On the evening of Saturday 3rd October 1226, Francis of Assisi prepared to meet his most beloved sister. Not Clara, his spiritual daughter, nor any earthly companion of his journey, but Sister Death herself, that mysterious member of his oikos (household) i.e., fraternity, who had walked alongside him through twenty years of radical discipleship, growing ever closer as he grew ever more like Christ. For Francis, death was never the hooded spectre that haunts the nightmares of lesser souls. She was family, woven into the very fabric of his understanding of creation’s being. In his Canticle of the Creatures, that magnificent hymn that poured from his heart like spring water from Umbria’s hills, he had sung:
Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape.
Death was not an intruder at the feast of life, no unwelcome Banquo materialising to spoil the banquet. Rather, she was the gentle Sister guide appointed by the Most High to lead this blind beggar home to his Father’s oikos (household).
From the pivotal moment when he stripped himself naked before the Bishop of Assisi, the life of Francis of Assisi became a gradual but persistent dying. Each day brought fresh opportunities to crucify the ‘old man’, to nail the ego to the cross of self-abandonment, to decrease that Christ might increase. His conversion began with that shocking act of public nudity, casting off not merely his father’s clothes but his father’s world, his father’s values, his father’s dreams for worldly success and not just his father’s but his own. Standing there in the cathedral square, shivering and exposed before the scandalised crowds, Francis declared his ultimate allegiance:
Until now I have called Pietro Bernardone my father. But now I desire to serve God, so I return to him the money and all the clothes I got from him, and from now on I will say ‘Our Father who art in heaven’, not ‘My father, Pietro Bernardone’.
That nakedness was prophetic, for it would bookend his earthly pilgrimage. As he had begun in the vulnerability of nakedness in spiritual birth, so he would end in the absolute vulnerability of nakedness in physical death, asking his brothers to strip him bare once more, to lay him naked upon the naked earth as he prepared to meet the once naked Christ who had been stripped for his sake upon Calvary’s hill.
Between these two moments of sacred nakedness stretched twenty years of what we might call the ‘daily martyrdom of love’. Francis understood, perhaps better than any saint before or since, that discipleship is not a single dramatic gesture but a thousand small deaths, each one conforming the believer more perfectly to the image of the Crucified One. Every morning brought fresh invitations to die: die to comfort, die to reputation, die to the subtle pride that insidiously whispers like the serpent in the garden … ‘I am holier and better than my brothers’ … die to the fear that God’s love might not be sufficient for whatever trial the day might bring.
His embrace of ‘Lady Poverty’ was itself a form of death: the death of security, of the illusion that we can find our identity in what we own rather than in who we are. When he kissed the leper on the verdant plain below Assisi, he died to revulsion, to the natural human instinct for self-preservation, to the barriers that separate the clean from the unclean. When he rebuilt San Damiano with his own hands, carrying stones and begging for mortar, he died to the pride of his merchant class upbringing. When he preached to the birds, he died to the sophisticated scepticism that would dismiss such simplicity as folly. Each stigmata that pierced his flesh on La Verna was simultaneously a death and a birth: the death of Francis the man and the birth of Francis the living icon of Christ’s passion.
The wounds that marked his hands and feet and side were not merely mystical phenomena but the visible manifestation of an interior transformation that had been occurring gradually through two decades of radical self-emptying. The blood that flowed from his wounds was the same blood that had been slowly draining from his ego, his self-will, his attachment to anything that was not God. This is the pattern that confronts every soul that would follow Christ in earnest.
We cannot leap from conversion to glorification in a single bound. Sanctification is slow work, the patient labour of the Holy Spirit Who chips away at our marble hearts with infinite tenderness and infinite persistence, gradually revealing the image of Christ that was always hidden within, that we might become the very embodiment of that image in the manner which the pagan philosopher Plotinus wrote of in 250 BC in his writings, the Enneads:
If you do not see your own beauty yet, do as the sculptor does with a statue which must become beautiful: he pares away this part, scratches that other part, makes one place smooth, and cleans another, until he causes a beautiful face to appear in the statue. In the same way, you too must pare away what is superfluous, straighten what is crooked, purify all that is dark, in order to make it gleam. And never cease sculpting your own statue, until the divine light of virtue shines within you.
First Ennead, Sixth Tractate, Section 9
Francis shows us that this process need not be grim or joyless for even as he died daily, he sang daily, even as he embraced ever-greater penances, he cultivated ever-greater joy. The man who called his body ‘Brother Ass’ was the same man whose laughter echoed through the streets of Assisi, whose face, according to the legends, shone with such radiance that people would cross themselves when they saw him coming. Yet even in this luminous example of sanctity, we find a salutary warning that speaks directly to our age of spiritual extremes. In his final days, as his body prepared for its last journey, Francis made a touching and instructive gesture, and with tears of genuine contrition, he apologised to poor abused ‘Brother Ass’ for the excessive rigours he had imposed upon it. ‘Forgive me, Brother Ass’, he whispered, ‘I have been too harsh with you. In my zeal to serve the Most High, I have perhaps forgotten that you too are a creature of God, deserving of reasonable care’.
