What Do You See?
What St. Francis and our modern “lepers” can still teach us about love.
There’s an old story about St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), that wandering troubadour of love who traded fine clothes and family privilege for the rough fabric of compassion.
Before his awakening, Francis couldn’t bear the sight,or the smell, of folks with leprosy. In his world, leprosy was a terrifying, disfiguring mystery. The afflicted were pushed to the margins, forced to live apart, declared unclean by the pious and unlucky by the prosperous. Religious folks whispered that such suffering must be punishment—divine retribution for heinous, secret sin.
And so Francis, like maybe most of us would, kept his distance. Crossing the road, holding his breath, pretending not to notice.
Until one day.
As the universe often conspires, and shortly after his heart began to turn toward God, Francis came face to face with a leper on the road. His instinct screamed, Run! But something deeper, quieter, truer rose within him. He dismounted, walked toward the man, and kissed his hand. Then, still trembling, he offered a few coins for food and care.
That simple encounter shattered something inside him and at the same time rebuilt him—more whole, more beautiful. Later, he would write, “What seemed bitter to me turned into sweetness of soul and body.”¹ In that moment, the wall between heaven and earth dissolved. Francis discovered that God was not tucked away in cathedrals or cloisters, the Bible or sterile doctrines, but hidden in the faces we fear, the bodies we avoid, and the overlooked corners of ordinary life.
He would later write of the Eucharist and the Incarnation, “God hides himself in a little bread. Look, brothers, at the humility of God!”² As if to say: Love’s favorite hiding place isn’t in the lofty or the pure, but in the plain, the discarded, the ones we’d rather not see.
And notice, this wasn’t a theological argument or a well-crafted sermon. It was a lived encounter. Francis didn’t theorize about compassion; he touched it, he experienced it. Beneath the disease, he found a person. Within the person, he met the Presence. What once filled him with revulsion became the doorway to tenderness, to beauty, to God.
That’s the miracle—when an issue turns back into a person. When we stop debating abstractions and start meeting eyes and hearts. That space where our tidy certainties crumble and a real, breathing human stands before us. This is holy ground.
Of course, counterfeit love will always try to sneak in, spritzed with religious cologne. It says things like, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” It sounds virtuous, but it keeps us small, holier-than-thou, and fearful. Pseudo-love can talk about compassion without ever getting its hands dirty, or its heart broken.
Real love,though,the kind Francis stumbled into,disrupts the order of things. It dissolves our categories along with their power: Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, straight or queer, rich or poor, progressive or those who wear red hats. Real love peers past fear and differences, and finds Christ hiding in plain sight—in the faces we’ve learned to avoid.
The image, the likeness of God runs deeper than our maladies, our politics, or our ideologies. It’s more foundational than the stories we tell about who’s right or who’s broken. Beneath the wounds, the fears, the labels, we bear a sacred likeness, a divine spark that no failure or philosophy can erase.
Recognizing the sacredness in one another is where love begins. It’s the confluence of our shared belovedness, the soil from which honest and healing conversation can grow. When we start there, seeing the sacred before the scandal, the person before the position,we can hold even our prickliest differences without dehumanizing one another.
So, who are your lepers? The ones who unsettle you, offend you, frighten you, or simply don’t fit the world you’ve constructed?
Ask for grace to see them through Love’s eyes. Ask for courage to move past the tidy theologies and cultural blindspots that props up your fear. And then, look again. Listen again.
Because it’s often the currents of Love, wild and uninvited, that takes our trembling hand and guides it toward another’s. In the brave spaces of Love we realize that, in touching the other, we have touched the hand of God.
Sola Caritas,
𝞃Michael
¹ Francis of Assisi, Testament, 3, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 1, The Saint, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 1999), 124.
² Francis of Assisi, “Letter to the Entire Order,” 27–29, in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Francis of Assisi, 118.
Mark your Calendars!
ORTcon’26: July 6-10, 2026.
Beautiful thoughts!