Franciscan Spirit Spring 2020

We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. —ST. CLARE OF ASSISI

SPRING 2020

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Dear Friends of Francis and Clare, Here at Franciscan Media, we are dedicated to sharing the love of God and reminding people they are beloved children of God. We do this in all of our offerings, whether print, digital, audio, or video. Franciscan Spirit offers just a few of the thoughtful and inspiring writings from our authors, all wrapped in a beautiful, easy-to-read package. It is our gift to

from the publisher

you. We appreciate your interest and support.

In this spring issue, Casey Cole, OFM, encourages us to let go of the many things that hold us back from following Jesus. Vincenzo Peroni brings us to the beach where Jesus met with his followers after the resurrection. Richard Rohr, OFM, illuminates the universal pattern of wisdom that underlies all genuine spiritual growth. Melanie Rigney offers insights gleaned from twenty-one women saints canonized in the twentyfirst century. This and much more awaits you in the following pages.

The way we communicate the Gospel is very different, but we are sharing the same message as St. Francis did so many years ago. Your support and generosity help us do that. For that, we are extremely grateful. As we move forward, we hope you will join us and follow in the footsteps of St. Francis to spread the Gospel to all.

Peace and all good,

Dan Kroger, OFM Publisher Franciscan Media P.S. Your donation is necessary for our mission to succeed. Thank you in advance for your support.

contents 2 God Seeks to Unsettle Us An excerpt from Let Go: Seven Stumbling Blocks to Christian Discipleship

by Casey Cole, OFM 5 With Jesus on the Shore of the Lake of Tiberias

An excerpt from Encountering Jesus: A Holy Land Experience

by Vincenzo Peroni 7 The Great Chain of Being

An excerpt from The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder

by Richard Rohr, OFM 9 Stop Playing It Safe

An excerpt from Radical Saints: 21 Women for the 21st Century

by Melanie Rigney 11 Of Cycles and Season

An excerpt from Wandering and Welcome: Meditations for Finding Peace

by Joseph Grant 14 Longing for Belonging

by Kyle Kramer 16 We Are Wired to Be Present

An excerpt from This Is the Life: Mindfulness, Finding Grace, and the Power of the Present Moment

by Terry Hershey 18 Becoming Bold Witnesses

An excerpt from Meeting God in the Upper Room: Three Moments to Change Your Life

by Peter J. Vaghi 20 The Grace of Resurrection

An excerpt from Caring for Creation: Inspiring Words from Pope Francis

by Pope Francis 23 God’s House Is All of Creation

An excerpt from Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from Saint Francis

by Murray Bodo, OFM 26 Contemplating Our Crucified Earth and Coming Home to the Incarnation in Creation

Excerpts from Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth

by Ilia Delio, OSF, Keith Warner, OFM, and Pamela Wood 30 St. Clare’s Roadmap of Prayer

An excerpt from Franciscan Prayer

by Ilia Delio 32 Responding to the “Cry of the Earth”

by Daniel Imwalle 34 Sister Dorothy Stang: Angel of the Amazon

by Tina Neyer

God Seeks to Unsettle Us An excerpt from Let Go: Seven Stumbling Blocks to Christian Discipleship

by Casey Cole, OFM

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eanwhile the boat, already a few miles offshore, was being tossed about by the waves, for the wind was against it. During the fourth watch of the night, he came toward them, walking on the sea. When the disciples saw him walking on the sea they were terrified. “It is a ghost,” they said, and they cried out in fear. At once [Jesus] spoke to them, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid. Peter said to him in reply, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the

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water.” He said, “Come.” Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the water toward Jesus.

—Matthew 14:24-29.

Before I entered religious life, I was pretty happy and most certainly comfortable. I spent a lot of time with friends, had a girlfriend I loved, and lived without much responsibility. What could be better than college, right? While my specific situation had to end—none of us can stay twenty-two for the rest of our lives—I could have continued on that trajectory. My life did not need to change much. After college, I could have found a job near home, working to support myself but also marrying someone I loved, hanging out with friends, and living in a familiar situation. I could have stayed in the safety and comfort of the boat, easing down the stream of life, and no one would have been the wiser.

He showed me a different path and called me to walk out onto the water.

But Jesus didn’t want me to stay in the boat. He called me—like he called Peter—to let go of the comfort of the familiar, the stable, the “easy”; he showed me a different path and called me to walk out onto the water. What stood before me seemed scary at first, even impossible. I would have more readily stepped out onto a literal sea than taken a vow of chastity. Why, when I’ve found something so safe and comfortable, would I risk my happiness like that? Isn’t that what we’re all looking for in life? It seemed crazy to throw something like that away. But I needed to. As much as I liked what I had, and as much as I knew that I could have served God from where I was, I also knew that Jesus was leading me to something that would be better for the kingdom of God—and for me.

As happy as I could have been as a husband and father, he knew, as I do now, that life as a vowed religious and priest would bring me even greater

fulfillment. This would not have been possible had I stayed in the comfort of the boat.

Jesus is calling each and every one of us from the boats of our own comforts. Maybe, like me, Jesus is calling you from the comfort of a traditional family close to home to religious life. But maybe not. Maybe the comfort that you seek in the boat is actually your own independence and lack of commitment, and what Jesus is calling you to step out onto are the waters of a traditional family, committing yourself to others. While each of our vocations is uniquely different and what is asked of me is likely not what will be asked of you, one thing is true for us all: True disciples of Christ never get comfortable in their seats. Rather than staying where it is safe, clinging to what is familiar, they recognize that the mission of Christ does not have walls or limits, and being a disciple is not a nine-to-five job. Whether it be a desire for

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pleasure, a response to fear, or simply the result of overwhelming apathy, any comfort that leaves us sitting in the boat when Jesus is standing out on the sea is a roadblock to discipleship. Jesus is calling us, and we must be willing to let go of what keeps us from him.

It’s no coincidence that the most meaningful encounters with God in the Bible happen when people are in the desert. Moses witnessed the burning bush and received his call; Elijah heard the “light, silent sound” of God speaking, offering him reassurance; even Jesus himself was led by the Spirit to be tempted in the desert. By definition, a desert is a place of complete desolation, absent of creature comforts and most likely unfamiliar to the average person. Few are at home in the desert, and that is precisely the point: in the desert, there are no pleasures, no means of safety, and nothing familiar from our everyday lives. We are exposed and vulnerable. Free of their worldly comforts, shaken up, and most certainly uncomfortable, there is nothing left to rely on but God. This is exactly what God wants.

The most important people in my life have always been the ones who unsettled me. Not the ones who comforted me and told me I was special and everything would be okay. No. The ones who challenged my worldview and forced me to do things that I didn’t want to do; the ones who stretched me and even said that they were disappointed in me. For as long as I live, I’ll never forget an admonishment I got from a close friend who told me things about myself that I did not want to hear. Here I thought that I was doing pretty well for myself, saw myself as a pretty good guy. No one is perfect, but, you know… I had my life pretty well in order. In just a few words— said with love, but by no means comforting—he flipped the perception I had of myself completely upside down. He unsettled the neat little world I had created, the comfortable image I had of myself, and forced me out of my complacency. I

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had unwittingly sat down in the boat and gotten comfortable with my life. I needed to be unsettled.

While some of the bad things that happen in our lives result from evil in the world and some from our own poor decisions, we can often see the hand of God in some of the upheaval in our lives.

We are called into the desert and stripped of our comforts, not for the sake of harm in itself, but because we have ignored the invitation to walk out onto the water for far too long. We’re anchored in our seats, God can wait no longer, and so, a storm comes to throw us out. If you won’t come out willingly, I’ll just have to capsize the boat! As odd as it might sound to some, God is not concerned primarily with our happiness. God cares nothing of our comfort. All that God thinks and does and cares about is directed to our salvation, breathing life and love into us so that we may choose to return to the source of Life and Love. Sometimes, like a close friend admonishing us to awake to our blindness, God unsettles us so we can attach ourselves to something that truly matters.

