The journey to Assisi, 800 years after St. Francis
“Assisi – best spiritual vibrations anywhere I’ve been, along with India,” enthused the mustached British man next to me on the bus to Florence. Pleased to find a fellow anglophone, he chatted away happily, telling me how he’d retired, sold his house in London and moved to Assisi. He hadn’t yet learned Italian but could manage enough Sanskrit to read the Upanishads. A spiritual dilettante. Wonderful. It was 7:30 a.m., I’d missed coffee, breakfast and a train, and my feet, after walking for eight days and 115 miles to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the death of St. Francis, hurt. Yet when my companion gave his verdict on how Francis had transformed his world, my cranky heart warmed to him.
