G. K. Chesterton wrote in his reflections on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi: “It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be forever paying it.”1 No person has ever lived that paradox as fully as the Saint of Assisi, whose vision of the world, its history, and his role in it was characterized by a consciousness of the loving God Who has bestowed on him “every good and perfect gift” (Ja 1:17). Saint Francis spent all