My Thoughts 04/10/2022
When the Franciscan Study International Study Centre in Giles Lane, Canterbury closed in June 2017, we at St Thomas of Canterbury parish were very kindly given their fine Statue of St Francis.
Unlike many of the statues we see today, it was not surrounded by birds or other animals. The figure of Francis was lifting up a flap in his brown habit to reveal the wound on his left side which was part of the stigmata that he received two years before his death.
He did his best to hide his five wounds from the rest of the world. These were not given to him as a mark of his holiness. St Bonaventure writes:
“Francis understood that he must become like Christ in the distress and the agony of his Passion before he left the world, just as he had been like him in all he did during his life.”
Throughout his life, Francis meditated and followed closely the life of Christ and now in his final years, he contemplated Christ’s passion and death. The marks of the passion caused him tremendous pain but the deeper pain that Francis felt was the indifference many men and women showed to the overwhelming love Jesus showed us in his passion and death.
“So that through faith Christ may live in your hearts as you are planted and founded in love, so that with all the saints you may have the strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; and to know the love of Christ, which transcends all knowledge, so that you may be filled with the whole fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:18-19