In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Today we have the joy of celebrating one of the most beautiful feasts in the life of any Franciscan.
It's the Feast of the Impression of the Sacred Stigmata of our Blessed Father Francis.
It's a very mysterious event, which is recounted by St. Bonaventure of Pagnoregio
in one of his biographies in the Legenda Minor, the Minor Legend of St. Francis.
I'll read to you the text of it.
Two years before Francis, the faithful servant of Christ,
gave his soul back to God, he was alone on the top of Mount Laverna.
There he had begun a fast of 40 days in honor of the Archangel Michael
and was immersed more deeply than usual in the delights of heavenly contemplation.
His soul became aglow with the ardor of fervent longing for heaven
as he experienced within himself the operations of grace.
As he was drawn aloft through ardent longing for God,
one morning near the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross
and was praying on the mountainside,
he saw what appeared as a seraph with six bright wings
gleaming like a fire descending from the heights of heaven.
As this figure approached in swift flight and came near the man of God,
it appeared not only winged but also crucified.
The sight of it amazed Francis, and his soul experienced joy mingled with pain.
He was delighted with the sight of Christ appearing to him so graciously and intimately,
and yet the awe-inspiring vision of Christ nailed to the cross
aroused in his soul a joy of compassionate love.
When the vision vanished, after a mysterious and intimate conversation,
it left Francis aglow with seraphic love in his soul.
Externally, however, it left marks on his body like those of the crucified,
as if the impression of a seal had been left unheeded wax.
The figures of the nails appeared immediately on his hands and feet.
The heads of the nails were inside his hands but on top of his feet
with their points extending through to the opposite side.
His right side, too.
It showed a blood-red wound, as if it had been pierced by a lance,
and blood flowed frequently from it.
Because of this new and astounding miracle, unheard of in times past,
Francis came down from the mountain a new man,
adorned with a sacred stigmata,
bearing in his body the image of the crucified,
not made by a craftsman in wood or stone,
but fashioned in his members by the hand of the living God.
A very beautiful account given here by a seraphic doctor,
St. Bonaventure.
And this gives you a few of the details.
If you were to look at the other accounts,
it would fill in some of the others.
This grace which St. Francis received of bearing the wounds of our blessed Lord in his body
was in a certain sense a grace which he had actually asked for.
He didn't ask our Lord to actually impress his wounds in his body,
but he did ask our Lord for two graces.
One was when he started that special retreat alone up on Mount Laverna.
What were those two graces?
He asked our Lord that he might experience as much as possible
the great love which compelled our Lord to suffer and die for our salvation.
He wished to experience that love burning in his own heart.
And the second grace he asked was that he might experience as much as possible
the suffering which our Lord endured in his passion.
And, of course, these two prayers which he offered up so fervently
were answered beyond his wildest dreams.
He wanted to know our blessed Lord,
not just in the beautiful, joyful moments of our Lord's youth
as he rested in the arms of his mother,
but he wanted to know everything about the life of our Lord.
And he wanted to experience it in his own heart, in his own soul.
And he wound up experiencing it even in his own flesh.
He wanted to be like our Lord.
And that's one of the characteristics of lovers, right,
is that they want to be in one with the beloved.
They want to share everything with the person, with the object of their love.
And that's one of the first things you have to understand
to understand the figure of St. Francis.
This is a man who was very deeply, very madly in love with Jesus Christ.
And so he wanted to be one with him in all things,
in the love in his heart, in the suffering in his soul,
the suffering in his flesh.
He asked for this grace, and he received it.
And of course, as St. Bonaventure comments in this reading,
it was an astounding and unheard-of miracle
because St. Francis is the first case that we know of in history
of any saint who actually received the stigmata in this mysterious way.
Some people have speculated that perhaps St. Paul had the stigmata
because of that passage from St. Paul.
His letter to the Galatians, which we read, is the epistle of the Mass,
where he says that,
henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear the brand marks of Jesus in my body.
You could say, well, doesn't that mean that St. Paul had the stigmata?
The common interpretation of that, though, is that it refers to the wounds
which he incurred in the various whippings and scourgings
which he received in persecution.
In his other letters, St. Paul talks about how he was,
the stigmata, which he received in persecution,
the various mistreatments that he received for the sake of the gospel,
among which he was beaten, he was stoned, he was whipped and scourged.
These are the brand marks of our Lord in his body,
so it wasn't really necessary for him to receive those same brand marks again
in a mystical fashion.
He had already suffered physically for our Lord.
St. Francis was an interesting case where he actually had attempted to,
he spent his whole life, you might say, his whole religious life,
seeking to be crucified and beaten for our Lord,
and it just never quite happened up until now.
He went off to the Holy Land, to the Middle East,
hoping to be martyred at the hands of the Muslims.
And what happened?
He was such a lovable character that even the sultan
couldn't quite bring himself to kill St. Francis.
It tells you something about this man.