Let yourself be unsettled. Let God shake up your world. The longer we cling to the comfort of our seat in the boat—whether it be because of the pleasure, safety, or familiarity it offers us—the longer we will find ourselves away from the Lord. He is calling us out onto the water, and there is only one thing left to do: jump. There will be times when it is far from fun, positively dangerous, and even a bit lonely, but it is what we all must do. If we want to be disciples of Christ, we must get out of our seats and walk with him.

Let Go Seven Stumbling Blocks to Christian Discipleship Casey Cole, OFM

With Jesus on the Shore of the Lake of Tiberias An excerpt from Encountering Jesus: A Holy Land Experience

by Vincenzo Peroni

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ere in the hills around the lake, Jesus has just performed the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, which the Gospel writer Matthew recounts. So what does Jesus do now? Jesus seems to be saying, “Let’s see if you understand something. I am arranging to send the people home, so go to the lake ahead of me and begin crossing it.”

The disciples obey and go to the boat on the lake.

Jesus dismisses the crowd and once again retreats to pray. It was evening when he sent his disciples to cross the lake, and he prayed for a long time, almost the whole night.

Meanwhile, the wind stirs up the water. Toward the end of the night, Jesus comes toward them, walking on the water. The sea, this great body of water, is once again, a symbol of sin and death.

Why does Jesus walk on the water? Did he perhaps want to demonstrate that he is more capable and

physically versatile than others? No. It simply means he has the power to put sin and death under his feet, so much so that he waits for the end of the night because it is toward the end of the night that the resurrection occurs. It is at very early dawn when the women go to the tomb; they find it empty and hear the announcement of the resurrection. Jesus had risen toward the end of the night.

Jesus, walking on the water toward the end of the night, preannounces his resurrection, saying, “I am able to walk over sin and death. I am also the Lord over sin and death.”

When the disciples see him, they demonstrate something typical of human beings: we are disposed to believe absurd things rather than surrender to the facts. It is obvious that Jesus is walking on the water, that there is something extraordinary and divine about him, but they are ready instead to say that it is a ghost, to believe something that does not even exist. How many times, just to continue with what we are already thinking, are we willing to believe the irrational and the absurd rather than submit to the evidence of reality? “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

The disciples had cried out because they were afraid. Peter, sensing that it is Jesus, says to him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on

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the water.” Peter’s request here is good because he is really saying, “Make me a participant in your life and in your power over these forces.” Jesus says, “Come.” The following point is generally overlooked.

Getting out of the boat, Peter does start to walk on the water. He too has now walked on water, so good for him for trusting Jesus! Peter was an expert fisherman, so he knew this lake and its dangers well. This is not a body of water in which one can float without knowing how to swim; in this lake one sinks! He obeys Jesus and begins to walk, but then a wind comes up that distracts him from Jesus. As long as he was focused on Jesus and was obeying him and looking at him, he could walk on water, thereby sharing in Jesus’s power and resurrection. But then he lets himself get distracted by the wind. Whenever there is a danger or difficulty, what do we do? Peter begins to sink. That is also how spiritual life works. When we pay more attention to our understanding of situations and obstacles, we distract ourselves from Jesus and are not able to keep moving forward; sin and death then have the upper hand.

However, Peter cries out, “Lord, save me!!” This is the really great cry that we ought to address to the Lord. First, calling him Lord, we should say, “You are my God and you are my savior; only you can accomplish this.” Secondly, we should say, “Save me in my weakness,” which is similar to the cry of the good thief on the cross when he says, “Remember me” (Luke 23:42).

We also learn from Peter the humility of crying out to Jesus, the ability to keep our gaze fixed on him and to know that only if Jesus stretches out his hand can we be saved. Jesus waits for us to cry out to him this way. Then Jesus reproves Peter: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” We could think, “Poor Peter. He is walking on the water and a strong wind comes up. It’s normal that he was a bit fearful.” Yet Jesus reproves him because, although it is true that many things can distract

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us, he, Jesus, is there and our gaze should be fixed on him. Every time we look away from Jesus, it basically means that we are not trusting him very much, that we are not so sure he is really taking care of us.

They had hardly gotten back into the boat when the wind ceased; it was enough that Jesus was there. “Truly you are the Son of God.” We too, after crossing over Lake Tiberias, hope to be able to say not only with our lips and minds but also with our hearts, our wills, our affections, and our emotions, “You are the Son of God.” We can choose to fix our gaze on him and not let ourselves become too disturbed by the wind and waves that life will make us experience again, once we return home.

Prayer I praise you, O Lord, for the power of your word; I praise you for the victory of your resurrection; I praise you for the faithfulness of your friendship.

I bless you, Lord, for the hard work of growing in faith; I bless you for the waiting that increases my desire for you; I bless you because you always hear my cry for help.

Heal the eyes of my faith, Lord; heal my unbelief; heal the wounds of sin.

Teach me to recognize your presence, Lord; teach me to keep my gaze fixed on you; teach me to abandon myself to you.

Encountering Jesus A Holy Land Experience Vincenzo Peroni

The Great Chain of Being

anything and everything sacred.

Jesus tried desperately to keep us within and connected to the Great Chain of Being by taking away from us the power to scapegoat and project

An excerpt from The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder

by Richard Rohr

onto enemies and outsiders. We were to keep the chain unbroken by not hating, eliminating, or expelling the other. He commanded us to love the enemy and gave us himself as Cosmic Victim so we

Francis called all creatures, no matter how small,

would get the point—and stop creating victims—

by the name of brother and sister, because he knew

but we are transformed into Christ very slowly.

they had the same source as himself.

Our inclination to break the chain—to decide —Bonaventure

I

who is good and who is bad—seems to be a basic control mechanism in all of us. We actually are a

would like to reclaim an ancient, evolving, and very Franciscan metaphor to rightly name the

bit worried about the God in whom Jesus believes: who “causes the sun to rise on the bad as well

nature of the universe, God, and the self, and to

as the good, who sends down rain to fall on the

direct our future thinking: the image of the Great

upright and the wicked alike” (Matthew 5:45).

Chain of Being.

If we dishonor the so-called inferior or unworthy

Through this image, Scholastic theologians

members of creation, we finally destroy ourselves

tried to communicate a linked and coherent

too. Once we stop seeing, we stop seeing. Like

world. The essential and unbreakable links in

nothing else, spiritual transformation is an all-

the chain include the Divine Creator, the angelic

or-nothing proposition. Like Jesus’s robe, it is a

heaven, the human, the animal, the world of

“seamless garment.” He wore it and offers it to us.

plants and vegetation, and planet Earth itself

Paul did for Jesus exactly what Bonaventure did

with its minerals and waters. In themselves, and

for Francis. He took the lived life and made it into

in their union together, they proclaim the glory

a philosophy or theology. The seamless garment

of God (Psalm 104) and the inherent dignity of all

is still intact in Paul’s most-quoted analogy of the

things. This image became the basis for calling

body:

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If one part is hurt, all parts are hurt with it.

If one part is given special honor, all parts enjoy it … [and] it is precisely the parts of the body that seem to be the weakest which are the indispensable ones, and it is the least honorable parts of the body that we clothe with the greatest care. (1 Corinthians 12:26, 22–23) Paul, the former mass-murderer Saul, knew well religion’s power to create hate and violence toward other people and other links in the Great Chain of Being. He left no room for scapegoating in his teaching: There is “one God and [Creator] of all, over all, through all and within all” (Ephesians 4:6, NJB).

For those given sight by the Gospel, there is only one world—God’s world—and it is all supernatural!

We may no longer divide the world into sacred and profane (fanum and profanum). There is cosmic symbolism in the tearing of the Temple veil from top to bottom at the death of Jesus (Matthew 27:51). In the one world liberated by Christ, our need to divide and discriminate has been denied us—and, frankly, we don’t like it. For some reason, we want to retain the right to decide where God is, whom we must honor, and whom we may hate. It’s a rather clever guise, for we can remain autonomous and violent while thinking of ourselves as holy. But, as Jesus reminds us, any branch cut off from the vine is useless (John 15:5–6). We either go to God linked or it seems we don’t go at all.

