The Lord granted me, Brother Francis, to begin to do penance in this way: While I was in sin, it seemed very bitter to me to see lepers. And the Lord Himself led me among them and I had mercy upon them. And when I left them that which seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body; and afterward I lingered a little and left the world (Test 1-3).
It is significant here that Francis experiences God in the midst of the world: in the embrace of an outcast, a poor despised man, in the encounter with social misery that approaches him in the form of an individual person. The world that Francis leaves behind is a particular kind of world, a world that is characterized by heartlessness and, therefore, continually produces lepers. And he enters a different world, a world characterized by compassion that brings the excluded back into the centre. He wants a world which puts an end to any kind of exclusion and enables people to experience God like an encounter, an embrace, a kiss.
CCFMC, Lesson Unit 1, C 2.2
back
print