How St. Francis Lost Everything and Found his Way

By Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich followed in the footsteps of Italy’s beloved 13th-century St. Francis, walking the road from Assisi to Gubbio that he took when he “renounced family and friends and set out on the journey that effectively defined the rest of his life as a wanderer, seeker, ultimately saint.”

A student of Trungpa Rinpoche since 1971, she is a writer of fiction and nonfiction books. Her latest, to be published by Pantheon in the spring of next year, is about the Inuit subsistence hunters of northwest Greenland.

Gretel likes to walk, taking daily 5-mile hikes hear her home on the central coast of California. “I walk so I can think,” she says.

(Published with the kind permission of The New York Times Magazine.)

The road from Assisi to Gubbio is sometimes a footpath, a horse track, a Roman street and now, a gravel road that winds through a roller-coaster landscape of treeless peaks and deep stream-cut valleys all dotted with tiny farms and fortress-like monasteries where 13th-century travelers could spend the night. It is called the Sentiero Francescano della Pace because it is the path that Francesco di Bernardone – better known as St. Francis – is believed to have taken after he stood naked in Assisi’s central piazza, renounced family and friends and set out on the journey that effectively defined the rest of his life as a wanderer, seeker, ultimately saint.

As I shouldered my rucksack on a cold March morning, preparing to follow his footsteps almost 800 years later, the Piazza del Comune in Assisi and the streets leading to it, lined with religious souvenir shops and bars, were empty except for pigeons and dogs. Bells chimed the hours and robins sang wake-up songs. All over town, Franciscan monks – the order of mendicants that is St. Francis’s legacy – were praying. Soon the roar of cement trucks and rubble pouring from the blank windows of buildings under repair filled the town. Since a series of earthquakes in the fall of 1997, all of Assisi is being restored.

“Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money.” That verse from Luke 9:3 spurred St. Francis on. In similar (if involuntary) spirit, I found that all my money had been stolen – not in Italy, but on the airplane from New York, and though I tried to entertain the joys of disburdenment, I failed. Three runners in Lycra sped by, and a nun talked vigorously into a cell phone clutched to her ear. With my companion, Tony, an Australian with a Franciscan’s hard-won sense of joy, I ambled up the street to the gate that would lead us out of the walled city.

At Porta Giacomo a blind man stood in the shadows. His eyes were blue oceans, and under his feet the cobblestones shone, still wet from the previous night’s rain. A hand-carved cane hung from his folded arms. I stood for a moment, thinking of how St. Francis passed here on just such a freezing spring day, spiritually blind as he began his long journey, and literally blind twenty-two years later when he was carried back through the gate to die.

The blind man began singing and talking as we passed by, the two sounds rolling together into squeaks, grunts and held notes. Then he stamped his feet in place as if he, too, had decided to walk along.

Blind or sighted, it is impossible to know one’s direction. The path is a place where going never ends, where arriving is always happening. It is a wavering that receives our falls, a gash in geology’s stacked floor where our uncertain feet break through to another level.

By the time St. Francis set out for Gubbio, he was beginning to understand that renunciation means giving up habitual thought. Conversion was a “turning around,” implying as well an engagement, a conversation with the world. He had already torn away so much, but there was more to come, and the open road would be his teacher.

He was not handsome, but said to be beautiful with joy. Long-faced, sweet-voiced, with large sparkling eyes, Francesco de Bernardone had oversize ears and eyebrows that drew a straight line across his forehead. Fun-loving and charismatic, he wooed women with the troubadour songs of Provence, spending each year’s 150 religious holidays sauntering through the Umbrian countryside on foot and horseback. He was a libertine with an unaffected generosity and an affinity for nature.