How easy it is to avoid the sacramental mystery: “Listen, Israel, the Lord your God is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). Jewish monotheism became the basis for one coherent and cosmic world, where truth is one and there is no basis for rivalry between the arts, science, and religion. If it is true, it is true, regardless of its source. It is such truth that will set us free (John 8:32).

In his brilliant contemporary synthesis, A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber sounds like

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a postmodern Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) or Bonaventure. He concludes that everything is a holon. A holon is defined as being simultaneously whole within itself and yet also part of something larger. In another book, he explains that everything in the physical, biological, psychic, and spiritual universe is a whole and yet a part. Ours really is one connected universe of meaning. In relation to the arrogance of modernism and the cynicism of postmodernism, Wilber notes, “No epoch is finally privileged. We are all tomorrow’s food.” Agreeing with the genuinely traditional Catholic, he reminds us that even our moment in time is a holon, a small chain-link in something still larger.

A Great Catholic—one who embraces the whole Tradition—would call this one connected universe the Cosmic Christ, before whom no institution, no moment of time, no attempt at verbalization will be adequate. We must hold the hands of both ancestors and children—and hold them well.

Those who continue to look through microscopes and telescopes are surrendering to the mysteries of an infinite, creative spectrum. The chain of being is even longer and bigger than we church folks imagined—and we had best come to the telescope and microscope with our shoes off, ready to live the emptiness of not knowing.

Maybe we are just beginning to see how broad the “communion of saints” might be—and whether we really want to believe in it.

The Wisdom Pattern Order, Disorder, Reorder Richard Rohr, OFM

Stop Playing It Safe

“of or relating to a root.” When Christ and his

An excerpt from

path, a path people have struggled to walk for

Radical Saints: 21 Women for the 21st Century

teachings are our foundation, we are on a radical more than two thousand years. Think about it:

by Melanie Rigney

Is there anything more radical than loving God

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as yourself? Society encourages us to worship

adical. The word makes us, well, itchy. We think of people whose political beliefs are at

with your entire being and loving your neighbor money, status, prestige, and more. Putting God

one end of the spectrum or the other, people who

before any of that? Before our own spouses,

won’t compromise or collaborate, maybe even

parents, children, friends, all those people we love

people who foster revolutions that upset entire

and would do anything for? And how about loving

nations.

those who look different from us or who have

How in the world could a group of women,

betrayed us, injured us, or persecuted us simply

ranging in age from nine to ninety-three at their

because we’re told God loves them every bit as

deaths, women formally canonized by the Catholic

much as he loves us.

Church for heroic virtues and associated miracles,

Now that’s radical.

be considered radical?

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how

Because being a Christian is radical. The word radical comes from the Latin radicalis, meaning

I wish it were already kindled!” Jesus told the disciples (Luke 12:49). These women, from Dulce

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to Faustina, got that. They lived it, and they didn’t care whether it cost them earthly love or respect.

They did so in a world that looked much like ours. All twenty-one saints featured in this book walked the earth in the twentieth century and were canonized in the twenty-first.

(By the way, that’s why Zélie Martin, who died in 1877 and was canonized in 2015, and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who died in 1942 and was canonized in 1998, aren’t in this book. We had to draw the line somewhere.)

Many of these saints took trains, rode in cars or airplanes, received telegrams, talked on phones, watched television and movies, and perhaps a few knew their way around a computer. All were photographed, and many were filmed as they shared their radicalness. They had an awareness of some—not all, but some—of the modernday distractions that, when not used in moderation, threaten to crowd out room for God. And while they may not have taken selfies and had social media accounts, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that if they had, they wouldn’t have been checking likes and shares at prayer, meals, or time with their loved ones.

I’m not saying that any saint from the Blessed Virgin Mary on had an easy life. Some joys and sorrows—the birth of a child, the loss of a spouse— are eternal. Some, such as martyrdom, are difficult for people living in any age to imagine. We can learn something from each and every one of our beautiful saints regardless of the century; indeed, the women in these pages were inspired

by Teresa of Ávila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Bridget of Sweden, and others. Still, there’s something especially moving and challenging about the faith and perseverance of women who actually walked the

earth with us or our mothers or grandmothers.

In each chapter, you’ll find brief descriptions of the woman’s radical gift and the world

Is there anything more radical than loving God with your entire being and loving your neighbor as yourself?

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in which she lived. You’ll learn more about how she lived radically and find some relevant Scripture and questions for journaling or discussion, along with resources if you’d like to learn more about her.

Just as important, you’ll find the true stories (in some cases, with names changed) of “everyday” women who are living these gifts in ways large and small today.

Sometimes I’ll share stories about the way my life has been changed by an experience or by knowing one of them. Sometimes the pairings might surprise you—for example, a schoolteacher living Gianna Beretta Molla’s selflessness or a mom of two

illumining the vocational devotion of a longtime Carmelite. Every one of them is extraordinary in her ordinariness.

You know people who are living radically too.

And I’m sure people think of some of you as they watch the way you trust, suffer, accept, and more, consciously or unconsciously. You think it’s no big deal, just like the women in this book did and do.

But I assure you it is.

You see, it’s easier to be radical than we think.

All we have to do is stop playing it safe—and follow the leader.

Radical Saints 21 Women for the 21st Century Melanie Rigney

Of Cycles and Seasons An excerpt from Wandering and Welcome: Meditations for Finding Peace

by Joseph Grant

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ur varied faith traditions are infused with profound appreciation for the rhythms and

lessons of the good earth. This natural wisdom shapes seasonal celebrations that mark the passing of our years and reverence our “creaturehood.” As Christianity calcified, mind holding sway over matter, these earth-bound roots withered. Now disembodied, “spirituality” retreated into the conceptual realm of the psyche. A deepening suspicion of nature reduced earth to “dirt” and considered indigenous and rural people primitive. These degrees of separation, in turn, cleared the way for the unrestrained exploitation of nature, treating creatures and earthy human communities as expendable resources in the pursuit of technological “progress.”

The symptoms of centuries of deprivation and

domination, our increasingly synthetic lifestyles have now brought us to the brink of global environmental catastrophe. And, nature-deprived faith has, in effect or by neglect, sanctified the pillaging of God’s good garden, a precious inheritance for generations of creatures yet to be. In such a time as this, how can the children of earth, sky, and sea repair our relationships with all our fellow creatures, travelling companions on our shared planet home?

Will we earthlings move from hubris to humus and live ourselves into a new way of being together?

Living slowly, with fewer compulsions.

Living humbly, demanding less.

Living simply, reducing our needs.

Living consciously, taking nothing for granted.

Living peaceably, blaming less and building bridges of reconciliation.

Living justly, tolerating fewer and fewer degrees of separation.

Living together and less apart, finding excuses to turn community into kin.

Living compassionately, shrinking the gap between our Maker’s mercy and our care for neighbors.

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Living Abundance For where your treasure lies, there your heart will also be.

—Matthew 6:21 Now, at home with ample weaknesses, I am spreading wide, slowing like an aged river.

My desire to savor life, in its myriad emanations, has become prayer.

And knowing we have a brief time to walk the soft grass together, I intend to take my time and generously share it.

When seeds germinate, roots come first, drawn by gravity to penetrate earth’s loamy heart.

In my ceaseless to-ing and fro-ing, it is the grave that draws me down.

Grave human realities hold me here, weigh me, and draw me down, rooted in place and time.

Life seldom disappoints if we are determined to stay awake and engaged.

Whether in tatters at the losses of the day, or smiling at my own awkward antics, abundance awaits.

I am delighted by the fragrant bounty of wildflowers, or the aerial gymnastics of swallows, openmouthed in the wind.

Gravity and levity, soul and spirit, mind and body, wonder and woe, there is room for this and more in a life slowly savored.

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So, what makes for a well-lived life?

What is expected of us?

Have we not already been told? …what is good; and what does the Most High ask but to do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God? —Micah 6:6-8 Gratitude is the motive for justice; mercy the courageous response to every situation; humility the honest pathway into the fullness of humanity.

Abundant life reveals itself the moment we cease expecting, wanting, or needing something else or more.

