Admonition XVI: Cleanness of heart
Francis lists three conditions to be met before a person can be said to be clean of heart. The first is that a person must 'look down upon earthly things'. In his religious experience of meeting the lord in the person of a leper, Francis came to feel a vanity or sense of discomfort in the circumstances of his father's business and his home. In his own words, he left the world after this meeting and put aside his good clothes and his social position in Assisi. He began to look down on earthly things and became known as the Poverello, the Poor Man of Assisi. But he set aside earthly things so as to be free to 'seek those of heaven'. From the beginning of his conversion, he felt a need to stay in caves and remote places so that he might be uninterrupted in his search for God. He listed this as the second requirement for anyone who wants to be clean of heart. But while, on the one hand, he stayed in caves, we know that he also searched for God in places of natural beauty. When we look at photos of the Carceri near Assisi, of Greccio, and of the mountain of La Verna, we realize how far he travelled to find places of natural beauty that spoke to him of God. His third point is that as we seek for the things of heaven we should 'with a clean heart and spirit, never cease adoring and seeing the Lord God living and true'. This is a remarkable sentence. A clean heart and spirit is found in a person like Francis who is fully occupied with the search for God. But it is not only a search. It is also a prayer of adoration, a conversation with God and an experience of seeing God. From such cleanness of heart Francis was able to write the Canticle of the Creatures.
