Go and Repair My House

Swami says, “Most of us, most of the time, are busy with trivialities, not knowing that they are so. It is only when we put them aside and strive to rise to a dimension of eternity which is that of the saints that we really begin to live. Meditation on the lives of saints and their teachings is a potent means of elevating our lives and gaining sublimity.” Sai Sarathi will carry a series of articles on the lives and messages of saints from all over the world. St. Francis of Assisi is the first in this series.

When St. Francis first heard the divine call that changed the direction of his life, he was kneeling in an old chapel, feeling utter despair because he did not know what to do with a life that no longer made sense to him. “Go and repair my house,” echoed in his heart as he attempted to open himself to knowing God’s will for him.

St. Francis had not always been an overtly religious person. Born to a wealthy, successful businessman, he enjoyed many worldly pursuits spending many evenings drinking and carousing with his friends until all hours of the night. At age twenty, his life took a strange and unexpected turn. On his way to fight a war for his country, the enemy captured him and held him in a dark, quiet prison for over a year. After his captors received the ransom that freed him, St. Francis again set off to war. This time, he had an indescribable, super-worldly vision that caused him to return home, disoriented. During his lengthy convalescence, St. Francis developed spiritual yearnings, which worried his father, but intrigued his mother. Shortly afterward, he found himself in a chapel, searching within himself for divine guidance. It was then that he heard the words, “Go and repair my house.”

Taking this command seriously, St. Francis began to rebuild churches. Then, expanding its meaning to a deeper level, he started to play a role in rebuilding the Catholic Church. He established a new order of monks. Within the order, St. Francis placed particular emphasis on living the following spiritual principles.

Joy

The primary spiritual principle he emphasized was joy. Various descriptions of St. Francis life reveal the intense joy that pervaded his life—perhaps a reflection of the strength and depth of his connection to the divinity within. He once explained that joy protected him, saying, “The safest remedy against the thousand snares and wiles of the enemy is spiritual joy.” Often the spiritual life appears arduous and painful, but biographers note that St. Francis’ life made spirituality look like fun.

Francis challenged and redefined traditional assumptions about what joy is. We see this through the explanation of his personal concept of joy to fellow monks. Once, on a walking pilgrimage to a new church, a brother asked St. Francis to describe perfect joy. St. Francis’ reply was unusual. He asked them to imagine that as they arrived at the gate of the church, they were rebuked, abused and left to suffer the night outside in the freezing rain. If, despite their bitter cold and hungry states, they could remember that it is only God who spoke through the person who rebuked them-that would be perfect joy.

Swami similarly advises His devotees to be joyful despite the positive or negative nature of their circumstances. He says, “Above all, it is best that the sadhaka (spiritual aspirant) should, under all circumstances, be joyful, smiling and enthusiastic.”

Unity

Unity is another spiritual principle fundamental to St. Francis’ life. Biographers describe him as someone who strove to bend his own will to God’s will, often becoming so enraptured that he could no longer perceive a separation between the two. His actions also revealed how he felt as one with most of humanity. For example, if St. Francis encountered someone Without warm clothing, he felt the person’s discomfort so acutely that he would take off his own cloak and give it away without thought for whether he could get another one for himself. When explaining this action to a brother, he said, “We receive it only on loan—until we find someone in greater need of it.” Swami also states that this feeling of oneness alone can lead to selfless service. “To earn the consciousness of not-two, love alone is the path. Love means selfless service, which means spiritual practice, which means expansion, self-enlargement, reaching out to the very horizon of being and becoming until all is ‘I’.”

St. Francis’ perception of unity extended beyond human beings to include animals, nature and the whole cosmos. Once, a wolf terrorized a village, repeatedly attacking its inhabitants. Everyone wanted to kill the wolf, but Francis intervened. He approached the animal, communicated with it, then explained to the villagers that the wolf merely needed food to survive and that if they would feed him regularly, he would have no reason to attack them. After following St. Francis’ advice, the villagers found that the wolf left them alone.

In addition to his devotion to animals, St. Francis spent countless hours enraptured by the color of flowers or the appearance of the night sky, losing all sense of himself as a separate entity.

Service and Solitude

Though service and solitude appear to be contradictory principles, St. Francis viewed the two as complimentary and equally necessary. When he renounced his prior life of comfort and riches, he also abandoned his family and the expensive clothing he wore. But soon afterward, an incident occurred that made him realize that the changes he needed to make were far deeper than simply renouncing material things. One day, out walking, he came upon a leper. St. Francis watched his own reaction of immediate revulsion toward the man. Truly desirous of freeing himself from all that bound him—especially his likes and dislikes—St. Francis approached the leper. He physically comforted the man, continuing until his repulsion subsided and he felt genuine love for his “brother.” This incident ignited within him the spark of self-less service that pervaded all his future work.

The theme of service infused St. Francis’ every action. He always brought along a broom so he could sweep the church after his sermon. In his concern for other monks, St. Francis made sure that their daily routine contained a balance of time for service and time for withdrawal into prayer and solitude. Though the monks would periodically go on personal retreats to connect with their inner selves, St. Francis often advised them to live together as if they were householders, assuming family roles. The roles changed regularly, enabling the monks to discover the immense lessons and growth available through relationships. They also came to see that their innermost realities could be experienced and manifested both in retreats and in the midst of discharging householder roles. The shifting balance between serving the world and retreating from it allowed St. Francis’ followers to experience the external world and the internal as equal manifestations of the divinity that pervades all.

Swami similarly suggests that inner solitude and inquiry are partners along with acts of service in the external world. He says, “None can understand the truth of what is outside himself or what the significance of the external world is unless he also understands what there is within him and what the inner self is. All that is outside, external to ourselves, good and bad, is only a reflection of what is contained Within ourselves. Thus, without trying to rectify ourselves, we merely try to improve the external world. It will serve no purpose at all.”

Though St. Francis went on to touch many lives during his time on earth—and afterward—his path was not always easy. After hearing his call in the chapel and changing his life, people responded to his transformation with varying degrees of harshness. The people of Assisi said he was crazy to want to rebuild old churches instead of pursuing his business career. His father showed concern—and often anger—at the change in the direction of his son’s life. Tensions grew between them. When St. Francis sold his father’s expensive cloth fabrics to buy stone for a church, his father lost all patience and dragged him to the local bishop, hoping the bishop could talk some sense into his son. Instead, St. Francis broke free of attachments that bound him to his family, replacing them with attachment to God. He took his last set of clothing, threw it at his parents and declared, “Until today I called you my father, but from now on I can say without reserve, ‘Our father who art in heaven.’”

St. Francis spent the rest of his days serving God and realizing the divinity within. He served the poor, the abandoned and the despairing while continually nurturing his own inner life with prayer and inquiry. His life shows the many important ways he responded to the call he heard to, “Go and rebuild my house.” Initially, he rebuilt churches; later, he rebuilt meaning within the Catholic Church. All along the way, he repaired God’s house within himself as he continually sought—and tried to live—God’s will for him. Paradoxically, perhaps, repairing God’s house within himself allowed him to exert, almost effortlessly, his influence on the external “house” of the church—and, of course, on the people whose lives he touched then and continues to touch today.

~Leslie Laud
New York, USA