As we cycle through the mysteries of living to die and dying to live, may you take your time to suffer and savor life with those you love.

Are you yet tender enough to be moved to mercy and humble enough to welcome forgiveness?

A Deeper Life Put out into the deep and let down your nets.

—Luke 5:4 What draws you below surface events to plumb the depths? The genesis of all our origin stories, water is the pourable, potable miracle upon which all known life depends.

Abundant on our wet world, liquid water remains a rare resource in the visible universe.

And while astronomers scour the stars for it, countless women and girls in impoverished countries make daily treks to rivers, lakes, or wells to collect water for their families.

Water ceaselessly sculpts our life-scape— filling ocean expanses, cavernous aquifers, and glacial snowpack— as silently it slips in misty rivers through the air above us.

This life serum bathes our cells, moistens our breath, and lubricates our most joyful and excruciating expressions.

In its perpetual rising-up and raining down, it mirrors the sacramental cycle: outpouring forgiveness, transformation, and redemption.

From the stories of creation to the flood, from the Red Sea and Jordan crossings to the Galilee shore, our faith is saturated in watery images.

But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

—Amos 5:24 A potent symbol of our thirst for restoration, cleansing water bears life and death.

As ice melts and seas rise, polluted streams carry our flotsam out to littered oceans.

Fresh, clean water has now become our most rapidly evaporating, irreplaceable, and squandered gift.

Yet, water also mirrors mystery, as still waters school us: the deeper, the darker.

We are all capable of floating and sinking, and we can choose to swim in the shallows or strike out for the depths.

In the shallows, we move quickly, though it takes effort just to stay afloat.

In the depths we are buoyed, upheld by the mystery beneath.

We are each created, called, and capable of looking, living, and loving deeply.

However storm-tossed the surface of our lives may be, there are slower currents in the deep.

When next you lift a glass of water to your lips, contemplate the miraculous elixir that shapes and showers us alike.

Whomsoever should give even a cool cup of water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple­— I tell you truly, they shall not lose their reward.

—Matthew 10:42 Consider the invitation to slow down, seek out connection, and be sustained by depth, especially in the most disturbing tides of our times.

Wandering and Welcome Meditations for Finding Peace Joseph Grant

For you my very soul is thirsting; my flesh is yearning for you, like a parched land without water.

—Psalm 63:1

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Longing for Belonging

by Kyle Kramer This article originally appeared in St. Anthony Messenger, March 2020

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ver the Christmas holidays, our family hosted a visit from my wife’s sister, her husband, and their five children. Somehow, we found room for 12 of us under one roof with just three bedrooms. And though it was noisy and chaotic in some ways, we had a wonderful time together.

My brother-in-law teaches theology at a small Catholic college in a rural Midwestern town.

Over the course of some long walks, stacking firewood, and spreading manure on our garden, he and I talked a lot about their life there. They live in a tightly knit neighborhood, do cooperative homeschooling and gardening, let their kids roam free-range among various nearby families, and help fellow parents/friends/neighbors in a mutual exchange of care and concern. I told him it all sounded like Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show and, although he admitted that their town faces many challenges typical of small, rural towns, he said he is profoundly grateful to be where he is. He’s all in for his whole life.

Hearing about his experience made me happy for him and his family. Frankly, though, I also felt somewhat envious and sad. My family and I are on amicable terms with a few neighbors along our stretch of rural highway, but sometimes a year or more can go by between interactions. We’re yearning for more and deeper connections beyond the wonderful relationships within our nuclear family and in my work community.

These hopes are a large part of our discernment about building or moving to a new home— especially because we hope that our kids will stay relatively close by when they are adults, and we want to settle in a place where they can thrive

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for the long term. But we haven’t found the right place, even after two years of searching and discernment, and I can’t help but be discouraged.

I suspect that most of us, on some level, are yearning for deeper and more meaningful ways to belong in the world. As I’ve written often in this column, I believe that we are relational beings— or, rather, “interbeings,” made in the image of the Trinity. We’re made for community: with each other, with the natural world, and with our Creator, who is in all and through all.

So then why does it seem so hard to find genuine belonging? How did we allow ourselves to become isolated from each other and from the rest of nature? Why have our churches and civic organizations waned, our politics become so dysfunctionally divided, our social fabric become so frayed, such that experiences like my brother-inlaw’s are more the exception than the rule?

Diving Down Into Grief During Lent, one of my spiritual practices is to get in touch with the grief I feel about how such disconnection manifests in my own life and our culture more generally. Sometimes the first step in moving closer to something you long for is to lament how very far away and impossible it seems.

For me, this often feels like a slippery slope to depression, but I honestly don’t see any other way around it that retains a sense of integrity.

Anything else feels like denial, which I think is an epidemic in our culture, manifested in the thousands of ways we keep ourselves distracted from this core wound. How else could we keep getting up every day, if we let the full weight of our disconnection settle on us?

David Whyte has a wonderful poem, “The Well of Grief,” which I treasure as a guide in this practice of facing my grief. Once we “slip beneath/the still surface” and descend down “to the place we cannot breathe,” we might discover deep forms of energy, encouragement, and guidance that are

unavailable to those unwilling to dive down into the dark waters of grief.

Deep in my grief at what feels like the world’s unraveling, I’ve also felt a heartbreaking, but beautiful, connection to those who have also suffered—which, let’s face it, is every human being who has ever lived and other creatures as well. I have to think this solidarity is some glimpse of what Jesus experienced on the cross, and Mary at the foot of it. It is a difficult gift, this love and belonging we find only at the bottom of the well of grief, but it feels real and true, like solid ground we might stand on as we help create a better world—possibly from the ashes of the current one.

As I long to belong more deeply among my fellow human travelers and within the rest of the natural world, I’m also trying to find hope and gratitude in the longing itself. Why else would my heart hurt at the lack of belonging, but that it was possible, however imperfectly?

Of course, with St. Augustine, I believe that our restless hearts will only find their ultimate belonging in God. But I also believe that God and the world are so interwoven that belonging in God will also and always mean belonging in the world,

now and by whatever mysterious means lie on the other side of death.

Fortunately, I do feel that we’re at a point in history where we are beginning to acknowledge that so much that is manufactured, marketed, and monetized just isn’t working for us anymore— personally, environmentally, socially, or spiritually. I think this breakdown is a wonderful gift. It’s time to let go of what needs to die, provide whatever hospice care our current systems require, then lean into our longing for deeper and more beautiful ways to belong.

Even in the middle of Lent, some kind of Easter miracle can’t be too far away!

An American tradition!

Published monthly by the Franciscan Friars of St. John the Baptist Province, your subscription to St. Anthony Messenger helps Franciscans to evangelize. Go to StAnthonyMessenger.org to learn more.

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We Are Wired to Be Present An excerpt from This Is the Life: Mindfulness, Finding Grace, and the Power of the Present Moment

by Terry Hershey

A

fter an event in Angel Fire, New Mexico, I drove in early morning light from Gardnerville, Nevada, through the Carson Valley to the Reno airport. The drive is framed by the Sierra Nevada Mountains, including the snowladen peaks that cradle Lake Tahoe. There is no urgency and it is a quiet drive, miles of open, high desert pastures, a canvas of camouflage, tan-speckled with congregations of cows. They are still, as if they were asked to pose for a photo.

And inclined to please, they said yes.

Absorbing this medicine for hurry, or blue moods, I smile. I typically think of transit to airports (or waiting in airports) as time to fill or tolerate, on my way to what really matters.

I remember a statement made in The Irish Times by a Connemara man after he was arrested for a car accident. “There were plenty of onlookers, but no witnesses.”

Hmmm. It’s like the tourists who religiously follow the advice of travel journals, and miss the unanticipated “sacred places.” We’ve consumed many books or sermons about the correct way to live life. Which, sadly, we assume, is a life other than the one we have today. In other words, we haven’t trusted that we are empowered to witness and savor this life.

On this morning drive, the tranquil backdrop gives my mind wandering room, which is always a good thing. A wandering mind makes space to absorb beauty and stillness with an affirmation of serenity.

