Rewilding the Word #12

A Story

Yesterday, Saturday afternoon, I went with three friends to a performance by the Oregon Repertory Singers.¹  One of our four is a Tenor in that group. After the concert, we four went to an Italian dinner, where we talked about what we had heard and felt, which interestingly (and I think significantly) ended up becoming a conversation about the nature of Heaven.  

For some reason, as I looked out from my seat toward Tom the Tenor standing at the center of the top row, I remembered a poignant poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) called “Sympathy”, whose last stanza reads:


The selections, in the first half of the Program, seemed deliberately chosen, Spirit-inspired it seemed to me, because they had words noble and important. The pieces made us all feel that we needed to hear those words and to have them sung to us, beautifully sung. I felt coming to the concert that my “wing had been bruised” and “my bosom sore” at this American moment when our public ears are burned and scarred by ugly words, by words spoken with the intent to distort, to demean, to leave us feeling that a thief had broken in and vandalized our soul. I needed that performance yesterday; it activated deep within me“ a prayer sent up from my heart’s deep core."

The concert yesterday did not solve anything; it gave no insight as to why we Americans (speaking generally) are indulging behaviors - alone or with or against others - for which I, when a boy indulging such behaviors, would have been spanked and appropriately scolded by my parents - “We do not allow this in our family.” But what the concert did in a way obvious to me was “wash over” me, or better, it “washed” me, substituting beautiful words for the ugly ones. The concert was not entertainment for me; it was liturgy.


The first piece sung was a choral arrangement of a prayer written by St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226; 45-years old) – now you will see what I mean by noble words.⁵ About this text, an editor and interpreter of Francis’ works writes:

A Text–A Prayer at the Crucifix⁸ in the Chapel of San Damiano (in the Fall or Winter of 1205, when he was 24-years old)


A Close Reading

“Most high, glorious God”– Notice Francis’ effort to find a way to address God sufficient to his experience of God–a personal God Who freely chose to reveal Himself to this young man. Francis at this point in his young life (24-years old) had never met a person who was even close to being as “high” above everyone or as “glorious” as God.

 What Francis is trying to express is what the young man Isaiah sought to express when he also had an experience of God so beautiful, so majestic, so frightening:

Isaiah 6: ²Above him stood seraphs,^10d each one with six wings: two to cover its face,^e two to cover its feet^f and two for flying; ³and they were shouting these words to each other:


⁴The door-posts shook at the sound of their shouting, and the Temple was full of smoke.^h  5Then I said:


Consider the contrast between, on the one hand, a man or woman trying sufficiently to name a person, even here a divine Person, which expresses his or her mature insight into why this person matters, and, on the other hand, a man or woman indulging in name-calling ... and people finding that amusing. It takes hard work, and love, to find the proper way to address a person (noble phrasing; tone of voice; facial expression), to get close to the other’s true name – to speaking it worthily.  And remember what it feels like when a person has had the ability to say you, your name, to summon you, not just to get your attention.  

“enlighten the darkness of my heart”¹³ – I think that it is natural for us to assume that by “darkness” here is meant sinfulness, some sort of moral sickness. But I wonder. If Francis meant “darkness” in this sense, then we might have expected him to name, with humility, the moral failing(s) that he means. He does not. Does it not make more sense that what Francis means derives from his awareness that he is not familiar with his own soul, that he cannot “go within” because he does not yet know how, that he cannot see his own depths?(Remember that this is a prayer from very early in his spiritual awakening.)  He beseeches God to illuminate this “undiscovered country” - his inmost self.  

I have considered Psalm 139 as the point of greatest mystical depth in the Book of Psalms. The Psalmist suddenly is given light see his depths (St. Teresa calls it the “interior castle”), the beauty of it, how much there is to “find” within, and how completely alive and present to him God is there. St. Francis prays that God would illuminate his (Francis’) soul – or his “heart”, to use the biblical word for the “inmost self”, the “hidden self”– so that he can see, and appreciate, what is there.

“faith...hope...charity” – What St. Francis asks God to give him here is not so much “things”, or “powers”, or specific “graces”. What he is asking is that God grant him a much closer, more intimate experience of friendship with Him, to be “a friend of God”. These three famous “theological” or “supernatural” virtues allow us to experience, if you will, what God is like on the inside. Francis is not asking God to give him discrete capacities; he is asking God to come closer – “closer to him than he is to himself”, asking God to make him more available to receive the closeness that Jesus insists that He made possible for us to experience and in which permanently to abide.


