Stop Kissing Me: Reading Mother Teresa with Bonaventure's Help

[Extract] Writing some 750 years ago, the great Franciscan Bonaventure spoke of a kiss between two mouths – one that festered and stank with wounds, another endued with life-giving grace.

In the story, Francis of Assisi is met by a man ‘whose mouth and cheek were being eaten away by a certain horrible disease’. Overcome with devotion, the man tries to kiss Francis’s footprints, but Francis, embracing him, kisses the putrid mouth. As Bonaventure recounts, Francis ‘touched that horrible sore with his [own] holy mouth, and suddenly every sign of the disease vanished and the sick man recovered the health he longed for’.