I’ve needed to face the parts of my life that derail too easily. That’s not fun to admit. I give

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way to exhaustion and resentment (they seem to go hand in hand, and I give myself grief for it).

Have you ever had that…where you wake up one day—spirit drained—and wonder where the joy went, and why? It doesn’t help that I’ve marinated in a world that is duty-bound to resolve or fix. No wonder we feel the weight of anything out of sync.

I get a geyser of email, much of it uninvited. But I’m still seduced by many of the pitches, because they promise me a bigger and better life, one that makes a difference and breaks the bank every month. “What did you do of significance?” one asks, wondering if I make the kind of money I deserve to make. And I think, “Well, I don’t know about the money, but I had a great chat with some cows in the Carson Valley this morning. And that did my heart good. Does that count?”

When it comes to significance, here’s the deal: There is extravagant value in tending the soil of my soul.

In southern Michigan, I was raised in a religious tradition that used the word grace, but were too afraid to give in to it. Not unlike the faithful band of “believers” in the movie Babette’s Feast who, when offered an extraordinarily generous gift of the feast-of-a-lifetime, make the decision to “taste” the wine, but not “enjoy it.”

I was cajoled to believe in a God who was no different than an alcoholic father. This isn’t hypothetical to me. Yes, I wanted his love, but was never sure which father would show up. So, I did my best to make him smile. And when he did smile, I would feel a shudder, wondering whether it was enough, or what I would do that would make his smile go away.

I know that scarcity affects how we see God. We have been weaned on the belief that our well-being is stuck in scarcity. Requiring us to earn our way out. It is no wonder that scarcity, not sufficiency, becomes our lens and our paradigm and our narrative. Scarcity affects how we see the world.

Scarcity affects how we see the present moment.

I must be missing something.

This is too good to be true.

Can I trust this moment?

I know I don’t deserve this.

If grace is dependent on God’s mood or temperament or on my performance, the scales always tilt. And that never turns out well.

We do well to consider Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s reminder, “We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe.”

We savor, because this life, this day, this moment, is a gift. And we sense wonder and awe because we are grounded in sufficiency.

I remember leading a retreat with an animated group of teachers—St. Augustine’s in Vancouver, British Columbia. Their day of refueling before a new school year. Our topic, an invitation to create sanctuary, allowing us to honor habits that sustain our wellbeing.

We began the day going around a circle, each sharing memories from the summer. There were weddings and funerals and trips and reunions and adventures and celebrations in Parisian pubs after a World Cup victory.

“I have a heart condition,” one young teacher began her turn. “And every year I get an MRI for

assessment. Because I never know what the news will be, my temptation is caution and apprehension. Because of my condition, and afraid of the worst, I have always kept my physical activity to a minimum. Although I’ll admit that the excuse does come in handy, ‘I’d love to help out, but I have a heart condition.’”

We laughed.

“This year, after a clear MRI, my doctors told me that I needed more activity. Outdoors.

Nothing strenuous. But still. Anyway, my summer was very different than normal. I biked and hiked and enjoyed the sky and water and the air. I loved being outdoors.”

Well, I have a confession. I have lived most of my emotional and spiritual life with a heart condition. Because I have lived cautious and afraid, holding back my heart because of what it might cost, or require of me. Or fearing (running from) my brokenness, not believing that an open and broken heart is an invitation to live my days giving, creating, embracing, connecting, savoring, and celebrating. It is no wonder that, too often, I do not see.

Hundreds of years ago, in an era much more fraught than ours, St. Francis learned to live without holding back his heart. His antidote to confusion and paralysis was a return to simplicity, one step at a time, one person at a time, one good thing at a time, the right-in-front-of-you idea of searching for the light even while living with the darkness. His genius was that he saw what was hidden in plain sight. It was so simple it is almost impossible to see; we are wired to be present.

This Is the Life Mindfulness, Finding Grace, and the Power of the Present Moment Terry Hershey

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Becoming Bold Witnesses An excerpt from Meeting God in the Upper Room: Three Moments to Change Your Life

by Peter J. Vaghi

M

uch happened in the Upper Room at Jerusalem. Everything that took place in that small room has permanently and positively affected our faith and the life of the Church down through the centuries until this very day. The Church continues to preserve the memory of the Upper Room. Here we focus on the work of the Holy Spirit after Pentecost, the predicted “Spirit of truth” who has remained with us, as promised

by Jesus, since that day.

Until now, the events of the Upper Room have taken place in private. But Pentecost changes everything. We see that, “What had then taken place inside the Upper Room, ‘the doors being shut,’ later, on the day of Pentecost is manifested also outside, in public. The doors of the Upper Room are opened and the Apostles go to the inhabitants and the pilgrims who had gathered in Jerusalem on the occasion of the feast, in order to bear witness to Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.

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On Pentecost, the disciples left the Upper Room, with spiritual toolboxes in hand, and attempted to put into practice what they had experienced and learned in the Upper Room. The Holy Spirit had empowered and changed them to be bold witnesses to the death and rising of Jesus.

Even the way they acted and spoke had changed.

The Acts of the Apostles recounts what happened from Pentecost forward. In fact, the Acts of the Apostles has been called the Gospel of the Holy Spirit, so strong is the manifest influence and guidance of the Spirit in the early Church we see developing in the Acts. The disciples felt, over and over again, the full strength of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit who is the soul of the Church and a lasting treasure in the life of the Church. It is a strength that is available to each of us if we are open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

On Pentecost day, Peter powerfully proclaimed the death and resurrection of Jesus. He preached in the power of the Holy Spirit, and the crowds, also objects of the Spirit’s activity, asked him what they were to do. Without any hesitation: “Peter [said] to them, ‘repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the holy Spirit’” (Acts 2:38).

The breaking of bread became a way of life in the early Church for Acts tells us that “every day

they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple area and to breaking bread in their homes…. And every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” (Acts 2:46– 47). First, the Upper Room was a place of prayer and where the apostles broke bread with the Lord.

Now, through their ministry, empowered by the Holy Spirit, those experiences continued in the early Church and continue in the upper rooms of our lives.

Healings also took place in the early Church.

We see in the story of the crippled beggar, “Peter took him by the right hand and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles grew strong” (Acts 3:7). Pointing to the faith of the man healed, Peter told the crowds, as if to underscore a deeper healing possible for them: “Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away, and that the Lord may grant you times of refreshment and send you the Messiah already appointed for you, Jesus” (Acts 3:19–20). The gift of healing, along with the forgiveness of sins, was an essential gift of the Upper Room. These gifts spread, through Peter and the apostles, as the early Church grew and developed.

Despite his newfound boldness, not all was easy for Peter and the apostles in the early days of the Church. The disciples were repeatedly warned by the authorities to stop teaching in Jesus’s name.

They were threatened, beaten, and imprisoned, but they persevered in their witness. When challenged, the answer of Peter and John was simply: “It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). And they continued to speak and give faithful and bold witness. What incredible examples of faith for each of us!

You and I are challenged to possess the same missionary resourcefulness of the apostles in our age as a result of what happened in the Upper Room ages ago. There is no need to hide in the upper rooms of our lives out of fear or selfishness.

We are missionary disciples on a permanent mission and, as such, called to allow the Holy Spirit to lead us as the Spirit led and empowered Peter and the apostles in the early days of the Church. What happened to them was not only a phenomenon for first-century Christians. It is also our legacy as privileged men and women, baptized into the Risen Lord. The Upper Room is an icon of a fruitful Church and its fruitfulness continues in and through each and every believer.

Like the apostles, you and I are called in our day to heal and forgive—to forgive seven times seventy times. We are challenged to experience ever anew the knowledge of our salvation by the forgiveness of our sins, and to help others to come to that same knowledge.

We are challenged daily to live lives of sacrificial love after the example of Jesus in the Upper Room in his washing the feet of the apostles. By washing their feet, Jesus became like a humble slave. In so many big and little ways, the challenge to follow the Upper Room Jesus in his servant-like example presents itself to us on a daily basis. We are called to reach out and share our loving heart with those in need and with those who seek the face of mercy.

