“I see that for a novice of Saint Benedict you chanel bags have done some odd reading,” William remarked. I blushed, because I knew a novice should not read romances, but they circulated among us young people in the monas?tery of Melk and we read them at night by candlelight. “But that doesn’t matter,” William continued, “you have understood what I meant. The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of ugg boots clearance lemures who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast. Saint Francis realized this, and his first decision was to go and live among the lepers. The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.”
     “But you were speaking of other outcasts; it isn’t lepers who form heretical movements.”
     “The flock is like a series of concentric circles, from the broadest range of the flock to its immediate surroundings. The lepers are a sign of exclusion in general. Saint Francis nike jordan heels understood that. He didn’t want only to help the lepers; if he had, his act would have been reduced to quite a poor and impotent act of charity. He wanted to signify something else. Have you been told about his preaching to the birds?”
     “Oh, yes, I’ve heard that beautiful story, and I ad?mired the saint who enjoyed the company of those tender creatures of God,” I said with great fervor.
     “Well, what they told you was mistaken, or, rather, it’s a story the order has revised jordan heels today. When Francis spoke to the people of the city and its magistrates and saw they didn’t understand him, he went out to the cemetery and began preaching to ravens and magpies, to hawks, to raptors feeding on corpses.”
     “What a horrible thing!” I said. “Then they were not good birds!”
     “They were birds of prey, outcast birds, like the lepers. Francis was surely thinking of that verse of the Apoca?lypse that says: ‘I saw an angel standing in the sun; and -he cried with a loud louis vuitton outlet voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together at the supper of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great!’ ”