St. Francis: Spinning, off balance, but onto a new path

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 10, 2025

I hadn’t read The Little Flowers of Saint Francis* for a long time—probably in the neighborhood of forty-five years—when the President of Trinity Communications apparently saw the need to give me a copy for my birthday a few months ago. The book is doubtless a chronicle of holiness, but it is interspersed with such zany forms of spiritual testing and perception as to almost beggar belief. In the eleventh of a series of very brief chapters, for example, we learn “How St. Francis Made Brother Masseo Twirl Around”.

These two Franciscans were walking in Tuscany, Brother Masseo accompanying his superior St. Francis, who apparently valued the former’s company because of the “help which he gave him in his raptures by dealing with people and hiding him from them, so that they should not disturb him.” But on this occasion, they came to a crossroad with signs to Siena, Florence and Arezzo, and they did not know which option would be best to choose:

	Masseo:	Father, which road should we take?
	Francis:	We will take the road God wants us to take.
	Masseo:	How will we be able to know God’s will?
	Francis:	By the sign I will show you. Now under the merit of holy obedience I command you to twirl around in this crossroad, right where you are standing, just as children do, and not to stop turning until I tell you.

So Brother Masseo twirled and twirled, sometimes becoming dizzy enough to lose his balance and fall to the ground, until Francis said: “Stand still! Don’t move.” Then Francis asked him, “What direction are you facing?” And Brother Masseo answered, “Toward Siena.” And St. Francis concluded: “That is the road God wants us to take.”

Now, it turned out that there were warring factions in Siena, and Saint Francis was able to make peace among them and restore a true Christian harmony to the town. But he and Brother Masseo had been staying with the bishop, and under Francis’ direction, they rose early after they had helped all they could and left without either saying goodbye or thanking the bishop for his hospitality. Understandably, Brother Masseo considered this sudden departure to be rash and discourteous, so he began to judge Francis in his heart.

Fortunately, Masseo sensed an interior rebuke in his “murmuring against what was clearly the will of God.” Moreover, he saw almost immediately that Francis had perceived his innermost thoughts, for the saint commended him for his conclusion but remarked that his earlier reflection “was blind and evil and proud and was planted in your soul by the devil.”

Living under obedience

It is hard to take some of these stories seriously, though Francis was such an unusual saint, with such a keen awareness of God’s presence, that it is clearly possible that all of them are true. But it seems to me that there are two lessons in this account. First, we have a lesson on the spiritual dangers of finding fault with superiors; and, second, we begin to see how hard it is to make decisions that respond perfectly to the genuine promptings of the Holy Spirit.

Most of us are not called to live under obedience to a canonical superior, though perhaps most of us are called to live in mutual obedience within marriage. Both kinds of obedience are full of difficulties, for neither canonical superiors, nor those under their rule, nor wives nor even husbands are perfect, whether in their virtues, their perceptions, or their decisions. This reality may be a recommendation for the unconsecrated single state, but one of the great difficulties in that path to holiness is that we need to learn to exercise the virtue of obedience to God without benefit of any human superior or helpmeet at all.

Marriage offers the help of at least shared decision-making. As a married man with six children, I have had many opportunities (unevenly embraced) to permit my own selfishness to be pared away in favor of a proper apprehension of and devotion to the needs and mission of my own Catholic family. I have even learned that it is possible to be selfish and willful in pursuit of seemingly noble aims.

While ecclesiastical situations with clearer lines of authority are often simpler, they do have their own challenges. After all, it is one thing to be the known and acknowledged head; it is quite another to be the head who understands and responds rightly to the needs of all in his or her care. And it is a third thing to be obedient to the head, especially in complex situations in which the spiritual well-being of the community may be at stake.

In any case, we lay people need to discern not only through prayer and good counsel but through our very successes and failures when God wants us to go in one direction and not in another; and especially when He wants us to affirm a good that we have not sufficiently recognized over a good we have so firmly convinced ourselves to be God’s specific will. The followers of Saint Francis—and indeed, all those under unidirectional obedience rather than mutual obedience—usually have a clearer path, though under bad superiors, not always.

On the virtue of not spinning endlessly

Hopefully the older among my readers have been blessed to correct some of their own mistaken actions and goals. Certainly any mature Christian has witnessed cases, in many different states of life, where the need for correction has not yet been recognized. In this particular regard, we should pray not only for ourselves and others who are relatively free to make their own decisions, but also for religious in deteriorating communities, secular clergy under bad bishops, and for all who must consider challenging the decisions of their superiors in any walk in life, with all the spiritual and material dangers this necessarily entails. We have seen too many examples of the loss of integrity in every vocation and path in life, along with the catastrophes this causes in the Church, religious communities, schools, businesses, families and even the single state itself.

God knows that these challenges have always beset the Church, but we have become more aware of them again over the past hundred or so years. Indeed, as William Butler Yeats put it in his chilling poem “The Second Coming” in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
…
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This, of course, is what happens in human cultures which forget, refuse or ignore Christ. They quite literally first welcome and then feed the Beast. We do not dare, I think, to perpetuate such a colossal lack of virtuous judgment in our own lives, our own families, our own vocations.

Perhaps, then, the point of the story about St. Francis with which I began is that we might often find ourselves spinning in circles, uncertain about the way forward. But we must also remember that Saint Francis was almost continuously at prayer, and so we too must learn to turn our hearts and minds to God in all circumstances. If we must twirl around and even fall down at times, so be it. But in our confusion we must always strain to hear the voice of the Falconer, for our mission is part of His mission. The spinning and spinning has no purpose unless we have the courage to trust God to set us on a fruitful path. Our dizziness and our falls serve no purpose unless we perceive in them Christ’s effort to turn us in the way He wants us to go.

Often it is the courage to at least try an unfamiliar path which takes us down that very road.

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* For your convenience, I believe that the best edition is: The Little Flowers of Saint Francis translated and introduced by Raphael Brown. This same edition is available from many sources, often at a lower price.