What is it in a life that leads a medieval playboy to sainthood, and where does the path begin? That’s what I wondered as I stepped onto the Sentiero and followed Francesco’s footsteps out of Assisi. I had been attracted to St. Francis because I’m a walker myself and have walked away from a life-threatening encounter with lightning into health. I’ve lived with the herds and now share a house with wild birds – a family of canyon wrens was born in my bedroom, and a sparrow often perches on a rafter watching me write. I’ve loved St. Francis for his unmediated kinship with animals as well as his modernity. He could well have been a 60s radical, casting off convention and everything money can buy, yet every action had something to teach: he was radical without bitterness, vital yet gentle, dramatic – even outrageous at times – without narcissism.

Most likely, he stepped onto the path out of despair – a sense that something was wrong, though he didn’t know quite what. His father, Pietro, was a wealthy cloth merchant who traveled between Italy and France, and because of his love for things French, he changed his son’s name from Giovanni to Francesco. In training for the clothier guild of Assisi, the young Francesco was a charming gadabout, often more elegantly dressed than his clients, and given to lavish spending when it came to banquets.

Every time Francesco started off on a trip, something happened – bad weather, bandits, illness, visions, even revelation – to alter the meaning of the journey. Sometimes the shortest walk brought the biggest change.

When Francesco went to San Damiano, a quiet hermitage just below Assisi’s walls, during vespers one day, the crucifix lighted up and a voice spoke: “Francis, do you not see how my house is falling into ruin? Go and repair it for me!” Francis took the words literally, thinking he was to repair the crumbling walls of the church. To help with reconstruction, he stole a horse and bolts of precious fabric from his father’s store and sold them, then offered the money to the priest at San Damiano, who refused the donation.

When Francis’ father discovered the theft, he came after his son. Francis hid in a cave on Mount Subasio, a mountain that rises almost straight up behind Assisi and is pocked with limestone caves known as the Eremo delle Carceri (hermitage cells). Many times, Francesco took up residence in those frigid grottoes to pray. Finally regaining his courage, he walked back down. He was no longer Assisi’s man about town but a footsore Dharma bum who had traded his dandy’s silk-and-velvet breeches and capes for a sackcloth tunic in the sign of the cross, held in place by a three-knot cord representing his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Once the most popular man in town, he was now viewed as a madman, as “God’s fool.” “Pazzo, pazzo,” his friends yelled. Stones were thrown. His father seized him, dragged him to the house, tied him in chains and beat him. When no one was looking, Francis’s gentle mother, Pica, a deeply religious Catholic who believed her son was on the path to sainthood, set him free.

It was not long before Francis’s father caught up with his son and brought him before the Bishop of Assisi in the Piazza del Comune to be tried as a thief. There, father renounced son, and Francis in turn famously renounced his father. “Our father who art in heaven …” he began. “I am the son of God, not of man.” He stripped off all his clothes. Standing naked, he handed his garments and the purse full of money to his father, then began to walk north to the walled city of Gubbio, where he planned to stay with a friend.

The road to Gubbio is cobblestone, pavement and gravel that gives onto a path through what were once forests and are now open fields. The A.D. 1371 statues of the Eugubine Commune, now called Gubbio, state that the road that St. Francis took, “qua itur Valfabbrica,” followed the river Tescio downstream to the village of Campolongo, then on to a nearby Benedictine monastery, where he stayed the night. In the morning, he discovered a waterfall, where he washed his body free of worldly concerns. Refreshed, he left the river and walked cross-country over snowy mountain tops.

Each step he took represented an inward peregrination. Walking and giving, walking and singing, walking and praying: the path was the proving ground for sainthood, and walking was an ambulation of heart and mind. Just after the village of Pioppo and before reaching Valfabbrica, bandits jumped St. Francis, but he had nothing to give – only his poverty. For the bandits to possess his poverty, they would have had to go naked and divest themselves of all they had previously stolen. Disgusted, the robbers threw St. Francis into a snowy ditch and ran off. Francis emerged singing.

