“Welcome home!” I announced to the students on my bus as we pulled into the parking lot just a few blocks away from Our Lady of the Angels of the Portiuncula, which was our first stop before going up into the city of Assisi. We were on pilgrimage there with the students from the Franciscan University study abroad program in Gaming, Austria. We had just come from Rome, and many of us were eager for the quieter, slower pace of Assisi in contrast to the bustle of Rome. “This is your spiritual home, too,” I told them, “not just mine as a Franciscan Sister.”
As I led the students around on a tour of the city later that day and the next, I truly felt at home. The feeling was a little strange, considering I do not know a single soul in the city except a TOR Friar I had recently met, and I had no place to call my own in the city except a temporary hotel room bed. Yet, home is sometimes not defined by places and people, but where the heart can find rest. My heart can truly find rest in the places blessed by the presence of my spiritual father, St. Francis.
The irony of feeling at home in Assisi does not escape me. St. Francis himself wanted to live like Jesus, and have no buildings or places to call home. Yet, the whole world was “home” to him because he knew that his true home and ours is in heaven, not in this world. At the same time, he appreciated the benefit of using certain places that were special to him. He even said to his brothers of the little Portiuncula chapel, “See to it that you never leave this place. If you are driven out by one door return by the other for this is truly a holy place and God’s dwelling.”
I was able to visit the crypt chapel of the tomb of St. Francis a couple of times while we visited there, and although the atmosphere was prayerful, it was also distracting with many people coming in and out, some pausing for prayer, others just looking around. I was blessed to have a few moments one of the times, when I could just kneel at the back side of the tomb of St. Francis. I put my fingers through the iron grate to touch the stone which encloses his mortal remains, and rested my head against the grate. Closing my eyes to shut out the distractions, I let myself become aware of God’s presence in my heart and the presence of the saints surrounding me. Though not a physical sensation, I spiritually felt the warm embrace of my spiritual father, and that he shared my delight and joy at being there again. It was as if he were saying to me, “Welcome home.”
-Sr. Mary Catherine Kasuboski, T.O.R.