This we can powerfully do, after the example of St. Peter and the others in that Upper Room, in the upper rooms of our own lives. We can do this because of what happened millennia ago in a particular place in history called the Upper Room, or Cenacle, in Jerusalem. What happened there was and continues to be a fruitful icon of the Church, God’s holy people, all in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Meeting God in the Upper Room Three Moments to Change Your Life Peter J. Vaghi

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The Grace of Resurrection An excerpt from Caring for Creation: Inspiring Words from Pope Francis

By Pope Francis

Pope Francis @Pontifex · July 2, 2015

A great challenge: stop ruining the garden which God has entrusted to us so that all may enjoy it.

St. Francis’s Hymn of Praise When we can see God reflected in all that exists, our hearts are moved to praise the Lord for all his creatures and to worship him in union with them.

This sentiment finds magnificent expression in the hymn of St. Francis of Assisi: Praised be you, my Lord, with all your creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, who is the day and through whom you give us light.

And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor; and bears a likeness of you, Most High.

Praised be you, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars, in heaven you formed them clear and precious and beautiful.

Praised be you, my Lord, through Brother Wind, and through the air, cloudy and serene, and every kind of weather through whom you give sustenance to your creatures.

Praised be you, my Lord, through Sister Water,

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who is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.

Praised be you, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you light the night, and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong.

ENCYCLICAL LETTER, LAUDATO SI’, 87 SUNDAY, MAY 24, 2015

Let Us Respect Creation!

St. Francis of Assisi bears witness to the need to respect all that God has created and as he created it, without manipulating and destroying creation; rather to help it grow, to become more beautiful and more like what God created it to be. And above all, St. Francis witnesses to respect for everyone, he testifies that each of us is called to protect our neighbor, that the human person is at the center of creation, at the place where God—our creator—willed that we should be. Not at the mercy of the idols we have created! Harmony and peace!

Francis was a man of harmony and peace. From this City of Peace, I repeat with all the strength and the meekness of love: Let us respect creation, let us not be instruments of destruction!

HOMILY, ST. FRANCIS SQUARE, ASSISI FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2013

Nature, A Magnificent Book St. Francis, faithful to Scripture, invites us to see nature as a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness. “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker” (Wisdom 13:5); indeed, “his eternal power and divinity have been made known through his works since the creation of the world”

(Romans 1:20). For this reason, Francis asked that

me: the poor, the poor. Then, right away, thinking

part of the friary garden always be left untouched,

of the poor, I thought of Francis of Assisi. Then I

so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there,

thought of all the wars, as the votes were still being

and those who saw them could raise their minds

counted, till the end. Francis is also the man of

to God, the Creator of such beauty. Rather than a

peace. That is how the name came into my heart:

problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery

Francis of Assisi. For me, he is the man of poverty,

to be contemplated with gladness and praise.

the man of peace, the man who loves and protects

ENCYCLICAL LETTER, LAUDATO SI’, 12 SUNDAY, MAY 24, 2015

creation; these days we do not have a very good relationship with creation, do we?

ADDRESS TO REPRESENTATIVES OF THE

The Man Who Loves and Protects Creation

COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA, PAUL VI AUDIENCE HALL SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2013

Some people wanted to know why the Bishop of Rome wished to be called Francis. Some thought of Francis Xavier, Francis De Sales, and also Francis of Assisi. I will tell you the story. During the election, I was seated next to the Archbishop

Mindset Influences Behavior

Emeritus of São Paolo and Prefect Emeritus of the

By learning to see and appreciate beauty, we learn

Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Claudio

to reject self-interested pragmatism. If someone

Hummes: a good friend, a good friend! When

has not learned to stop and admire something

things were looking dangerous, he encouraged

beautiful, we should not be surprised if he or

me. And when the votes reached two thirds, there

she treats everything as an object to be used and

was the usual applause, because the Pope had been

abused without scruple. If we want to bring about

elected. And he gave me a hug and a kiss, and said:

deep change, we need to realize that certain mind-

“Don’t forget the poor!” And those words came to

sets really do influence our behavior. Our efforts

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at education will be inadequate and ineffectual unless we strive to promote a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society and our relationship with nature.

ENCYCLICAL LETTER, LAUDATO SI’, 215 SUNDAY, MAY 24, 2015

Pope Francis @Pontifex · June 19, 2015

The teachings of the Gospel have direct consequences for our way of thinking, feeling and living. #LaudatoSi

The Gift Entrusted to Us It is our profound conviction that the future of the human family depends also on how we safeguard— both prudently and compassionately, with justice and fairness—the gift of creation that our Creator has entrusted to us. Therefore, we acknowledge in repentance the wrongful mistreatment of our planet, which is tantamount to sin before the eyes of God. We reaffirm our responsibility and obligation to foster a sense of humility and moderation so that all may feel the need to respect creation and to safeguard it with care. Together, we pledge our commitment to raising awareness about the stewardship of creation; we appeal to all people of goodwill to consider ways of living less wastefully and more frugally, manifesting less greed and more generosity for the protection of God’s world and the benefit of His people.

COMMON DECLARATION OF POPE FRANCIS AND THE ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH BARTHOLOMEW I, JERUSALEM SUNDAY, MAY 25, 2014

An Invitation to All This is the invitation which I address to everyone: Let us accept the grace of Christ’s Resurrection!

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Let us be renewed by God’s mercy, let us be loved

by Jesus, let us enable the power of his love to transform our lives too; and let us become agents of this mercy, channels through which God can water the earth, protect all creation and make justice and peace flourish.

URBI ET ORBI, LOGGIA OF ST. PETER’S BASILICA EASTER SUNDAY, MARCH 31, 2013

Pope Francis @Pontifex · April 30, 2014

Let us put our trust in God’s power at work! With him, we can do great things. He will give us the joy of being his disciples.

Take Care of God’s Beautiful Gifts Once I was in the countryside and I heard a saying from a simple person who had a great love for flowers and took care of them. He said to me: “We must take care of the beautiful things that God has given us! Creation is ours so that we can receive good things from it; not exploit it, to protect it. God forgives always, we men forgive sometimes, but creation never forgives and if you don’t care for it, it will destroy you.”

This should make us think and should make us ask the Holy Spirit for the gift of knowledge in order to understand better that creation is a most beautiful gift of God. GENERAL AUDIENCE, ST. PETER’S SQUARE WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 2014 Caring for Creation Inspiring Words from Pope Francis Pope Francis

God’s House Is All of Creation An excerpt from Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from Saint Francis

by Murray Bodo, OFM

A

s he looked out of his cave and down to Assisi from the heights of Mount Subasio,

it was as if the whole of creation were spread out beneath his cave, and God’s goodness rushed in upon him. He could only think of that pure Goodness and how God shares his life with us.

Everything good and beautiful comes from God. God went so far as to give us one of the persons of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus the Christ, who came among us as Jesus, the carpenter’s son from Nazareth. Jesus was one of us, and yet he

was more. He came to show us how to praise God, though only he could praise God perfectly.

Only Jesus was the perfect lover of God outside the circle of the Blessed Trinity. Everything and everyone comes from the Trinity, including Jesus.

And everything that is exists in Jesus Christ.

This was beyond Francis’s thinking. These were thoughts too high for him, a merchant’s son who understood the give-and-take that is business.

The world of business Francis knew, and he knew that God’s economy was different. All the supply was on God’s side. All we could give in return was praise through Jesus Christ, who alone can give back adequately what the Father gives eternally.

Praise we can give. And care for and of all God has created outside the Trinity, beginning with Jesus himself who sums up and contains all of creation in his own divine nature. Francis knew the two stories of the beginnings of things in the book of Genesis. One story emphasizes human beings’

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dominion over all lesser creatures. The other story was about humans’ care and nurturing of all creatures, including Earth itself. Francis loved the second story more. It appealed to who he was and how he saw his relationship to the world around him. So, he would praise God through Jesus Christ with all creatures, for all creatures, and in and by means of all creatures. And he would care for them and nourish them, as God’s words in Genesis said he should. That is an economy Francis could understand: God gives all good; humans in return praise and care. He knew he had to praise or he wouldn’t be able to care and nourish. And he had to care and nourish or his praise would be empty.