Penniless, sick, frail, he had no address. He had never been ordained. His self-styled vocation, shaky as it seemed at first, was for redemption and liberation, not the medieval alchemy of secrecy and poison, and his natural radiance magnetized those near him. Instead of taking on the monastic rule of the church, he abandoned himself to God and the road. He was God’s vagabond and “geography’s ant.” With unimaginable self-discipline, he kept adjusting to the difficulty of the path, learning to live each moment in total combustion.

Winter snows lay draped in lazy drifts across the Sentiero. I took off my shoes and plunged into the snow. The arches of my feet ached with the cold. After a few moments I put my socks and shoes back on and, with tingling feet, kept walking. Behind me, to the south, Mount Subasio showed its back. It was a black wall crowned with sun-glinting silver.

To walk is to unbalance oneself. Between one step and the next we become lost. Balance is regained as the foot touches earth, then it goes as the foot lifts. A path is made of dirt and rock; it is also a swath of light cut through all that appears to be solid and unchanging. It is a flesh wound that opens deep in the foot of the walker, so that what we are, and where we are going, and the way we’ve chosen to get there, remains directionless; the traveler is forever wounded and lost. Pain, discomfort and groundlessness are the seeker’s friends. Being lost turns into a state of awakeness; it is the same as being found.

As I walked, I tried to feel his path: how the Sentiero had opened him; how the Umbrian landscape became the font of inspiration into which he dipped. As we trekked out of a deep valley between patches of snow, the path was lined with blackberry bushes, genista (Scotch broom) and wild iris. Hayfields were thick with bunch grass and clover, interspersed with wheat, corn, sunflowers, grapes, figs, apples, plums and walnuts.

I tried to imagine the animals darting out from forest cover to amble at his side or flutter around his head, but there were no animals anywhere. So much of this landscape had been changed and desecrated since St. Francis walked here: mountains have been denuded of trees and almost all the animals and birds short. In the distance we saw cranes – what Tony referred to as “Italy’s national bird.” Not the avian kind but the mechanical cranes with which tumbled farmhouses are now being restored. Bereft of life and diversity, the Umbrian beauty seemed surprisingly shabby.

We passed neat-as-a-pin subsistence farms whose vineyards were so old as to look like groves of thick-trunked trees. We walked uphill through Pian della Pieve, then down again toward a waterfall. Somewhere between San Presto and Collemincio, a farmer invited us in for coffee. He was small and wiry with huge dirt-stained hands. Renato had been born in the house and his wife, Teresa, came from a farm just up the road. She had recently suffered bouts of angina and had cut down on the number of cows she milked every day. Her wide, coarse face opened in a beatific smile as she offered us pane di San Francesco – bread with nuts and fruit – and assured us that St. Francis had once passed this way.

The house was a series of small rooms connected by a hallway. Only the kitchen and eating room were heated. Near the fireplace two large hams hung from the rafters. Every once in a while there was a thud and the wall shook. Terremoto? I asked. They shook their heads, no, no earthquake. “It’s the cows. They live on the first floor.”

To embrace poverty meant more than going without. It demanded a way of living that was all-accommodating. St. Francis disproved the apparent contradiction that you could spend your life giving when you possessed nothing. Poverty meant materializing riches from emptiness. St. Francis’ sick body humbled him whenever prayer failed, enabling him to welcome the disinherited and the sick, and share their lives with a pure heart because it was his life too. Between walkabouts he helped care for the lepers, the poor, the homeless. From emptiness came compassion.

We continued up the road. Farmers pruned grapevines and olive trees. Stacks of firewood gave way to stacks of roof tiles drying. A blue tent, distributed after the earthquakes, was still pitched in one of the yards – just in case. Not far from there, a whole village had collapsed during the October earthquake. The yearly custom of baking a certain kind of bread as an offering against natural disaster was overlooked in 1997. Now the villagers, all living in tents and containers, attributed their tragedy to that single lapse. The earthquakes were a result of “things that we have done that are bad,” one resident told us. Who can say?

