St. Francis of Assisi: Conversion, Grace, & Birdbaths

Fr. Dave Pivonka begins the film Sign of Contradiction by saying that St. Francis has to be more than just a birdbath.

My maternal great-grandfather was named Francis, presumably named for someone before him who was named for St. Francis. My mother was named the feminine variant, Frances, and then passed the name onto me. Aside from that connection, Francis indeed made his first appearance in my life as a birdbath. 

I grew up in a family of surfers six miles from the beach in Delaware. Two feet tall and velvety with algae, Francis stood by the door of our outdoor shower. Handsomely humble, he gazed out and down, a bowl resting in his arms and stone doves perched on his wrist and shoulder. Nearly every summer day, I greeted him as I ran under the billowing clothesline and through the grass to rinse the ocean and sand from my body in that shower. While I don’t recall his bowl being full of water or animals often visiting him, I delighted in the idea of him protecting the birds my mother loved.

My mother’s side is Irish Catholic, but she is no longer practicing. My father had a severe heart attack when I was six that resulted in his heart stopping for a few minutes, during which he believes he met God and was, thankfully, sent back to us. I received my First Communion in the Catholic Church very soon after my father’s heart attack and was given a book on St. Francis. We were not very regular parishioners, and I lacked any true catechism or reinforcement in the faith. My father said an Our Father with me before bed each night, but everything else was piecemeal. With little true knowledge of Christ, St. Francis seemed to function as a stand-in for Him in my mind. My book told me that he spoke of peace and loved every blade of grass–what child wouldn’t be intrigued? I also knew he was the patron saint of animals, and my dogs were the love of my life as a little girl. I decided I adored this guy and was proud to bear his name. 

My true conversion to Catholicism came about twenty years after my First Communion. I now chuckle at the universal image of “St. Francis the birdbath.” Fr. Pivonka makes this statement for good reasons. While he must be more than a birdbath, I also count us lucky as Catholics to have a rich history of keeping reminders of our faith around the home and on our persons. Paloma & Fig Founder Christina Sabo and Happiness Support Specialist Annette Littlefield are sisters, and both have loved St. Francis since they were young girls. Their family heartwarmingly fastened St. Francis medals to the collars of all their pets. Christina says Francis’ devotion to animals is “a reminder that Jesus teaches us to always stand up for and protect the most vulnerable,” a central tenet of our faith.

Francis was many things. It is hard to even scratch the surface of his influence without feeling reductive. Assisi was a relatively prosperous town during his life, which spanned from the early 1180s to 1226. His father was a wealthy silk merchant, and he himself was once a lover of money. Gregarious, charismatic, pleasure-seeking, and not particularly studious, Francis was actually somewhat of a hedonist in his youth. As a young man, he went to war with the rival city of Perugia and was taken as a prisoner for a year. A bout of illness in captivity caused him to reexamine his life, but he resumed his previous lifestyle after his release. After a series of personal encounters with Christ, he was on his way to becoming the saint we know him as today, renouncing his wealth and caring for a colony of lepers. His kissing the foot of a leper is a key expression of his conversion, marking his devotion to the weakest, most ostracized, and most despised members of society. His life, his miracles, his relationship to St. Clare, his penitential nature, and the influence of the Franciscan Order have taken up endless books. His touch healed the sick. He tamed a wolf and spoke to animals. Some accounts say he prayed a basket of bread into existence. His “Canticle of Creation” is but one example of his poetic gift for glorifying God’s creation. Crucially, he was the first person to bear the stigmata. I doubt I am alone in my childhood misidentification of Francis as a “stand-in Christ,” so prevalent is his image in even the secular mind as an embodiment of peace and goodwill. My mother still lights up when St. Francis is mentioned. St. Thomas referred to him as the Alter Christus for the ways his life mirrored Christ, an idea repeated, in a symbolic sense, by theologians and saints for centuries to come. 

For all these reasons, we look to Francis as a prime example of closeness to and likeness with Christ. However, as a Franciscan nun says in Sign of Contradiction, we have a tendency to expect saints to be “sculptures”–birdbaths–when really they are “flesh and blood.” Rather than look to these stories only as examples of a well-developed spiritual life, we can also spend time considering Francis’ past, the intensity of his conversion, and what it took to reach such a life. In The Prayer of St. Francis, we see true sacrifice of self laid bare in brief, simple words. Like us, Francis suffered, searched for meaning, failed, succeeded, surely failed again, loved, lived, and died. It is in the principles laid out in this prayer that he found himself in the light of God. The prayer is one of many gifts we are given that may help us to follow his lead.  

A lifetime away from birdbaths and my beloved dogs, St. Francis is vital to my own conversion story. When the person dearest to me got sober, he seemed to cling to the Prayer of St. Francis even more than the Serenity Prayer. Previously, religion had had little to no place in his life. In the months before he went to rehab, I had started going to Mass on a semi-regular basis. I bounced tirelessly between feeling lost and helpless before God and ignoring Him completely, seeking my own disordered methods of controlling the invincible pain that I’d long ago decided was the sum of my life. Sometime after he detoxed, and I was finally able to speak on the phone with him, he read me the St. Francis prayer. 

Where there is doubt, faith.

It was a still, clear day. I felt like I could feel and hear wind moving in every part of my body. My ears, my mouth, my heart, and my pores filled with what I can only describe as a wind that could speak. It spoke my name twice–Frances, Frances. Nothing else had to be said. The tone of the voice sounded the way a rub on the back feels when you are inconsolable as a child. That tone was so disruptive to my pain that no further words were needed. I knew that I had arrived at the door of a house I longed to live in. A feather on the breath of God. St. Francis’ prayer showed me how to knock. 

May St. Francis’ life and prayer grace all of our lives this week, in ways big or small. 

Writer and editor Franci Revel Eckensberger holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Cornell University. With years of experience as a copyeditor for academics, fellow writers, and various small businesses, she takes pride in maintaining clarity, consistency, and beauty in each client’s voice. 

Franci finds grace and insight in the Catholic Church’s rich relationship to language and invites that relationship to influence both her literary and editorial work. Saint Cecilia and Catherine of Siena continue to play a vital role in her journey to the faith as an artist. She lives in coastal Delaware with her husband.