The Cross of the Response

After Francis heard the voice of Christ speak to him on that autumn day, "go and rebuild my house...," he never mentions the Cross of San Damiano again in any of his writings. Yet the words of Christ never left Francis' heart, and his personal response never faltered. He went forth to see the glorified Christ in every crucified person - especially in the poor, the dispossessed, and the leper. And what Francis effected by the acceptance of his calling was not the sweet and lyrical movement that later poets describe, but rather a gritty grassroots spiritual campaign that transformed the vestiges of a distanced, glorified medieval king into the visible footprints of an imminent Renaissance Saviour.

While Francis was called to passionate conversion by the San Damiano Cross, his response to that call was chronicled in a completely different cross. The "Blue Cross" was commissioned for the lower basilica in Assisi (c.1250), and was probably suspended over the altar of Saint Francis' tomb. Now located in the basilica museum, this cross was the early community's artistic representation of the founder's free response to the call of the San Damiano Christ. The Blue Cross, along with all of the prototypical art frescoed in the basilica (cf. chap. 6), presented the Franciscan vision of God.

Even though the Middle Ages were 1200 years beyond the Resurrection, the Franciscan movement was restating that the God of paradoxes had been born, died and was resurrected. Everything in the old order had been reversed by the new order; no longer was the law an "eye for an eye," but now one must "turn the other cheek." The Lord of armies, the Lord of hosts, had become the Lord of shepherds, tax collectors, and prostitutes. In the midst of the awakened realization of these profound spiritual reversals, the art conventions (that had always been used to set theology free from the abstract) were also being renewed and changed.