Even as he proclaimed the gospel and told the sultan
that if he didn't convert, he'd go to hell and all the rest,
he didn't do that.
The sultan,
he was so fascinated with St. Francis
that he couldn't bring himself to kill him.
So St. Francis returned to Italy all disappointed and deluded
that he hadn't won the martyr's crown.
And you think about the incredible fasts
that he endured throughout the year,
the different penances.
He denied himself every possible bodily consolation.
He even put ashes in his food so that he couldn't enjoy his meals.
He treated his body so harshly
that on his deathbed,
he actually apologized.
He referred to his body as Brother Ass,
you know, the Brother Donkey.
And he apologized to Brother Donkey
for having mistreated him so badly.
He spent his whole life trying to be martyred
and it just never happened.
And so what happened?
You know, God did it himself.
God actually came from heaven
and in this mystical vision,
our Lord appearing under the semblance of a six-winged seraph,
he himself impressed the wounds on St. Francis' body.
Okay?
No creature would do it.
And so the creator did it himself.
And there are all sorts of lessons in this for us, right?
You know, very often we, you know,
we ask God for some particular grace.
We might desire it with all of our heart.
And he doesn't always grant it when we want.
And we might be tempted to think that, therefore,
he's not going to grant that grace.
Or he might not grant it the way that we want.
And we might be tempted to think,
oh, God is deaf to my prayers.
He doesn't listen to me.
He doesn't care about me.
He doesn't want to answer my prayers.
The answer is no.
Whenever God doesn't answer our prayer,
it's not because he's ignoring us.
It's not because he doesn't love us.
It's not because he doesn't care about us.
If he denies us some little gift, we ask him,
it's usually because he wants to open our hearts for a greater gift.
He wants us to give us something more beautiful, more sublime,
you know, which would have been,
which is more beautiful for St. Francis to, you know,
if he had just been, you know, whipped in stone like St. Paul was
or for him to receive this extraordinary vision.
Right?
Where God himself impresses these wounds.
And, of course, from our worldly standpoint,
it's tough for us to understand how that would be a gift, right?
Why would it be a gift for us to receive the wounds of our Lord?
Well, the answer simply is that our Lord redeemed us through his sufferings.
His sufferings were fruitful.
The church is born from his pierced side, from his pierced hands and feet,
from his wounds, right?
As it says in the book of Romans.
As the prophet Isaiah says, by his stripes, by his wounds, we are healed.
And St. Francis' mission was to renew that in his own day.
St. Francis' wounds weren't just ornaments.
They weren't just some pretty decoration for people to admire.
In fact, St. Francis didn't want people to admire those wounds.
He did everything possible to hide them.
Most people didn't find out about the wounds until after he was dead.
But those wounds were, they weren't ornaments.
What were they?
They were fruit-bearing wounds.
But why?
Because offering up those sufferings, offering up his whole life of conformity to the crucified Christ,
he bore tremendous fruit.
It was like the birth pangs, right, of a mother.
Every time a mother gives birth to a child, unless of this day and age they put her out usually
and she can't feel a thing, right?
But whenever a mother gives birth to a child the regular way, those birth pangs bring forth fruit.
They bring her the joy of having a child.
And as it says in Sacred Scripture,
the moment of the birth pangs, you know, it seems like such a horrible, terrible thing.
But after the child is born, she forgets about what she suffered and she just rejoices in that child that she holds in her arms.
Well, St. Francis is the same way, right?
He embraces all of these sufferings with the knowledge that that's how he'll bear children, spiritually, for God.
And what children?
Well, you think of the children that St. Francis has had down through the centuries, right?
The Franciscans have given more saints to the Church than any other religious order in history,
at least if you include the different branches of the order together, the La Femmes, Capuchins, Conventuals, etc.
More than the Dominicans, more than the Augustinians or the Benedictines, all the tremendous Franciscan saints.
If you look at the Franciscan Book of Saints, you know, it's a book about this thick.
There's so many of them you could read their lives over and over again, you still don't remember them all.
These are St. Francis' children, okay?
And how did he bear those children?
Through a life of suffering, okay?
And we need to learn to imitate St. Francis' example by asking God to help us to see the sense of our sufferings,
to give us the light of faith, to open our eyes so that we'd see that our sufferings aren't useless.
They're not a sign of a curse from God.
It doesn't mean that he hates us.
It doesn't mean he doesn't care about us.
Quite the contrary, it means that he loves us.
Those sufferings will bring us children.
If we embrace them with faith and if we offer them up to him with love.
But that's the difficult part, right?
To embrace them with faith and offer them with love.
And so we need to imitate St. Francis by asking for this grace, okay?
If we don't have the courage to ask for the grace to experience as much as possible the sufferings of our Lord,
we should at least ask him for the grace to accept the sufferings that he's willed for us,
to embrace them, to kiss the cross that he offers us, and to offer it back to him with love.
And if we do that, yes, we will bear abundant fruit.
And we'll forget about those sufferings one day because it will bring us abundant joy in paradise.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.