If you want to connect to the pure beauty of Francis’s soul, listen to Jenny Oaks Baker’s arrangement on the violin (an Italian instrument) of “All Creatures of Our God and King.”15 She catches the majestic joyfulness, the complete adoration of the Giver of Life, the sheer love of all things that directed Francis’s paths, greater than anything I have ever read or listened to before about the Italian saint. “We are minstrels of the Lord,” he said of the Canticle. “What are the servants of God if not His minstrels, who must move people’s hearts and lift them up to spiritual joy?”
