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Nor did Francis preach as a man untouched by fault or failure. Rather, he struggled throughout his whole life with the pride and vanity that had made him a teen ringleader (more charitably we might call this trait "dramatic flair"—but all of our brightest gifts have a dark side).

Again and again, in the service both of this battle and of the larger church, he exposed himself to public ridicule: The rich merchant's son begging in rags for the money to build up his neighborhood's broken-down churches. The laughing-stock visionary, mocked by village sages and stoned by children. The man so set on maintaining humility and obedience before his Lord that when he felt himself over-pleased with some compliment he had received, he was known to ask one of his brother friars to tie him and drag him through the city, shouting out the charge of pridefulness so all would know what a worthless fellow was Francis of Assisi.

As Galli observes, even in such acts of mortification Francis's motives never quite sorted themselves out. It was as if he were forever proclaiming: "Look at me! I'm the most humble man in the world!"

Yet, no one can question the depth of Francis's devotion or the tremendous inspiration he has provided to Christians from his day to ours. He applied to the Christian life the same fervent commitment that had launched him into battle as a young man seeking knightly glory (an escapade that succeeded only in landing him in a rival prince's jail for a year, where, true to his irrepressible nature, he laughed, poked fun at his chains, and tried to cheer everyone up).

This reckless wholeheartedness marked everything Francis did. Faced with his father's implacable resistance to his newfound lifestyle of poverty and service, he responded to a summons and went before his father, a bishop, and a crowd of onlookers. There he stripped himself of his clothes, folded them with dramatic deliberateness, put all of his money in a bag on top of them, and handed them over to his father. As he did so, he called out, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: Until now, I have called Peter Bernadone my father. But, because I have proposed to serve God, I say from now on, 'My father who is in heaven,' and not 'My father, Peter Bernadone.'"

Afraid of lepers from childhood, Francis forced himself to clothe them, kiss them, and eventually live with them. Burning with devotion to his Lord, he wept, practiced mortifications, saw visions, and eventually received in his own body the marks of the crucifixion: the stigmata.

I asked Mark Galli what he thought of this best-known of the miraculous signs surrounding Francis's life. Did it really have a miraculous origin? Mark said, "I'm not so skeptical as to dismiss the miracle outright," but added that if it were some day proved that Francis had somehow inflicted them on himself, he would have no trouble believing this either. "I could imagine him in his sleep," he mused, "out of the intense devotion to the Passion of Christ that always gripped him, digging at himself until he bled."

These are some of the complexities of a life well worth faithful screen treatment. We can only hope that if not Gibson, someone of similar vision and talent takes up the challenge of the Franciscan petition and renders Francis's life in the many, powerful, inspiring dimensions that it really had.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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