All these gates led me finally to return to the entrance of another “cave” where Saint Francis is buried, in a crypt inside a hill outside the original walls of Assisi. It is a cave that, like all the others, reveals to us the treasure which is the Gospel of Jesus Christ that sends us forth from Assisi, as it did Francis, to return to our original true place and find there the way into our own mountain where we find the Spirit of God who will send us forth, beyond our own protective walls, to find the poor among us and beyond us, beyond, at least, our former seeing and living.

And at some point we have to return to Assisi, at least in memory or imagination, and pass through the Capuchin Gate, hopefully in a springtime of the soul, and begin the slow ascent of Mount Subasio and reenter the caves of St. Francis looking for renewed energy and inspiration, for the silence and solitude that send us back to the plain below, to those, especially, who have no lightsome place to lay their head.

—from Enter Assisi: An Invitation to Franciscan Spirituality