This moment of humility offers profound instruction for all who would walk the path of serious discipleship. Francis, who had fasted until he fainted, who had rolled naked in thorns to mortify his flesh, who had denied himself warmth and comfort and adequate food and sleep, recognised in his final days that even penance can become disordered if it flows from pride rather than love, from a desire to impress God or others rather than from genuine contrition.
The body, he came to understand, is not the enemy of the soul but its companion and collaborator in the work of salvation. Brother Ass, that humble, hard-working ‘donkey’, had carried Francis faithfully through twenty years of apostolic labour. It had knelt with him in prayer, had shivered with him in winter caves, had burned with him under the summer sun as they ministered to lepers and preached to crowds. It deserved better than the harsh treatment it had received. This recognition speaks powerfully to our contemporary moment, when some souls swing wildly between the extremes of bodily indulgence and bodily hatred, never finding the balanced path that honours both the legitimate needs of the flesh and the primacy of the spirit. Francis shows us that true sanctity is not found in the violent destruction of our physical nature but in its gentle transformation, its gradual consecration to the service of love.
His apology to Brother Ass reminds us that the ascetical life, properly understood, is not about punishment but about purification. We mortify the flesh not because it is evil but because it has been disordered by sin, prone to seek its good in things that cannot ultimately satisfy. The goal is not to destroy the body but to teach it to find its joy where the soul finds its joy – in God alone.
What strikes us most powerfully about Francis’ final days is not his weakness but his strength, not his fear but his extraordinary courage. Here was a man who, the year before his death, had undergone the medieval equivalent of eye surgery (cauterisation) with red-hot irons to treat the eye disease that was slowly blinding him. When the physician approached with the glowing metal, Francis had spoken gently to the fire itself:
Brother Fire, the Most High has made you beautiful and strong and useful. Be courteous to me in this hour, for I have always loved you.
Even so, when the hot iron touched his face, he had cried out in pain and struggled against the agony (though the legends of course say he remained silent in the face of such suffering). Poor, poor Francis, scarred in hand, feet and side and in pain with the Stigmata, small and wasted through his ascetical excesses, and now badly scarred from temple to eye from the hot iron. Yet now, facing death itself, that ultimate surgery that separates soul from body, he showed no such terror.
Death held no hot irons, no searing pain, no violence. Death was gentle Sister Death, coming to complete the work that life had begun, to strip away the last remaining barrier between Francis and the God he had served so faithfully. This fearlessness in the face of mortality was not the result of natural temperament but of supernatural grace. Francis had spent twenty years learning to die, practising daily the art of letting go, until finally there was nothing left to release but the final breath itself. Death found in him not a terrified victim but a willing partner, ready to dance the last dance of earthly existence.
The fear of death is ultimately the fear of loss, loss of consciousness, loss of relationship, the loss of wakefulness to one moment of endless sleep, loss of all that makes life meaningful and pleasant. But what had Francis to lose? He had already given away his inheritance, his family connections, his social status, his comfort, his security, his reputation. He possessed nothing but God, and God cannot be lost. Death could take his eyesight (already nearly gone), his strength (long since spent in service), his breath (that had been used to praise the Most High with every exhalation), but death could not touch what truly mattered: his union with Christ, his membership in the eternal fraternity of the redeemed.
When the moment came for Francis’ final request to be fulfilled (to be stripped naked and laid upon the earth), his brothers wept to see their founder and father reduced to such bewildering fragile vulnerability. Yet Francis himself radiated a peace that seemed to illuminate the gathering darkness. This nakedness was not degradation but apotheosis, not defeat but victory. So much so was he at peace that he asked his brothers to sing the Canticle for him. This was no morbid farewell but a luminous celebration. Francis refused to depart this world under death’s shadow, for she was not an ominous spectral shadow of foreboding but a sister and a guide to the light. Instead, as he heard the Canticle, his mind filled with radiant images: Brother Sun blazed golden in his consciousness, warming him with divine light; Brother Wind kissed his fevered brow with gentle breath; Sister Water’s soothing murmur calmed his spirit like a woodland stream; Sister Mother Earth revealed her final gift: the colours of wildflowers dancing before his inner eye, the fragrance of herbs sweetening the air, the abundance of her generous bounty. Through song, Francis transformed his deathbed into a threshold of joy. The Canticle became his bridge between worlds, each verse a step toward the Creator he had praised through creation itself.