An Action

All the great Religions of the world insist that the soul needs to have at hand a collection of holy words/prayers to say, prayers that one has memorized, which one can recite “by heart” (I love this expression). When one knows not what to say to God, he or she can reach for one of these prayers to pray.  

My suggestion is that we memorize, learn by heart, this prayer of St. Francis. About which one scholar remarks:  “Almost all of the manuscripts that contain this simple prayer indicate its origin at the foot of the crucifix in the church of San Damiano. It clearly reflects the struggle of the early years of the saint’s life as well as his ever-present desire to fulfill the will of God. Thus it is a prayer that can be seen as characterizing the Poverello’s¹⁶ entire life.”¹⁷

¹See:  https://www.orsingers.org.

²See:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46459/sympathy-56d22658afbc0.  “Among the latter [group of his poems] is one of his most popular poems, “Sympathy,” in which he expresses, in a somber tone, the plight of Black people in American society.”

* 3:21

³The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Pr4:20–24.

* Ex 12:22j; Jb 9:30; Is 1:18; Ezk 36:25; Heb9:13–14

⁴The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ps 51: 6–7.

⁵“Illumina le Tenebre”, a choral arrangement by Joan Szymko of this text by St. Francis of Assisi.  The prayer offered in this essay is translated from the critical edition of the works of St. Francis of Assisi.

⁶For an account of this incident and its immediate impact on the young man Francis, see: https://catholicexchange.com/st-francis-the-voice-from-san-damiano/.

⁷Francis and Clare, Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, ed. Richard J. Payne, trans. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982), 103.

⁸For a “reading” of this famous crucifix, see: https://franciscanmissionservice.org/2012/10/san-damiano-cross-telling-the-history-of-christs-passion/.

⁹Francis and Clare, Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, ed. Richard J. Payne, trans. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982), 103.

¹⁰The special title that the Church gave long ago to St. Francis of Assisi is the “Seraphic Doctor”.  In the hierarchy of the nine Angelic Orders (articulated by Dionysius the Areopagite in the late 5th and early 6th centuries), the Seraphim are the order/rank of Angels closest to the Trinity, whose very essence if constituted of divine fire, in which case “fire” means LOVE – by love not that they have but by love that each one has completely become.  Notice how it is that we do not say that God has love; we recognize that God is love.

*Rv4:8; Nb14:21

* Ex 19:16g; 40:34–35 1K8:10–12 Jn 12:41 Rv15:8; Ex33:20i

¹¹The New Jerusalem Bible  (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Is 6:2–5

¹²Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, chapter “The Loosing of the Shadow”, page 81. On the significance of names in the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin, and their connection to the real magic of the world, see, for example, Monica Uszerowicz (28 January 2018):  “Before Earthsea there was the “The Rule of Names” and “The Word of Unbinding, ”two short stories published in Fantastic that set up the concepts for the Earthsea realm. At the beginning of “The Rule of Names,” a schoolteacher reminds her class, “You never ask anybody his name. You never tell your own.”  The true name is sacred; its revelation is emblematic of deep trust. Words thwart and create equilibrium. Language is linked to power.”

¹³Pope Francis just published this month (October 2024) what is likely his last Encyclical, choosing as his theme “On the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus”.  It can be found in full here:  https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/20241024-enciclica-dilexit-nos.html
Early in the Encyclical he answers the question: “What do we mean by ‘the heart’?” And in part he writes: “The heart is also the locus of sincerity, where deceit and disguise have no place. It usually indicates our true intentions, what we really think, believe and desire, the “secrets” that we tell no one: in a word, the naked truth about ourselves. It is the part of us that is neither appearance nor illusion, but is instead authentic, real, entirely “who we are”.”

* Jb 10:8seq. Ws 7:1

¹⁴The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ps139:13–14.

¹⁵The New Jerusalem Bible  (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Jn15:15

¹⁶“Poverello” is a nickname the tradition has given to this humble (“little”) poor man of God.

¹⁷Francis and Clare,  Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, ed. Richard J. Payne, trans. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982), 103