Silk and St. Francis

Michael Straight · 25 Jan 2003, 01:54 · from urth-v0301.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: (urth) Silk and St. Francis
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 20:54:24 -0500 (EST)
Message-ID: <urth-v0301-2811 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0301/2811.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Waay back on Wed, 23 Oct 2002, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

> > Here's a connection I've never teased out before: Silk is (in
> > part) St. Francis of Assisi, who lived from 1181 to 1226, in
> > Umbria;
>
> Yes ... his preaching to animals (and birds in particular)
> should make that clear.

There's a *much* stronger connection.

According to G.K. Chesterton's biography of St. Francis, Francis began his
career when he heard a voice saying to him, "Francis, seest thou not that
my house is in ruins?  Go and restore it for me."

Chesterton:  "Francis sprang up and went...In the coarse conventional
language of the uncomprehending world, he stole.  From his own
enthusiastic point of view, he extended to his venerable father, Peter
Bernardone, the exquisite excitement and inestimable privilege of
assisting, more or less unconsciously, in the rebuilding of St. Damian's
Church."

So Francis takes the vision too literally, thinks he's supposed to rebuild
a particular run-down church building, tries to steal money to do it but
gets caught and gets in trouble.  Then he goes around begging for stones
to rebuild various churches.  Only later does he seem to realize that he
was being called to love, inspire, and thus help restore the people who
are the Church, rather than saving the buildings they meet in.

-Rostrum

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net