That was to be his story. That was everyone’s deepest story. Bad things would befall us all, but praise and care would keep us going. And that was love, to praise and care for, no matter what.

That’s what God’s good merchant does: receive good unlimited and pay it back with praise and care. That was the economy of love that was the counterweight to the economy of money that was beginning to make its way into Assisi.

And so he would always keep praise in the forefront of his and his brothers’ lives. They would all try to remember to praise. And to help them he will direct the brother gardener to not plant the whole garden with food plants, but to set aside a plot for those plants, which in their season would bloom with Brother Flowers. Then when the brothers saw the pretty little flower bed with its sweetly scented herbs and flowering plants it would invite everyone to praise God; for Brother Flowers will say, “God made me for you, O human!”

Thursday, July 13, 2017, the New York Times: “A chunk of floating ice roughly the size of Delaware broke away from the Antarctica Peninsula this week, NASA confirmed on Wednesday, producing one of the largest icebergs ever recorded and providing a glimpse of how the Antarctic ice sheet might ultimately start to fall apart.”

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I felt a shiver run up my arms as I held the paper. “O humans!” I cried out to the empty room. I wondered were we in any way responsible for accelerating such an alarming change of the planet. What would this mean? My mind raced to St. Francis’s, “Canticle of the Creatures,” to the stanza on our sister Mother Earth, who “sustains and directs us, / bringing forth all kinds of fruits / with colored flowers and herbs.” And the flowers and herbs cried out, “God made us for you, O humans!”

What then is our response to such a gift? It is surely not indifference, or worse, dismissal! And what then are the consequences if we not only dismiss but abuse her who is our sister, Mother Earth, God’s gift to sustain and nourish us? And what kind of arrogance and greed abuses Earth instead? It makes one weep and be tempted to hate those who rape Earth, were it not for the knowledge that hate diminishes the effects of God’s love and care even more. We’ve had enough of hate and neglect.

Something ominous is beginning to happen.

How much of it is of our own making? Perhaps once again St. Francis can help us.

His greatest teaching, in his words and in his life, is that God is. He had experienced the “absence” of the one Jesus called, “Our Father.”

And that same Father had found the lost Francis through God’s presence in other human beings, especially in the lowliest and most rejected, like the lepers.

After his imprisonment in Perugia and after his long recuperation afterward at home in Assisi, the natural world, too, seemed dead, the glory of its charm no longer real to Francis, but then the same God found Francis there too. Once he had come to know and remember that there is a God dwelling among us and within us, then nature also began to speak to him of God. As Brother Thomas of Celano, Francis’s first biographer, wrote,

Everything good and beautiful comes from God.

St. Francis praised the Artist in every one

that chasm to be one like us. Francis’s whole life,

of his works; whatever he found in things

after his conversion, was to respond by his life and

made, he referred to their Maker. He

actions to so profound a self-emptying by God,

rejoiced in all the works of the Lord’s hands,

the eternal Creator of all things. He does this by

and with joyful vision saw into the reason

praising and thanking God for the work of God’s

and cause that gave them life. In beautiful

hands, by reverencing every created thing, and by

things he came to know Beauty itself. To

emptying himself of everything he clings to that

him all things were good. They cried out to

keeps him from meeting the God who became

him, “He who made us is infinitely good.”

Incarnate out of pure, selfless love for us.

By tracing His footprints in things, Francis followed the Beloved wherever He led. He made from created things, a ladder to His throne.”

Surrounded by Love Seven Teachings from Saint Francis Murray Bodo, OFM

St. Francis had an intuitive grasp of the infinite chasm between the creature and the Creator.

And in Jesus Christ he saw the Creator bridging

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Contemplating Our Crucified Earth And excerpt from Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth

by Ilia Delio, OSF, Keith Warner, OFM, and Pamela Wood

C

ontemplation is essential to understanding how to follow in the footprints of Francis and lead a life of reflective action. Contemplation in the Franciscan tradition is an essential part of an engaged spirituality; it asks us to really look at the world with seeing eyes. It involves withdrawing from the world in reflection, yes, but not to escape from the world or its problems.

Rather, this stepping back offers a chance to take a penetrating look at the world as it truly is, in all its beauty and gift as well as its pain and injustice.

Contemplation involves looking critically at the underlying structures of injustice and finding a way to be part of their transformation; it is anything that helps us to “unveil the illusions that

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masquerade as reality and reveal the reality behind the masks.” Yet contemplation also nurtures our spirit, and out of this inner fullness our actions become like a sacrament in this world—cocreating with God and making the spirit visible in our hurting world. Contemplation ignited Francis’ heart, which led to his profound conversion and his commitment to living a penitent life. His kinship with all of creation was an occasion for joy, but it also brought with it grief and pain at the injustices suffered by that which he loved. This familial love for all of life ultimately compelled him to act with compassion and to promote peacemaking and justice in ways that often challenged the power structures of his time.

Looking at contemplation from this perspective, what does it mean for us as followers of Francis to take a contemplative approach to our modern-day ecological crises? If we dare to look and really see, we encounter Creation crucified—at our hands. This is truly a heartbreaking and terrifying reality, almost impossible to bear without the strong spiritual grounding that contemplation offers. If Francis were to walk our earth today, he would encounter for the first time his Sister

Mother Earth, Brother Wind, and Sister Water polluted and desecrated, the creatures he loved endangered and some gone forever. Francis never experienced this type of ecological devastation since it occurred largely after the Industrial Revolution, yet the way he lived his life can teach us how to contemplate such realities and then find the courage to act.

The story of Francis’ encounter with a leper offers powerful guidance here. In his era, lepers were looked upon with scorn. They suffered intense social stigma, and their affliction was often seen as a punishment from God. In his youth Francis was no exception in his disdain for the lepers living on the outskirts of his town; in fact, he avoided them even more vigorously than others did. Perhaps their pain and disfigurement was too much for him to bear, so he assumed the cultural messages of his time, which helped justify this collective “looking away” of society from the lepers’ plight. However, early in his conversion God’s love shone through to Francis in his encounter with a leper, and it profoundly changed his life. Soon after he went to live with the lepers, caring for them as his own kin and experiencing true joy in this service.

Francis’ transformed heart was what made the difference; he saw in the leper’s eyes that God “humbly bends low in love and hides in weak and fragile forms.” This transformed understanding flowed from a heart that was grounded in love and the knowledge of his relatedness to his brother leper through their common Creator. How can contemplation help us do as Francis did—face harsh realities and injustices in our world despite the pain and discomfort we might experience in the face of that suffering? How can a contemplative heart help us to discover again our love for the family of creation and help us to find the courage to act in its defense? Like Francis in his encounter with the leper, we must learn how to gaze upon our damaged, disfigured and disregarded Earth

with contemplative eyes, for when we hold within our hearts the pain of our world long enough for it to transform us, we discover the courage and hope needed to act on behalf of creation.

In the same way that Francis’ fear and apathy caused him to shun the leper early in his life, we humans—in our collective inaction—shun our ailing Earth and the plight of all her living creatures. Why is this? What keeps us from taking action to heal our world? This chapter focuses on some of the obstacles that prevent us from doing our part to care for our crucified Earth: denial, apathy, disempowerment and despair. In the guided meditation, the process of “breathing through” is offered as a practical tool to use whenever we encounter difficult feelings—from a disagreement with a friend to the powerlessness of the huge and complex ecological crises we now face. Individual actions are discussed that can help us to assess and begin the process of changing our individual contributions to global climate change: They begin to “lay the groundwork” for rebuilding the house of creation. Group reflection questions then encourage us to examine what prevents us from joining with Francis to “rebuild the oikos.” What are the challenges each of us face when contemplating difficult realities and the need to take action? Fundamental to the approach of many of the world’s great spiritual traditions, and surely to Francis’ approach to life, is the recognition that we are not separate, isolated entities, but are interrelated to all of creation.

