(FOR Paul Adam McKay)
From the book Servants, Misfits, and Martyrs: Saints and Their Stories, by James C. Howell, Upper Room Books, 1999:
“It was the middle ages that saw history’s greatest saints. A pregnant woman dreamed she gave birth to a dog with a torch in his mouth. Her son turned out to be Saint Dominic. . . . .
Another woman, while her husband was abroad at a cloth fair, gave birth to a boy and named him Giovanni. As an adolescent, he affected a French accent and manners, and played the troubador so exquisitely that his friends dubbed him Frenchy, or as we know him, Francis.
His promising future in his father’s cloth business collided with an unexpected destiny when war broke out against Perugia. Francis suited up as a knight for battle with the other young men of Assissi, but the result was disastrous. He was captured . . . and languished, gravely ill, for months. He had visions, perhaps from his fever or perhaps from God (or both), that led him to reassess all he was about. Francis began to pray in a crumbling old church, San Damiano, over whose altar hovered a Romanesque crucifix.
One day Jesus spoke–yes spoke–to Francis from that crucifix. “Go, rebuild my church, for as you can see, it is falling into ruin.” Francis heard this as a call to rebuild the stone edifice in which he knelt, and did so, with his own hands.
(More to come)
