Reading Francis

Who do you look like?

They say couples that have been together for a long time start to look like each other. I don’t know if that’s true. But I do know that, if not in physical ways, it’s part of human nature that we start to resemble the people we focus our attention on, or the people we spend time with.

I think first of how we talk. My wife has some dear friends with rich Southern accents, and I can tell when she’s been talking with one of them, because the accent rubs off on her. Likewise vocabulary – think about how groups of teenagers who hang out together develop their own shorthand, which is incomprehensible to parents and others outside their circle. (Which, let’s face it, is part of the point.) At work, if you spend a lot of time with a group of coworkers, you’ll likely start speaking in the same terminology. And, of course, if you plop down in front of a TV series with a lot of cursing, you may find yourself dropping more f-bombs than you normally do. Roy Kent fans, you know who you are.

It’s also true with how we dress. Consider how groups of teens who are trying to be counter-cultural seem to always wear similar clothes. Or how even informal office cultures tend to generate similar unwritten dress codes. Sure, there are some pretty original looks out there, but most of us end up looking and sounding like the people we hang out with, the people we watch, the people we follow.

Eight centuries ago today, September 17, 1224, Francis of Assisi experienced something called the “stigmata”. Basically, after a mystical experience, he received wounds on his hands, feet and side that mirrored those of the crucified Jesus. He had been fasting and praying for forty days, asking to know and feel a taste of what God’s love for humanity is like, as well as to feel the pain Jesus felt on the cross. (By the way, how crazy is it that we know the exact day of an event that happened 800 years ago?)

There have been others since Francis who have had similar stigmatic experiences, though Francis is, as far as I know, the first. He mostly kept his wounds secret, except to a few close followers – they hurt, as you might imagine, but he didn’t want them to become a distraction. You can imagine how he could easily have become a novelty, attracting gawkers.

If all this sounds morbid and unnecessarily gory and superstitious, I get it. Maybe, though, rather than focusing on the bleeding wounds that stuck with him for the last couple years of his life, pull back the lens and look at his intent: to be as much like Jesus as possible, feeling what Jesus felt, loving as God loves.

After his death, a legend arose that Francis’ mother was visited by an angel while she was late in her pregnancy, with the message that she wouldn’t give birth until she went to a nearby stable. If you go to Assisi, you can visit that stable, “La Stalleta” – it’s really a little nook of a chapel now – and while there aren’t the first-hand witnesses to this story that there are to the stigmata, it’s an almost-800 year-old tradition as well.

Both these stories – the stigmata and La Stalleta – are reflections of the belief by his contemporaries that Francis tried to follow Jesus so closely that, in some profound ways, Francis started to look like Him.

You don’t have to believe any of that, of course. Regardless, it’s still a good question to ask ourselves: If we grow to look like those who we pay most attention to, who do you look like?