We walked a ridge line, dipped into a valley, and then trudged uphill again. The air was cold but we were sweating. Farm implements – a hay rake and a horse-drawn ditcher – were 19th century; no sign of the upcoming millennium here. The week before, we had visited the Basilica di San Francesco, which was severely shaken by the earthquakes. The three-story complex sits like a sore thumb at the west end of Assisi, once a place of execution called the Hill of Hell. Now it is referred to as the Hill of Paradise. Deep inside, St. Francis’ bones are locked away in a sepulcher, the immense weight of the basilica – a place he would have hated – weighing down on top of him.

Four people, including two engineers, were killed when portions of the vaulted ceiling fell on them during the second of two earthquakes on September 16. “A few minutes more and the whole thing would have come down,” an injured bystander said. Brother Daniel, a Franciscan friar from Buffalo, told us the earthquake was “a call for us to return to rebuilding our church, as St. Francis did, a spiritual rebuilding in a time of greed and battling.” As we walked under what remained of the Giotto and Cimabue frescoes, Brother Daniel reminded us that the root word for obedience means “to listen.” As we listened, military planes flew overhead in the direction of Yugoslavia.

The walled cities of medieval Italy were fixed universes, bastions of defense, outlets for commerce, built out of fear. By turning his back on the religious status quo, St. Francis began to take the roof off 13th century superstition and violence by sticking to the open road and welcoming whatever came his way. His previous enthusiasms for war, wine, women and song transmigrated into a divine intoxication with the natural world.

Hunted animals sought refuge at his side. Fish refused to die in his hands. A pheasant and a rabbit followed him like dogs, as well as a goat and a hawk. During cold snaps he set out honey for bees to eat. He talked to flowers when they came into bloom. Sparrows rode his body like a moving tree, catching rides up and down mountains. Followers said they saw light wherever he went, that sometimes his body was lifted up in a silver cloud. By seeing into the essential nature of things, St. Francis opened the door for animals to see into him. No skin, no feather, no blood barriers existed. He used mountains and rivers for words and owl songs and bear grunts for prayers.

It would be a mistake to think that St. Francis lived a life of solitude. Quite the opposite. Bernard, Giles, Sylvester, Juniper, Leo and Elias all joined St. Francis, and together they formed a brotherhood, walking two by two around Italy, Spain, France and Switzerland, preaching and praying, meditating in the carceri on Mount Subasio, living together in the little shacks beside the chapel at the Porziuncola in the Spoleto Valley. Francis forbade sadness in his presence, urging laughter and singing, along with a hefty dose of discipline and a stricture to keep their vows. Walking tirelessly, they kicked discursive thought aside (books were forbidden) and lived wide awake.

We walked higher and higher. The Apennine Mountains glistened in the northeast. Under melting snow, green grass showed through, and sun came as bright darts stabbing clouds. On a north-facing slope, waist-high snowbanks stretched across the road: our footsteps through them left black holes, like eyes, looking for the next season.

If St. Francis was hard on himself, he was kind to others. He refused to shake off the icicles that hung from his robes in the winter and cut his legs. Yet when one young follower cried of hunger in the middle of the night, St. Francis didn’t reprimand him for lack of discipline but instead woke the others and prepared a feast, which they spent the rest of the night eating.

Rain came in heavy curtains and undulated across stippled peaks. The pencil-point cypresses were stirred by gusts of wind that bent their tips and straightened them again. If they could write something, what would they say? Two cars whizzed by, then the woodcutter’s truck passed, laden with dried branches for cooking fires. The sky brightened and the sun was suddenly hot. Four gray and black birds the sizes of ravens took turns flying across a hayfield then returning. Rainwater washed back and forth between gathering clouds, then dropped as snow. A chill ran down my back. I pulled my hood up, clasped my hands together and kept going.

