I, Francis: 40th Anniversary Edition with a New Foreword by Jon M. Sweeney

by Carlo Carretto, Jon Sweeney (Foreword by)

Overview

The 40th anniversary edition of an Orbis classic—Francis of Assisi’s spirituality and life explained in an inimitable voice that could only be his own, except that it was Carlo Carretto’s. “I was born in Assisi, in Italy, eight hundred years ago. And eight centuries later I still remember a thing or two…. Thanks to my father’s money and my mother’s good taste I passed my childhood like the classic spoiled child…. Middle class rich boy that I was, I never would have thought that it would be the poor who would be my salvation…”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626984783
Publisher:	Orbis Books
Publication date:	10/06/2022
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	863,424
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	17 - 18 Years

About the Author

Carlo Carretto was a leader of Catholic Action in Italy and served as National President of Catholic Youth from 1946 to 1952. At the age of 44 he joined the Little Brothers of Jesus of Charles de Foucauld in the Sahara. He continued writing up until his death in 1988. His other books include Letters from the Desert.


Jon M. Sweeney is an award-winning contemporary spiritual writer whose books on Francis of Assisi, including The Complete Francis of Assisi and Feed the Wolf, have sold more than 200,000 copies.

Read an Excerpt

Sainthood—Just a Dream? At least once in our lives we have dreamed of becoming saints, of being saints.

Stumbling under the weight of the contradictions of our lives, for a fleeting moment we glimpsed the possibility of building within ourselves a place of simplicity and light.

Horrified at our own selfishness, we burst asunder the chains of the senses, at least in our desire, and glimpsed the possibility of true freedom and authentic love.

Bored by a middle-class, conformist life, we suddenly saw ourselves out on the streets of the world—bearers of a message of light and love, love of all sisters and brothers, and ready to offer, on the altar of unconditional love, the witness of a life in which the primacy of poverty and love would make communicating and relating an easy matter.

This is when Francis entered our lives in some way.

It would not be easy to find a Christian—Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox—who has never identified the notion of human holiness with the figure of Francis of Assisi, and who has not in some measure desired to imitate him.

As Jesus is the basis and ground of everything, as Mary is the mother par excellence, as Paul is the Apostle of the Gentiles—so Francis, in all Churches, is the incarnation, the ideal figure, of the human being who sets out on the adventure of sainthood and expresses it in a way that is truly universal. Anyone who has ever considered holiness possible in a human being has seen it in the poverty and tenderness of Francis, has joined himself or herself to the prayer of the Canticle of Creatures, has dreamed of going beyond the limits imposed on us by unbelief, the limits of fear, beyond which one should indeed be able to tame wolves and speak to the fishes and the swallows.

I think Francis of Assisi is in the depths of every human being, for all are touched by grace—just as the call to holiness is in the depths of every human being.

And yet at any moment in history, Francis, while profoundly incarnate in history, can be placed outside history as well

He can be placed with the first Christians, who, as itinerants in the streets of the Roman Empire, bore with them the joy of a message that was really new. He can be placed among the medieval reformers, as the rebuilder of a Church enfeebled by political struggle and threatened by false compromise. He can be placed in the baroque era, challenging, with his strange poverty and humility, the pride of the clerical class, whose priesthood was that of lords of the people instead of as their servants. He can be placed in the world of today as the prototype of the modern man or woman, sallying forth from anguish and isolation to renew the discourse with nature, with human beings, and with God.

Especially with God.
Let me explain what I mean.

If it is true, and it is, that we are living in the most atheistic epoch of all times, it is just as true that it takes practically nothing to reverse the situation.

In the saturated sea of tensions that surrounds us, a sea prepared and purified by our suffering and earnest searching, it takes only a minimal catalytic factor to provoke a sudden and total precipitation. I have become accustomed to seeing more conversions among the “far” than among the “near”; and when I am invited to talk of God, those most interested are the ones who have always denied God.