As he had entered the world naked and helpless, so he would leave it, but now the nakedness spoke not of human frailty but of divine confidence: ‘I have done what was mine to do’, he whispered to his grieving brothers, ‘may Christ teach you what is yours to do’. These words, simple as they were, contained the wisdom of a lifetime spent learning to distinguish between human effort and divine grace, between the work that is ours and the work that belongs to God alone. Francis had given everything – his youth, his health, his reputation, his comfort, his very life, but he recognised that even his most heroic efforts were merely cooperation with a grace that flowed entirely from the generosity of the Most High.
The earth that received his naked form was the same earth whose creatures he had called brother and sister, the same earth that had been blessed by the footsteps of the incarnate Word in which footsteps he sought to always faithfully follow, the same earth that had received the body of his Lord and brother, and the same earth that had been redeemed and made holy at the deepest recesses of its own being when he placed his resurrected feet upon it. To return to it was not defeat but homecoming, not burial but planting, the planting of a seed that would bloom in the resurrection into a glorified body that would dance through eternity with the rhythm of divine love.
Sister Death came to Francis not as executioner but as guide, the final companion appointed by Divine Providence to lead him from the valley of tears to the mountain of vision. She was as much a part of God’s household and Francis’ fraternity as Brother Sun and Sister Moon, as essential to the divine plan as the larks that sang at dawn or the lambs that grazed in Umbrian meadows.
In embracing her without fear, Francis offered a gift not only to his immediate followers but to every generation that would come after – the gift of hope in the face of mortality, the assurance that death need not be an enemy but a friend for those who have learned to live in Christ. His peaceful departure was itself a form of preaching, more eloquent than any sermon he had delivered in the town squares of medieval Italy. The death of Saint Francis matters, not because it was dramatic or miraculous in the obvious sense, but because it was the natural conclusion to a life lived in perfect conformity to the Gospel. Every saint dies, but few saints die with such evident joy, such palpable peace, such unmistakable confidence in the mercy of God. Francis’ death was his final sermon, his ultimate testimony to the truth that perfect love casts out fear, even the fear of death itself.
His example offers hope to every Christian who struggles with mortality, whether their own or that of their loved ones. Death need not be the great terror that haunts our sleepless nights and anxious days. For those who have learned to die daily with Christ, death becomes what it was always meant to be: a doorway, a passage, a bridge between the fragmented love of earth and the perfect love of heaven. Francis shows us that preparation for death is not morbid obsession but joyful anticipation. It is the gradual stripping away of everything that is not essential, the patient cultivation of that interior nakedness that can stand without shame before the searching gaze of divine love. It is the daily practice of letting go, of holding all good things lightly, of remembering that we are pilgrims and strangers in this world, citizens of a better country that awaits us beyond the veil.
As we contemplate the death of Saint Francis, our hearts overflow not with sorrow but with thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for a life that demonstrated so clearly the beauty of Gospel living, for a death that removed forever the sting of our common mortality, for an example that continues to inspire and challenge us eight centuries later.
We give thanks for the young man who stood naked before the bishop of Assisi and chose God over gold, Christ over comfort, love over worldly success. We give thanks for the years of joyful poverty that followed, for the lepers kissed and embraced, for the churches rebuilt stone by stone, for the songs that celebrated the goodness of all creation. We give thanks for the stigmata that marked his flesh with the wounds of Christ, for the Canticle that praised God through every creature, for the Testament that preserved his vision for future generations. We give thanks for his struggles with Church authorities, for his defence of evangelical poverty, for his insistence that the Gospel could be lived literally in every age. We give thanks for Brother Ass, that faithful body that carried Francis through his earthly pilgrimage, and for the wisdom that led him to ask forgiveness for his excessive rigours. We give thanks for the balance he achieved between asceticism and joy, between penance and praise, between dying to self and celebrating the goodness of God’s creation. He died as he lived, embracing all creatures as family, finding God’s presence not in darkness but in the magnificent, ordinary wonders surrounding him.
Most of all, we give thanks for Sister Death, welcomed without terror into the fraternity of Francis’ oikos, received not as enemy but as friend, embraced not as defeat but as victory. Through his fearless departure, Saint Francis teaches us that death is not the opposite of life but its fulfilment, not the negation of love but its consummation, not the end of the story but the beginning of its eternal chapter. Through his intercession may we live without fear and die without despair, knowing that love is stronger than death, that grace is greater than sin, that the God who called us into existence will never let us go.
Praised be You, my Lord, through all Your creatures, especially through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living person can escape. Blessed are those who die in the Lord, for they shall find true peace in the eternal fraternity of the saints. Amen.
Séamus Mulholland OFM