Lux Aeterna

There is more than one world in Assisi, if you believe in these things. I see the earth as it was layered there; the slow creeping climb up through streets paved with clean stones the color of wheat, blocks of white sun on potted flowers and little alcoves of painted stories, San Francesco rising in the shadow. Assisi’s streets are charming, but it has none of the sacred which lies at the top of the hill.

The town ends at the top of the mount, giving way to the the basilica of St. Francis. There is the realm of the divine, and crossing a green lawn I feel a change happening. It is the same shudder of a thought—unfamiliar, but calm—that I am somewhere at a crossing between child and adult, only now this in-between is where a tourist becomes a pilgrim, the cynic a child of God. I am all of these things.

Inside the church it is dim, but not dark. Though it is afternoon and the sun outside is fierce, windows like gentle hands mold the light into softness. There is a soft kind of silence, too; the deep, quiet echo of a basilica is something your ears can hear, a pleasant and continuous breath. We look around at the chronicles of the saint’s life spoken over the walls, painted lovingly by dead men buried in tiny paragraphs of our books and I think, You were alive once. Did you feel this too?

Down, outside and to the northeast of the church, are steps. The great walls of the church hide us from the sun, and I look down these steps and can’t shake the image of Orpheus and Eurydice, those pagan lovers forever climbing up and up. I expect, as I walk down to the crypt, to find Hades at the bottom, but I am wrong.

There is nothing of hell in the tomb of St. Francis. It is dark, and stony, and its beauty is an ache. The walls are colorful frescoes made and remade to look untouched by the thousand years that separates their time and ours, or perhaps—if you believe—preserved only by grace like the fresh face of a long-dead saint. The pilgrims in this tomb do not reject miracles. They place pictures of children, of animals, of wishes and regrets at the feet of God and the crypt of Francis, where his bones rest in a solid column of stone, circled by a halo of vigil candles. People kneel, pray, and weep, but their pain is not unsettling. Instead, I start to grasp a feeling which never seemed to touch me. I recall from some obscure bible lesson the phrase meaningful suffering, only now, it means something.

Climbing back up from the crypt of St. Francis I skirt the whitewashed brick, settling arms and elbows on the wall that overlooks the west, and all of Umbria. There is no other place like Umbria in the sun. Light touches the red earthen roofs of houses, the tops of dark cypresses and bright poppies, the gold and green fields where they curve up blue hills and into a wide sky: light like holy fire, light like the hand of God.

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