We crossed the roiling Chiascio River on a high bridge and walked north. When St. Francis reached this point, he had to knock on the doors of the Benedictine monastery at Santa Maria di Valfabbrica because the flooding river was impassable. The monks, known to be aggressive and rude, grudgingly let him stay. He was lucky that his rapture was not seen as dangerous or delusional; the time had not yet come when the Inquisitors were burning heretics at the stake. A few days later, St. Francis walked north to La Barcaccia, where he crossed the river by pole barge, then continued on toward Gubbio.

Pine wind roared. We were on pavement now. Following a steep mountain road, sheep parted, letting us pass. At Casa Castalda, we turned left and took the gravel road northwest to Colpalombo. The hayfields were steep. They looked like green cloths pinned to a blackboard. What was left of the oak forest was still brown, leafed, dormant, hiding patches of snow that had not yet seen the sun. Under my feet the flinty soil shattered into a thousand arrows pointing a hundred different ways.

St. Francis’s feet must have been callused and torn. The thousands of miles he walked came to stand for the unending inward journey he was making. He believed that physical suffering would bring redemption. He called his own body “Ass” and the donkey that sometimes accompanied him “Brother.” His tireless exertion propelled him toward the truth of the human condition, which is suffering. Each footstep and heartbeat enlarged his capacity to understand.

As we climbed higher the temperature dropped. We took a shortcut through hayfields and trees, then came into a clearing: shoals of clouds shifted among reefs of light; the sky was an ocean and the storms came in waves. I thought of the blind man’s eyes, then of the earthquakes of 1997, of the basilica’s roof sections that fell, the frescoes of Giotto and Cimabue shaken into colored dust, and how this high spine of central Italy kept wiggling its back as if trying to shake something off – a blindness perhaps – to make room for a renewed Franciscan simplicity. I looked up. My mouth must have gone slack: a snowflake alighted on my tongue. Take. Eat. This is my blood …

We stayed the night in a castle that had once given St. Francis sanctuary. The old peasant who greeted us was corpulent and, at 9 a.m., red-faced with wine. He was splitting wood with a dull ax. The interior was frigid. We were taken up three flights of stairs by a young woman who spoke a bit of English. The room’s two immense arched windows faced north towards Gubbio. Had St. Francis plotted his trail from this aerie?

In the middle of the night a wheel of thunder threw hail at the window. Lightning showed the peaks of the Apennines one by one. Far to the north was La Verna, the mountain where the wounds that Jesus suffered on the cross – the stigmata – appeared on St. Francis’s body. Was his experience agony or did the wounds simply appear? And how are we to think of them? Are they real or the result of a collective hallucination?

Three brothers had gone with St. Francis to La Verna, where they lived in solitude in the caves and said their matins on a rocky ledge overlooking the valley. On September 17, 1224, Brother Leo later reported, rays of light fell down on St. Francis’s head, and after, the marks of the crucifying nails in the hands and feet and the lance that pierced Christ’s side showed on St. Francis’s body. I imagine all of La Verna enveloped in light. If Brother Leo told me this story, I’d say St. Francis had been hit by lightning.

The next day I walked in blackness. Storms lifted like hats, then slammed down again. Later, the mountains shone with a strange radiance. We walked into a valley and crossed a frothing stream whose hoarse voice cried out, “This way, he went this way.” We tumbled down, down. Sometimes the river shimmered on our right and our left – a brown god – churning chocolate, white and red. Gubbio was just ahead. In the valley a chemical factory stood on the bank. Pavement began. The way to the walled city took us past more factories, then into suburbs.

Somewhere on this road St. Francis encountered the legendary wolf that had been killing people in Gubbio. When beckoned, the wolf sat at the saint’s feet, lowered his head and wagged his tail. Francis implored the wolf to stop eating people; when he entered Gubbio with the wolf, the townspeople were astonished. Everyone fed him, and the wolf never ate a human again.

Approaching Gubbio, we lost our way. A man with a wolfish face gave us directions. We stayed in a 13th-century hotel near the top of town, from which everything flowed downhill like lava. Some days I thought of St. Francis as a living ember plucked from one of Italy’s volcanoes. These mountains were places of retreat for him: Gubbio, Cortona, Le Celle and La Verna, where his pet hawk woke him for matins. Wandering from mountain to mountain I began to feel his presence everywhere – bringing alive the dormant forests and stone cities that seemed so dead.

