Saint Francis of Assisi was said to have acquired his stigmata following the vision of an angel. Can Creator share with us if the two events are related, and how it was that Saint Francis came to acquire the stigmata?

This is a complicated story that is also a personal one, the story of a human being buffeted about, a human being with karmic entanglements and an elaborate history from other journeys in the physical, as a prior human in other lifetimes, always seeking to serve the cause of the divine but having the usual obstacles and penalties so common to the life of a lightworker. This was a karmic setup not so different from that of Saint Faustina we have shared with you, that he was more vulnerable and sensitive than many to the trials and tribulations of his own personal past and suffering, and it is the workings of the mind and emotion that will often see, that reawakened past hard times will be revisited by the Law of Karma and then embraced by the mind, on multiple levels, to identify with suffering to such a great extent it becomes fused with the notion of divine service and seen as a path to glory, if only in being a living witness in sharing a kind of identification with Jesus Christ and his travails by going through it, in part at least, with a physical manifestation of wounding. So this was an exquisite demonstration of the intuitive reach, level of inner sensitivity, passion, and devotion he felt within his being to the reality of Christ's existence and that mission life's purpose to be an example to others. Saint Francis resonated quite strongly with that awareness because he, too, was inspired to become an example to others through his life and how he lived it. So he, we would say, went to an extreme in modeling that after Christ's physical sacrifice on the cross. We see that as a most unfortunate symbol for divinity because it is the working of evil to cause physical harm and suffering, it is not to be exalted or envied, and it does not make a truly divine iconic representation, even of sacrifice. We would rather see people make a sacrifice in the extremes of their giving of love until it hurts, until they are exhausted and feel depleted. We know we can fill them up with love again, to live and love another day, but to make the point of one's life the creation and existence of physical mutilation, as representing something divine, is a distortion that threatens the loss of the most important part of the message in the life of a martyr. The point of martyrdom is not to suffer and experience that ultimate penalty in loss of life, but to demonstrate the courage to stand for truth and accept punishment as a risk of dispensing love into the world and wanting to change things for the better.