the experience. It would be years before Francis came to understand the deeper implication of these words. Their meaning grew over time, as he grew in his capacity to respond to them.

We can see a similar process at work in the powerful responses Francis inspired among his early followers and among those artists and writers who struggled to express some part of the mystery of his dynamic spiritual vision. Particularly striking are the many attempts to capture Francis in the moment of ecstasy when he received the stigmata (seen in the work of artists as diverse as Giotto, Bellini, Gaddi, Caravaggio, van Eck, El Greco, and Rubens). These images evoke, in an astonishing range of styles and idioms, a charged moment in Francis’ experience every bit as decisive as the one in the church at San Damiano. In fact, it was a moment so extreme and profound as to be almost impossible to fully absorb by the subsequent tradition. Yet, how different these images are, in both tone and meaning, from the portraits of Francis we most commonly encounter. I am thinking in particular of the image, found most often in our gardens, of Francis preaching to the birds. This too is part of the tradition of stories told of Francis, and it is a beautiful and moving part of that tradition. But largely because of the way it has been produced and marketed, and because of the very success of this image (along with other Franciscan images that have become fixed in the popular imagination—such as the fat, jolly friar), it has tended to eclipse other images of the saint from our imagination, especially the more disturbing ones. We have been left with a static, toothless, and domesticated Francis, one who sits comfortably in a particular corner of the religious imagination, but who poses little threat, and possesses little capacity to fire the kind of devotion and ardor for God that he certainly did in his own life-time.

Perhaps this is part of the phenomenon Max Weber famously described as the “routinization of charisma,” the process by which the original, often-dangerous, vision of a founder devolves into a pale, routinized version of that vision. It can be argued that a certain degree of routinization is necessary if a tradition is to achieve any measure of stability. But such stability can come at a great cost, especially if it means losing contact with the original vision completely. When this happens, it can and often does provoke a crisis of conscience for the community, which must then consider whether the charism that so long shaped its way of life can be rekindled, reimagined. Careful, creative scholarship can make a significant contribution toward rekindling the original vision of a community, especially when it is able to shed new light on the character of the community’s early experience, or bring new questions to long established ideals. The Symposium on Franciscan Spirituality in this issue of the journal, facilitated by William Short, OFM, gives exemplary expression the role such scholarship is currently playing in helping us reimagine Francis and the ideals of the Franciscan tradition. One of the remarkable aspects of this scholarship is its range and diversity. Truly international in scope, carried out by Franciscans and non-Franciscans, committed to a fresh consideration of the entire range of texts and traditions relating to Francis and his followers, this collaborative...