🌿 Transformation Tuesday: Franco Zeffirelli — Finding Faith in Assisi



Franco Zeffirelli came to Assisi as an artist, not a believer. He wanted to capture the beauty of St. Francis — the poet of poverty, the troubadour of peace. But as he filmed Brother Sun, Sister Moon, something deeper unfolded. The story he was telling began to tell him.

Amid the quiet of Assisi’s hills, Zeffirelli found what Francis had found centuries earlier: simplicity, humility, and joy. The film’s light and music became more than art — they became prayer. Those who were there, including Sr. Maria del Rey, saw the change firsthand: the director who came to portray conversion experienced his own.

Zeffirelli later said that Brother Sun, Sister Moon was his most personal work — not just a film, but a confession. His transformation reminds us that beauty can be a doorway to belief. When art seeks truth, it often finds grace.


post inspired by A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God by Elizabeth Mahlou.

Book description:

It begins with a single, transforming encounter with God—one that reshapes everything. What follows is not a return to ordinary life, but the beginning of a sustained pattern of mystical experience within it.

A Believer in Waiting’s First Encounters with God invites readers into the lived reality of a modern-day mystic, where the boundary between the physical and spiritual world opens again and again in the midst of everyday life.

These are not abstract reflections, but direct encounters—moments of divine presence that reveal a reality shaped by grace, mystery, and the unmistakable nearness of God. Each experience unfolds within the ordinary circumstances of life yet points beyond them to something deeper and enduring.

Through these accounts, themes of good and evil, darkness and unknowing, and the unyielding power of God’s unconditional love emerge—not as ideas, but as lived truth.

Blending spiritual memoir with contemplative insight, this book offers a rare and grounded account of lived mysticism in the modern world—immediate, experiential, and deeply personal.



For more posts about Elizabeth and her books, click HERE.

Read more Transformation Tuesday Nuggets HERE

Read more posts about transformation HERE.

Read more encounters with God HERE.





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