Not all people have the physical courage of Saint Francis, but some do. I’m an Army brat proud of my father’s service to our country and proud of my son Evan who began yesterday pre-Ranger School training at Fort Bragg. I received just now a copy of this email my brother Sean sent to our father. It deserves a wider audience. Hat tip to Sean Royal Ellsworth, West Chester, PA.

Dad,

I want to share this personal, related story. Last month while boarding a plane in Dallas to fly back to Philadelphia I observed a young E-1 Air Force Airman take a seat in coach about three rows in front of me. Many fellow citizens were thanking him for his service and just being generally accommodating to the men in uniform on the flight (you gotta love Texans!). As the flight attendants were preparing for take off I saw two of them approach this young serviceman and could tell they were asking him for something in particular. It was taking some coaxing on their part so my interest grew then I saw an older gentleman stand up in first class as the young airman walked toward the front of the plane in his combat dress unform. These two men exchanged a heartfelt handshake and I then knew that the older man was giving up his first class seat for him. This struck many people in the plane as they observed this and the older gentleman received some high fives as he made his way back toward the back of the plane. Afterward as we walked toward baggage claim in Philly I shook the older man’s hand and thanked him for his excellent act of citizenship and leadership that made such a lasting impression on so many on the flight. He told me he was a young E-1 Airman once and served 22 years in the Air Force and will never forget these young servicemen and women.

Share these stories. Look for these divine appointments in your day as they can make a lasting impression on those around you. Veterans Day is in 35 days. Maybe you are being “called” to do something special this fall for somebody in your neighborhood or community that is serving our country or has a son or daughter serving.  Maybe next time you are in an airport and you see young servicemen in line for some food or something to drink you tell the cashier to put it on your tab.

That physical courage is not at all on the minds of people who think of Francis indicates how little people actually know his life. He’d been a fierce warrior as a young man. He survived fighting in two wars (we would call them battles today), one that saw the slaughter of his town Assisi in a battle so brutal it turned the Tiber River red. There were a total of nine crusades waged by Christians in the west to try to take back land that had been seized by the Saracens, as Muslims were called at the time. Living in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries, Francis lived in the middle of this period. When Pope Innocent III dispatched the fifth crusade, Francis jumped at the chance.

So off he went with a few of his brothers, setting sail from the shores of Italy across the Mediterranean to Damietta, Egypt near the Nile delta. That’s where the fiercest battle was going on, in that critical port city. The Christians were fighting valorously and were being slaughtered. Francis went to the man leading the Christian forces and asked him permission to go into the Saracen camp to meet the Sultan. The commander summarily denied his request. Francis received that denial and went anyway, his brother Illuminato going with him. They walked straight into the Muslim camp.

As they drew near the Saracen perimeter, Francis repeatedly called out, Sultan! Sultan! Sultan! and because he was calling specifically for the Sultan the guards didn’t kill him on the spot. They thought the Christian wanted to convert and weren’t willing to deny the Sultan such a conquest.

The Sultan’s name was Melek-el-Kemel, and he received the Christian graciously. Have you come to convert? It was the first thing the Sultan said. No, Francis demurred. I’m not here to become a Muslim. I’ve come to implore you to convert to the Lord Jesus Christ.

This stunned the Sultan. Flabbergasted, he summoned his sages. This is what they told him, “The law forbids giving a hearing to infidel preachers. And if there be someone who wishes to speak or preach against our Law, the Law commands that his head be cut off.”

The Sultan knew the law, knew that it bound him to cut off the heads of these two men. But the Sultan said, “I am deciding to act against my own law, because it would be an even reward for me to bestow on one who conscientiously risked death in order to save my soul for God.”

Disarmed by the physical courage of Francis, Melek-el-Kemel asked Francis to stay for a while. I imagine Melek offering my church’s patron saint some tea. Francis declined. The Sultan said, “At least let me send you back with gold and silver and silks and other treasures.” No, Francis declined again, disappointed. There was only one treasure Francis came there looking for and that was the Sultan’s soul; if he couldn’t offer that to God he’d just as soon return home empty-handed. He was hungry, though. He said that he wouldn’t mind a little food. So the Sultan gave him all the food he could possibly need, and gave him a military escort back to the Christian camp. I’m not making any of this up.

On the tombstone of one of the Sultan’s sages who was present at this meeting of Francis and Melek-el-Kemel there’s this cryptic remark. “The things that befell Melek-el-Kamel owing to the monk are very well known.” Ten years after this meeting between Francis and the Sultan, in 1229 Melek-el-Kamel freely remitted Jerusalem to the Christians. Not a drop of blood was shed in this transfer. Francis didn’t live to see that. He had been dead three years.

One of my great lights at Yale, the preeminent historical theologian Jaroslav Pelikan, in his Jesus Through the Centuries, wrote:

If a public opinion poll were to ask a representative group of informed and thoughtful people, “Which historical figure of the past two thousand years has most fully embodied the life and teaching of Jesus Christ?” the person mentioned most often would certainly be Francis of Assisi. That answer might, if anything, be even more frequent if the people polled were not affiliated with any church. And it is probably also the answer that many of his own contemporaries would have given to such a question — or at any rate, those who lived within a century or so after him. For in Francis of Assisi the imitation of the life of Jesus and the obedience to his teachings (which were, at least in principle, binding on every believer) attained such a level of fidelity as to earn for him the designation, eventually made official by Pope Pius XI, of “the second Christ [alter Christus].”

From the family diary of 1997 —

Aaron loves big work trucks of all sorts, just as Evan did. His favorite is a backhoe. This fall he asked Victoria, “Where is God?” She answered, “In the sacrament, in our hearts, in good fun, in church, in heaven.” He countered, “He is on a backhoe, a cement truck, a bulldozer!”

At St. Bartholomew’s [in midtown Manhattan, my first cure], worried at the communion rail that the priest with the paten was passing him by, Aaron asserted in an uppercase voice, “I WANT THE CHRIST! I WANT THE CHRIST!”

At Christmastide he confided, “I want to go to church to see Joseph, Frankenstein, and Mary!” glossing thus the holy family, the gifts of the magi, and Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.

Saying my prayers fifteen years ago in Jerusalem I stuck a note in the wall of the Second Temple built by Herod the Great and completed in the late first-century BC. The famous Western Wall that I stuck the note into is actually the top layer of retaining wall below Mount Moriah. The actual bottom of the Temple’s wall is at bedrock sixty feet below. What’s going on here is a complex of little things, the biggest of them all being this. Micrometeorite dust falls on the earth at the rate of a ton every hour.