A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim

By Abigail Carroll

Who was Saint Francis? Today he is most often a sweet ceramic statue in a garden, a sentimentalized romantic figure. But A Gathering of Larks, containing forty personal letters from Abigail Carroll to Francis, reveals him to be a complex man who lived a fascinating life of radical faith.

These letters—part devotion, part historical biography, part contemporary engagement, and part inspiration—reveal Carroll's curiosity and wonder about Francis. She celebrates his whimsical idealism and impetuousness, explores his spirituality and commitment to poverty, and sometimes even questions him. She also uses Francis as a sounding board for larger questions about the world—and, through her own experience, explores how brokenness makes experiencing redemption possible.

As beautiful as it is insightful, alight with a pilgrim's growing sense of discovery, A Gathering of Larks has both range and depth that will uplift readers and challenge them to better understand this singular saint and how he might speak to and shape their way of living in today's world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Mar 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781467446839

Abigail Carroll

Abigail Carroll is author of Habitation of Wonder (2018),A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim (2017) and Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal (2013). She lives and writes in Vermont.

Book preview

A Gathering of Larks

Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim

ABIGAIL CARROLL

WILLIAM B. EERDMANS PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505

www.eerdmans.com

© 2017 Abigail Carroll

All rights reserved

Published 2017

22 21 20 19 18 171 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-7445-0

eISBN 978-1-4674-4683-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Dedication

For my fellow modern-day pilgrims

Jennifer Decker, Deborah Dickerson,

Kevin Fitton, Leigh Harder, and Manisha Munshi,

whose keen, encouraging feedback has strengthened

this book and whose gift of friendship

has gladdened my journey.

Contents

Introduction

Prologue: The Life of Saint Francis

The Letters

Epilogue

A Conversation with the Author

Reader’s Guide

Questions for Thought and Discussion

Exercises for Spiritual Growth

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A letter bridges distance. It travels roads, crosses borders, and traverses mountain ranges and oceans, carrying the words—and a bit of the heart—of the letter-writer. The letters in this book also bridge distance, but of a different kind. They travel across time, reaching out to a figure whose life was framed by cobblestone streets, feudalism, lepers’ bells, troubadours, woolen tunics, wood smoke, minstrels’ lutes, and crusaders’ swords. Francesco Bernardone, the man who would become famous as Saint Francis of Assisi, inhabited a wholly different world than the one we live in, and yet the echo of his fascinating, at times beguiling, twelfth-century life reverberates through the centuries and speaks to us today.

While many people feel an affinity for Francis all these centuries later, a thick shroud of romanticism threatens to replace the man with the myth. For most of my life, the St. Francis I have encountered has been as garden statuary, prayer card images, children’s book illustrations, and stained-glass windows. In these letters, I attempt to bridge the distance between who Francesco Bernardone really was and who we have made him to be. Each letter is an invitation bidding the life of this holy man from Assisi to speak for itself. Together, they probe his humanness, poke fun at the sentimentality surrounding his persona, and attempt to parse man and saint—getting under his halo, so to speak. If these letters manage to do that, as I hope they do, the point is less to challenge than to inquire. This is not the correspondence of an adversary or a cynic, but of one who is reverently, if candidly, curious—a modern-day pilgrim in search of a friend with whom to share the journey.

A friend rejoices with you when you rejoice, weeps with you when you mourn, and cares to know what is on your heart and mind. Likewise, I have cared to know what was on Francesco’s heart and mind when he wandered the fields of Umbria, kissed a leper, heard a crucifix speak, stole from his father to restore a crumbling church, parted with his clothes in the public square, walked to Rome barefoot, scissored Clare’s locks with a tender hand, attempted to single-handedly halt the Fifth Crusade, tamed a ferocious wolf, underwent failed surgery on his eyes, received the stigmata on Mount Alverna, penned poems and songs that we still sing today, and died lying naked on the dusty Umbrian earth.

In these letters, I explore the spiritual landscape of Francis’s life, and, as with a close friend, I invite him into the spiritual landscape of mine. By sharing with Francis my joys, hopes, questions, and doubts, these letters bridge yet another distance: the vast canyon between the head and the heart. The Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld famously said, The longest journey of any person is the journey inward. How do we embark on that journey? Prayer and contemplation come to mind—study and reflection as well. Indeed, all manner of spiritual disciplines may help. But a simple conversation with a fellow pilgrim is often all the encouragement we need