after Rossellini’s “Flowers of St. Francis”
Not long after these encounters, later accounts tell us, perhaps in allegory, that Francis was walking down a road and met one of these same lepers. He embraced the man in his arms and kissed him. Francis’ spiritual nightmare was over; he had found peace.
—Francis of Assisi: A New Biography
While I was in sin, it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them and I had mercy upon them. And when I left them that which seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body.
—Last Testament of Francis, 1226
We are commanded by the artist
To look: the saint crumpled on the earth,
Dark flower gleaming in the dark, blooming
Under wandering cloud, under ragged branch,
His home, the unlonely wild. The trees that know him
And call him by name. The creatures, too,
Mouse and hawk, ancient enemies, love him,
Keep watch in glade heavy with scent of sleep,
Though he does not sleep. He is a coiled, an agonized spring,
Haggard hunter, less shepherd than sheepdog,
In foolish pursuit the foolishness of his master
Who suffers none be left lost. And look:
No sheep but man hunted,
Man with no name,
Man forgotten by all time, scattered in oceanic ages,
Shuffling in desolate forests, pitch-hearted, black silhouette
Inked over a life built of night. What could reach him?
Young hands on withered,
Saintly tears on incredulous cheeks?
All so much detritus of the world that mocks him.
Every step, every warm hearth, each expectant wife,
Each ringing bell a fresh agony,
A burning icon of the society his sickness bars him.
What can he think, leaving the brash saint behind
To his holy ecstasy, forgotten again save as lesson
For others already long in school of love,
Left, again, to empty rooms of wilderness mansions
And the ghostly comforts of self-annihilation,
Turning, only once, as if something in his smooth stone heart
Had caught for a moment in the infinite net of God
And then torn free.
~
image: film still, “Flowers of St. Francis,” dir. Roberto Rossellini