So often a “no to everything,” thickened to curdling by the spirit of free and genuine thinking and searching, explodes in a “yes to everything” in the presence of the sudden radiation of the Absolute.

Even matter, heretofore seen as empty of God, who would be useless in any event, suddenly lights up, with this Presence that was always present and now returns to speak to us of its deepest mysteries.

Contemporary atheism, in its immense efforts to liberate itself from a bygone religious culture, is on the eve of a radical explosion of faith. Naked, and more transparent, this faith will have acquired a more vital capability of contemplating the oneness of the All as a sign of God’s Immanence in things, together with the perfect Transcendence of the triple divine person.

But how shall we begin?

How can we find within us the power of believing in the possibility of renewing the world, of finding peace once more and our lost joy—of feeling hope again, of building upon a rock?

We all have a feeling of having arrived at a critical juncture in history, after a long period of a thousand disasters that has come at last to its final agony.

There are those who speak of an imminent apocalypse, of an atomic terror. We may not wish to go that far, relying on our basic hope. But this is a sorrowful hope, that peace may win out over fear, that fear itself may deter human beings from pushing the nuclear button. We feel ill at ease, lined up as we are behind rows upon rows of machines, and dismayed to discover that technology has led us into a dark, unpleasant tunnel where we can scarcely breathe.

And what are we to say when one gray autumn morning we perceive, coming out of the mist, the little stream where we used to gaily splash and play as children, converted now into a filthy current of water covered with foam and invaded by mountains of garbage—antithetical symbol of a prosperous civilization?

The malaise of which we are conscious at that moment is deep, deeper than we first suspect, and it does us more harm than we think.

In the long term it destroys joy, it takes away our peace. It makes us nervous, and it makes us wicked.

We end up by hating everyone and everything.

And we do not like to think about it, so we toss off some alcohol, or light up a cigarette

But underneath, it still hurts. And it blocks off the horizons of life.

If we happen to be passing by the school we attended once upon a time, or the place where we used to work, or even the house where we lived in years gone by, perhaps built by our own hands, with our own sweat and effort, and they have gone to rack and ruin, so much that we would hate even to have to go into them again, then even daily toil takes on the hue of something we do in vain.

Not even the steeples of our churches any longer have the power to speak to us, or inspire us.

The only thing that holds any power of attraction for us now is flight, or the desire to taste some new pleasure, even a dangerous one, and we become available for every sort of forbidden adventure.

Even the good fall short. Mothers spend their days away from their children, fathers are continually having something to do far from home. We have started down the slippery slope, and the boredom we can no longer escape results in dejection, mistrust of society or of our own work, dryness of heart, and the cloying of physical pleasures as a surrogate for values now compromised or destroyed.

A glance at a list of the films “now playing,” a walk by night through a railroad terminal where the waiting room has become a public dormitory for uprooted men and women, a few hours spent in an inner-city dispensary where addicts gather in droves for their methadone, are all we need to convince ourselves that we have come to an historical juncture of exceptional critical gravity, and this to an extent never before experienced.

Like an epidemic that has reached the term of its incubation, evil has invaded the whole body of humankind. It is above, it is below, it is within and without, it is everywhere. A few days ago I revisited the Berlin Wall—that absurdity that lasts and lasts while life goes on around it as if nothing were the matter.

I realized as never before that that wall is but the outward sign of an infinite number of other walls, the walls that divide up people and things. The real wall is within us, and it divides rich from poor, nation from nation, children from parents, human beings from one another, human beings from God.

We are divided, split apart to the depths of our innards, as the Berlin Wall divides Germans from Germans, as Jerusalem is split between Jews and Arabs, as any man or woman may be all alone in the universe around.

Everything is quiet, for the moment—but all ready to explode.

Yes, I truly believe we could be on the eve of the Apocalypse—unless. . .