Sleep didn’t come easily that night. I was perched on the head of a pin at century’s end and didn’t know how to proceed. The medieval European mind was fixated on eternity and driven by notions of sin and mystery. Now, at the end of the 20th century, we have traded in linear time for the ever-present Einsteinian time. Our weak link is not a Christian tragedy we are powerless to escape but the nihilism of living in the ever-present Present. To find the path through a continuum takes another kind of imagination and tenacity.

All I knew was that the path moved. It was not a solid place but a continuous unfolding. It could be described as a road where everything changes and is made of dirt, stone, space, light, twigs broken by hard winds, indentations where hailstones hit earth, hoof prints, bird tracks and litter from humans passing.

If the path represents the intrinsic poverty and humbleness of all things, it is also a richness, functioning as a lens through which we can see things as they really are, without the embellishment of our ideas about them.

By the end of the week the temperature soared, and a blue haze rose up from the valley, where the farmers were burning pruned branches from vineyards and olive trees. A friend came for us and drove us back to the center of Assisi.

A woman in dark glasses, high heels and a mink coat walked her whippet. Two men, both tipsy, their car doors opened wide, stood listening to a CD of Frank Sinatra. (His real name of course, was Francis.) In the Piazza del Comune, the Irish setter that always lays in front of the confectionary store was gone. Teenagers lounged on the steps of the Temple of Minerva.

By the time St. Francis had reached his mid-40s, his pace had slowed. For the last two years of his life, the stigmata were oozing sores, compounding a frailty already complicated with malaria, malnutrition, tuberculosis, rheumatism and what was probably glaucoma, which made it impossible for him to tolerate light. Brother Elias predicted that he would soon die. The people of Assisi sent knights to Nocera Umbra to bring St. Francis back on the eve of his death. His final ride through Porta Perlici was on a palanquin because he was too weak to walk or ride. After blessing the town that had earlier repudiated him, he begged to be taken down into the valley to his beloved chapel at Porziuncola.

There, his friends came and said goodbye. Ignoring his own ban on being in the presence of women, his last visitor was a woman. Her name was Giacoba dei Settesoli, and she had brought his favorite food: an almond frangipani, which he ate with pleasure. After, his final request was honored: he was laid naked on the cold floor of the Porziuncola to die.

Assisi had originally been called Asceti, which means “a place of rising.” St. Francis died on October 3, 1226. At the moment of death, light shone from his body and the bells at San Stefano began ringing spontaneously. The oak forests in the mountain where he loved to walk were dormant then, as now. I stared up at the endless series of peaks. The white eyelash of Mount Subasio – all that was left of the previous week’s snow – had almost melted. Down in the valleys the fruit trees stood white with blossoms.

Spring weather is capricious, not unlike the way death comes. I thought of the pleasure St. Francis must have felt each time he hit the open road. As it was with Jesus and the Gautama Buddha, the poet Matsuo Basho and the great Ch’an masters of China and Japan, all teachings were given on the move, under an open sky. “We are not so much traveling as just stopping here and there,” Matsuo Basho said. The divinity of a place rose up through the soles of their feet and went everywhere with them.

Walking back to our rooms on a narrow street, Tony and I heard a roar. For a moment we thought it might be an earthquake – the day before there had been a tremor in the nearby town of Gualdo Tadino – but it was only distant thunder, another spring storm passing by.

I paused at the bottom of the stairs. Two parakeets were feeding each other water. Pots of primroses had been set out. The qualities I most cherished about St. Francis were these: inexhaustible tenderness, unconditional living.

A raindrop came out of the dark and hit my forehead – just one. An opening in the clouds revealed stars. I climbed the stairs to my room, cracked the window wide and went to bed.

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