The spirits which created GODSPELL and JESUS CHRIST, SUPERSTAR have not, to my knowledge, inspired a stage play about one of Jesus’s most winning followers.  What a musical it would be: they would probably call it “FRENCHY !” Its hero strips himself naked in the town square and goes off to imitate Jesus, especially his poverty. “Frenchy” then bargains with and tames a wolf. He founds three religious orders. He joins Crusaders in the Near East and debates with a top Muslim leader. He receives in his own flesh marks of the wounds of the crucified Lord. Who would believe such a tale? Whose would ben an imagination wild enough to write it down? Yet it is a true story. “Frenchy,” of course, is better (and more serenely) known as Saint Francis of Assisi (c. 1181 - 1226).

In 1181 or 1182 in Assisi, Umbria, Italy, he was born Giovanni di Petro di Bernardone.  His merchant father was on a business trip abroad and when he came home, he informally changed the recently baptized boy’s name to Francesco. This was an uncommon name, more of a nickname, really, equivalent to “Frenchy.” Francis died in 1226. In 1228 he was declared a Saint by Pope Gregory IX.  A much more recent Pope declared him patron saint of ecologists and all who see God’s manifestations in the beauty of nature. We know him today as Saint Francis of Assisi, God’s “little poor man.”

Both before and after Francis, Church reformers went back in imagination  to the Church’s best days. Those times were usually identified with the earliest years just after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. That church was best, the reformers, Catholic or Protestant, often thought, as described in  the Acts of the Apostles. Or  they would argue that things surely started sliding downhill after Constantine the Great embraced Christianity and made it the leading religion of the Roman Empire. 

And Francis? What was so original about him? Francis agreed that things had once been better for Christians than in the 13th Century. Times were surely best when Jesus was alive and very poor, teaching and healing,  out among the other poor, the lepers, with women and children, with the weak more than with the mighty--showing in his own person how to live. Francis thought the best lived 13th Century life must, therefore,  closely resemble the life of Christ. So Francis prayed for grace to live as Jesus lived: very poor, unmarried, obedient, humble, serving the poor, the despised, the desperately ill. It was very, very hard. But it attracted other young men and women to follow Francis as he was imitating Jesus.

When about 24, Francis overcame his deepest personal loathing and embraced a leper. Also a voice from Christ’s image painted on a crucifix  commanded him to “rebuild my church.” He then began repairing decrepit churches around Assisi. In 1208 a Gospel reading convinced him to embrace evangelical poverty. He began to preach and attracted seven companions. In 1209 wrote a brief rule for his group and went to Rome and shared with Pope Innocent III his vision of poor clerics regularly preaching out among the poor. The pope had been strongly predisposed to say no. But  Innocent then had a dream. In that dream Francis prevented the Pope’s own cathedral church from tumbling down upon him. His Holiness took this as a sign from God and blessed Francis’s command from Jesus to “rebuild my church.” He approved the new Order of Lesser Brothers, or Friars Minor.  Much later, on Christmas 1223, Francis introduced the first known realistic Christmas creche, complete with animals, as a setting for  midnight Mass.

In 1224, during a forty day fast in La Verna, God gave Francis the stigmata, the marks of the five wounds which Jesus had received on the cross. The next year Francis composed THE CANTICLE OF BROTHER SUN. He began to lose his eyesight and his overall health deteriorated sharply. He died October 3, 1226. As monuments he left great poetry, the memory of his holy life and rules for two religious orders both for canonically consecrated men and women as well as a Third Order for lay men and lay women. Between 1290 and 1295 the great painter Giotto, or his students, decorated the basilica at Assisi in which Francis lies buried with frescoes illustrating his life.

Susan W. McMichaels is an Asheville professor and researcher who has recently retold the life of Francis using a conceptual framework provided by the philosopher/therapist Carl Gustav Jung. Her 1997 book is JOURNEY OUT OF THE GARDEN: ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND THE PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION. It is based on many months of research for  a Master of Arts degree bestowed by the University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNCA) and draws upon study visits to Sienna and Assisi.

You cannot discover the historical Francis without first penetrating layers of hagiography, legend, interpretation and reinterpretation. You can read him in many ways: as a man, a Saint to be imitated, or, paradoxically, as a Saint too singular, too extreme to be imitated; or as  your personal guide to the unconscious or, finally,  as an exemplar of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of personal development. Susan McMichaels delivers all the above with mastery. She roots her narrative in 13th Century sources closest to Francis, especially the first of two lives by Friar Thomas of Celano. She also relates Francis to Jung, both as an object amenable to scholarly, Jungian analysis, as a forerunner of Jung’s in discovering methods for achieving personal wholeness and in other ways.

Susan McMichael’s book is a low-key, almost conversational redoing of her Master’s thesis. She leads  readers to view Jung as Francis might see him. Readers also  you see Francis through the borrowed eyes of Jung. We are carried into the dialectic universe of Hegel, of Toynbee’s challenge and response, into the creative tensions of yin and yang and into the late medieval coincidence of opposites. In Jungian terms, an average individual’s persona (or mask) is largely formed by society through repressing his shadow. Personal integration into wholeness by truly extraordinary people is matter of creative conversion. The individual sees with new eyes what he has hitherto feared the most (lepers, in the case of Francis). This event provides a motive for looking deeply into one’s self and then making  a quantum leap to new levels of perceiving and living.

In recent weeks my wife Mary and I have attended with delight two public readings by the author from the text of JOURNEY OUT OF THE GARDEN. In each public reading she selected from different parts of the book. 

First the author spoke of the women in Francis’s life: his Provencal mother, his Second Order follower, the cloistered Saint Clare, his Third Order lay follower, the widowed Lady Jacoba. Other feminine figures for Francis included the Virgin Mary and Lady Poverty. 

In her second public reading, Susan McMichaels emphasized Francis’s literary genius and the depths of his emotions. 

Her splendid, nuanced readings were followed by brisk, competent question and answer periods, first at the UNC-Asheville and later at  Malaprop’s Bookstore in uptown Asheville.  At Malaprop’s one woman said, “I have been a Franciscan for fifty years and I learned some really new things today. Thank you!” 

Susan W. McMichaels teaches in the humanities program of the University of NC-Asheville and does independent scholarly studies as well.
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for Asheville TRIBUNE