Here I am up in the Cave of Narni to spend a few months in solitude. Once more I have yielded to the temptation of the desert, which has always been the love niche where I can encounter the Absolute that is God, and the place where truth bursts out in blossom. The Franciscan solitude of this lofty grotto rivals the dunes of Beni-Abbes, or the harsh desert of Assekrem. At bottom they all spring from the same root; for when Père de Foucauld sought the African desert he was doing what Francis had done when he sought the silence of the Subasio dungeons, or the rough country of Sasso Spico at La Verna.

What counts is God, and the silence of an environment where God is near

I sought out this hermitage because it is one of the special places of the Franciscan world, where the Saint sojourned on repeated occasions, and where all blends together in a perfect oneness. Forests, bare rock, the architecture, poverty, humility, simplicity, and beauty, all go together to form one of the masterpieces of the Franciscan spirit—an example to the centuries of peace, prayer, silence, ecology, beauty, and the human victory over the contradictions of time.

When we behold these hermitages, abodes of men and women of peace and prayer and joyous acceptance of poverty, we have the answer to the anguished conflicts that torment our civilization.

You see, these rocks say to us, you see, peace is possible. Do not seek for luxury when you build your houses, seek the essentials. Poverty will become beauty then, and liberating harmony—as you can see in this hermitage. Do not destroy forests in order to build factories that swell the ranks of the unemployed and create unrest; help human beings to return to the countryside, to learn again to appreciate a truly wellturned object, to feel the joy of silence and of contact with earth and sky. Do not hoard up money—inflation and greedy people lie in ambush for you; instead, leave the door of your heart open for a dialogue with your brother or sister, for service to the very poor.

Do not prostitute your labor fabricating things that last half a season, consuming what little raw material you have left; but make pails like the one you see here at this well—it has been drawing its water for centuries and is still in use.

The ill you speak of consumerism is a cover. You fill your mouth with words in order to stifle a bad conscience. Even as you speak, you are consumerism’s slaves, without any capacity for innovation and imagination.

And then . . .

Unburden yourselves of your fear of your brothers and sisters! Go out to meet them unarmed and meek. They are human beings too, just like you, and they need love and trust, even as you.

Do not be concerned with “what you are to eat and with what you are to drink” (Matt. 6:25); be calm, and you shall lack nothing. “Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on his righteousness” (Matt. 6:33), and everything else will be given to you for good measure. “Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matt. 6:34).

Yes, this hermitage speaks. It speaks and says brotherly and sisterly love is possible.

It speaks and says that God is our Father, that creatures are our brothers and sisters, and that peace is joy.

All you have to do is will it.

Try it, brothers and sisters, try it, and you will see that it is possible.

The Gospel is true

Jesus is the Son of God, and saves humankind.

Nonviolence is more constructive than violence.

Chastity is more pleasurable than impurity.

Poverty is more exciting than wealth.

Try to think about it, sisters and brothers. What an extraordinary adventure lies here before us.

If we put Francis’s project into execution we shall be escaping the atomic apocalypse.

Is it not always this way? God proposes peace.

Why not try it?

Table of Contents

Foreword by Jon M. Sweeney vii

Preface: Sainthood—Just a Dream? xiii

I, Francis 1
It Is the Poor One Who Saves 9
A God Who Is Poor 15
The Mystery of Poverty 21
The Merry Company 31 Clare, My Sister 40
This Is Gladness 50
My Church, My Church 62
The Eloquence of Signs 76
The Primacy of Nonviolence 85
The Dark Night 95
It Is Easter 105
Praying with Saint Francis 113
Invitatory Hymn 115
Matins 117 Lauds
120 Prime 123
Terce 125
Sext 127
Nones 130
Vespers 133
Compline 136
With Mary 138

Editorial Reviews

One of the most poetic, most spiritual, and most instructive books I have read.” —Messaggero di S. Antonio



“Carretto’s life, like that of Francis, was a combination of action and contemplation. In his book, I, Francis, Carretto speaks in Francis’ voice, combining biography with what Francis might say to us today.” —Richard Rohr, OFM, Center for Action and Contemplation

From the Publisher