Why St. Francis told a friar to mind his own business

MOUNT LA VERNA, Tuscany, September 30, 1224 AD — Saint Francis of Assisi said goodbye to a hawk early on the morning of September 30, 1224 AD. He was about to leave Mount La Verna. The bird had come into his cell at first light every morning to wake him for prayer. He took a last look at the rocks, the flowers and the trees, too.

St. Francis had just finished a fast of forty days, and he was too worn out to walk. So he rode down on a horse lent to him by Count Orlando. Count Orlando was the lord who had given him the mountain eleven years before.

Two weeks earlier, wounds had opened in his hands, his feet and his side. They were the stigmata, the wounds of Christ. His own flesh had formed marks like nails. They had round black heads in his palms and on the tops of his feet. On the other side were long points, bent back. The wound in his right side was red, as if a spear had pierced it. It often bled onto his clothes.

St. Francis tried to keep almost everyone from seeing the wounds. He wore woollen socks, with pieces of skin laid over the wounds so the wool wouldn’t rub them. When someone asked to kiss his hand, he uncovered only his fingers, and sometimes he held out his sleeve instead. Being looked at upset him. So the friars who lived with him learned to look away whenever he had to uncover his hands or feet.

“What is this, good brother?”

Still, St. Francis couldn’t hide the wounds completely from the friars who lived with him. One of them saw the marks on St. Francis’s feet and asked, “What is this, good brother?” St. Francis answered: “Mind your own business.”

Another time the same friar took St. Francis’s tunic to shake it out. The friar found blood on it and asked what the blood was. St. Francis put a finger to his own eye and said: “Ask what that is, if you don’t know it to be an eye.”

St. Francis worried that a friar who knew the secret would think he was a favourite and tell others. St. Francis feared he would then lose part of the grace he had been given.

Goodbye to a mountain

As Tradition tells it, St. Francis asked two friars to look after the mountain before he set out that last morning. They were the two who were staying behind on La Verna. They begged to see his hands. St. Francis held them out for the two friars to see, touch and kiss.

Then St. Francis got on Count Orlando’s horse, and the friars set off with him down the path. All of them went down with him, even the ones who would be staying on La Verna afterwards.

At the last point on the path where the mountain could still be seen, St. Francis got down from the horse. He knelt on the ground facing La Verna. He said goodbye to it: “Adieu, mountain of God, sacred mountain … adieu Monte-Verna, may God bless thee, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; abide in peace; we shall never see one another more.” A few minutes later, the mountain was out of sight.

The path dropped quickly into the Tiber valley, and people came out of the villages to see him pass. St. Francis was so deep in thought that he didn’t notice them. At Borgo San Sepolcro the townspeople cheered him, and he still didn’t notice. Long after the friars had passed the town, St. Francis looked up. He asked the friar beside him whether Borgo was near yet.

That night they stopped at Monte Casale, above Borgo San Sepolcro, and one of the friars living there was sick. At supper, as Tradition tells it, St. Francis made the sign of the cross over a slice of his own bread. He made it with his wounded hands and sent the bread to the sick friar. The friar ate it and was well.