800 Years of St. Francis · Day 5 of 31 · Monday, October 5, 2026
Francis is in his early twenties. He rides outside the walls of Assisi, recently home from a disastrous war and time in prison, and finds that his old life doesn’t fit anymore. He rounds a bend. A leper is standing in the road.
In thirteenth-century Umbria, you did not approach a leper, and you did not even look at one. You crossed to the other side and kept moving.
Francis stops.
He doesn’t do anything dramatic at first. He simply stops, looks, and does not look away. In that single act of not looking away, something became visible that had been invisible to everyone else on that road for years. What he saw was not a category or a disease. It was a person, with a face, and the trace of God in a ruined body.
Then he dismounted, walked over, and embraced him.
This is the first movement of Sacred Noticing, and Francis shows us its essence. Noticing is not merely seeing. It is refusing to let what we were taught to see replace what is actually there.
Notice today: Whom or what have I been taught not to see?
He noticed what was actually there, not what he had been taught to see. Everything began there.
Day 5 of 31 · 800 Years of St. Francis: A Daily October Companion · spiritualbreak.com
Reflection © 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS.
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