“It is hard to accept this effacement of things and to maintain a conversation with what seems to be nothingness. It is hard to remain awake in the midst of empty darkness, where not only all familiar beings have lost their color, their voice and even their identity, but where the Divine Presence itself seems to have disappeared. Francis had desired poverty. He had espoused it, as he used to say. And here, at this moment of his existence, he was poor─painfully poor─beyond all that he had ever dreamed.”