On the next page he says that Francis rebuked the friars for not accepting serenely the abuse they encountered when preaching in foreign lands.
Francis accepted all this serenely, and the qualities that at the beginning had marked him as an eccentric eventually made him seem holy.
Indeed, Hans may be the most passively intriguing character to wander disconnectedly though a novel since Frank Bascombe first appeared, solitary and serenely accepting, in Ford's epic dissection of grief and dislocation.
The definitive photograph of the event is the striking image of two priests in clerical dress, one big and craggy, the other slight and puckish, serenely accepting their imminent incarceration.
Instead we see scenes of St. Francis traveling with a fellow monk, teaching him of perfect joy, embracing a leper at the urging of an angel and, in the final tableau, serenely accepting death as he bids farewell to his beloved birds, while the blinding aura of divine illumination radiates throughout the ecstatic music.
Every two weeks or so, Nabokov and Kubrick would meet to discuss the author's progress, and Nabokov was bemused by the director's increasing reticence: "By midsummer," he recalled in his foreword, "I did not feel quite sure whether Kubrick was serenely accepting whatever I did or silently rejecting everything".
He accepted the agony of martyrdom serenely (he was flayed alive, according to tradition), grateful for the opportunity to fulfill the commandment to "love God…with all your life," which he always interpreted to mean "even when he takes your life".
Last week Mr. Carter, who is not one serenely to accept "no" for an answer, got into an angry exchange with a security official in Darfur about visiting the chief of a village that had taken in thousands of refugees.
Robert E. Lee was included, in a letter accepting his university presidency, which serenely occupied a panel with his adversary, Abraham Lincoln, who had three documents in all, including the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation.
Mr. Pataki, as he has throughout the campaign, tried to sail serenely above the fray, accepting the endorsement of Gov. Sila M. Calderon of Puerto Rico.
Then, without much further ado, she is off to her next venue: a small private hospital in a rural area of an unnamed Midwestern state, which accepts only insured patients and is clearly operating serenely in the black.