Care for Creation A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth Ilia Delio, OSF, Keith Warner, OFM and Pamela Wood

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Coming Home to the Incarnation in Creation A Guided Meditation And excerpt from Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth

by Ilia Delio, OSF, Keith Warner, OFM, and Pamela Wood

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aint Francis of Assisi loved the earth; he walked respectfully over the land as holy ground. When he walked over rocks, “he would walk with fear and reverence out of love for Him who is called ‘the Rock.’” We, too, are called to tread lightly on our planet, always supported by our Earth home, which has been created to sustain us in every moment.

Now bring your attention to your breath. Simply notice your breath, with no need to change it in any way. When your mind wanders, gently nudge it back to the breath, letting it rest there. Let your mind stay passive yet alert as your body begins to relax.

Bring to your awareness the fact that your breath happens by itself. Even when you are not mindful of it, the Spirit of Life breathes through you in every moment of your life. Spend some time now nurturing an awareness of this miracle of breath.

Now bring to mind the air that extends out from your breath, moving beyond you to fill the whole sky, joining with the great winds that encircle our planet. From the oceans to the deserts to the wind over high alpine meadows, our home planet is refreshed by this lifegiving air, which moves across its surface in currents of wind and weather. Our thin layer of atmosphere miraculously protects the fragility of life on this planet.

With Francis, we can dance with Brother Wind, and gaze upon Sister Moon and the stars,

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contemplating the vastness of God revealed to us in our universe home. We can be mindful that this precious air connects us to one another, across the globe and through the ages. This same air we breathe was breathed by our ancestors, by saints and sinners throughout time, by Francis himself.

It will continue to circulate in this way until our children and great-great-grandchildren also breathe it through their lungs, so that they, too, may be filled with life.

Now picture the sun wherever it is in the sky.

Each morning our planet turns toward the sun, soaking in its warmth and suckling its life energy.

In each second our great, generous sun offers up four million tons of itself, transformed into radiant light and energy daily, free for all of life on Earth to use. Green plants have evolved to take in this energy from the sun and convert it to food and energy for themselves. By doing so, plants feed all life on this planet as they make that energy available to humans and other mammals to ingest when we eat. All life depends on energy, and all energy has the sun as its ultimate source. With Francis, we, too, revel in the miracle of Brother Sun, whose life-giving energy courses through our own bodies too: warming our hearts, igniting our

dreams and fueling our work in the world.

Now bring to mind the element of water in our blue-green planet home; the great oceans that cover two-thirds of its surface, the streams and rivers and lakes. Picture, too, the huge glaciers and snow-capped mountains that hold our water in reserve for us, releasing it slowly over time for the use of all living beings, and the ice caps that cool our poles and play such a key role in the circulation of air and water throughout our planet.

Give thanks for the water cycle that draws all this water into our atmosphere, circulating the water across the world, bringing the cleansing rains that feed all of life. We take in this water: It composes 70 percent of our bodies and is contained in each and every cell and in our blood and our tears.

Those who lived with Francis tell of him reverencing water by choosing to wash his hands “where the water would not be trampled underfoot after washing.” With Francis, we marvel at the wonder of water and honor the lifeblood of our bodies and our bounteous earth. Like all living creatures, we humans need food, a home and a

of the elements of creation, we are awed by the amazing hospitality of our planet home.

We prodigal sons and daughters can learn to fall in love again with our planet home, and come to more fully appreciate our utter dependence on its bounty. We can follow Francis’ example of remembering that the earth is not our home alone, but is first and foremost God’s house. We can build anew bonds of love, care, concern and companionship with not only our human brothers and sisters, but with the house of creation that sustains us and is kin to us all. We can walk in God’s Incarnation daily, remembering that the face of the Divine shines through each and every thing, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. Through creation, the ineffable is made tangible, and we can sense the radiance of God in the beauty of the natural order.

Care for Creation A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth Ilia Delio, OSF, Keith Warner, OFM and Pamela Wood

family, and none other exists for us or any other living creature than our planet Earth. Walking with Francis through God’s house, honoring each

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St. Clare’s Roadmap of Prayer An excerpt from Franciscan Prayer

by Ilia Delio, OSF

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cholars tell us that Clare desired to follow Francis’ evangelical way of life and may indeed have done so in the early part of her career. At the age of eighteen, she left her noble household in upper Assisi to join Francis and the brothers at the little church of the Portiuncula (“Our Lady of the Angels”) in the Umbrian valley below the town of Assisi. What is unclear is how long she and her companions stayed with the brothers. Because it was considered unsafe for women in the Middle Ages to live independently or without some type of male protection, we are told that Francis placed Clare and her sisters in a Benedictine monastery, eventually moving them to the convent of San Damiano where Clare remained until her death. Although she described herself as “la piantacella,” the little plant of Francis, she was clearly no wilting flower. She had a strong, independent spirit and a real desire to join in Francis’ evangelical project. Whereas

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Francis saw poverty as the means for living authentic gospel life, Clare fought for the “privilege of poverty,” because poverty was the key to Christian life. The Incarnation spoke to her of the “poverty of God” manifested in God’s self-giving love. Her fight for this privilege was compounded by the fact that she lived under the Benedictine Rule throughout most of her life. Although the tools of historical-critical analysis are now helping to retrieve a more authentic Clare, it is apparent that she never succumbed to the monastic spirit.

Rather, she continued to fight for the “privilege of poverty,” which she won about a year before her death in 1253. She wrote her own Rule and was the first woman of the church to have a Rule officially approved for a community of women.

Clare provides the “roadmap” of prayer for evangelical life. I believe she was able to do this precisely because she lived under a monastic rule while ardently desiring evangelical life. In other words, to really cling to what she believed in, she had to consolidate its meaning for herself and those who followed her. The monastic path to God is quite different from the evangelical path.

It emphasizes divine transcendence rather than immanence, the ascended Christ rather than the crucified Christ, spiritual union with God rather than the physical expression of divine love. The

Gaze.

Consider.

Contemplate.

Imitate.

monastic quest includes the silence and solitude of the cloister to seek God whereas evangelical life, with its focus on the Incarnation, means that God is to be found in the cloister of the world.

As far as we know, Clare wrote only four short letters to the noblewoman of Bohemia, Agnes of Prague, whom she never met but with whom she shared a spiritual bond, describing Agnes as “half of her soul.” Although Clare also wrote a Rule and Testament, it is her letters, rich and dense in spirituality, which reflect her evangelical spirit. In her second letter to Agnes she lays out the path to union with God centered on the mystery of Christ crucified. I quote it here: O most noble Queen, gaze [on him], consider [him], contemplate [him], as you desire to imitate [him]. If you suffer with him, you will reign with him. [If you] weep [with him], you shall rejoice with him; [if you] die with him on the cross of tribulation, you shall possess heavenly mansions in the splendor of the saints and, in the Book of Life, your name shall be called glorious

differs from it. The monastic ascent begins with the reading of Scripture which leads to meditation, then prayer and contemplation. Clare begins with a “visual reading,” a gazing on the image of the crucified Christ, which leads to meditation or consideration of Christ, then to contemplation and imitation of Christ. Whereas the monastic path ends at contemplation, for Clare, the goal of prayer is imitation. It is not simply that we arrive at union with God; rather, it is that we become what we love. Prayer is to forge us into the likeness of the beloved, and thus it is bringing Christ to life in the believer. This is evangelical life—bringing Christ to life by participating in the Christ mystery. Prayer is the energy of evangelical life because it transforms the desire for gospel life into the practice of gospel living. Clare’s template of prayer, gaze—consider—contemplate—imitate, is the template of evangelical life and the relationship with God that makes this life alive.

Franciscan Prayer Ilia Delio, OSF

among people.

Gaze—consider—contemplate—imitate. What makes this passage significant is the way it parallels the monastic ascent to God and yet clearly

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Responding to the “Cry of the Earth”

by Daniel Imwalle Adapted from an editorial in the February 2020 issue of St. Anthony Messenger

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e humans tend to compartmentalize just about every aspect of our lives, from what we do in mundane daily rituals to how we engage with entire holy seasons. There’s comfort in routine, to be certain. The cycle of holidays, holy days, and commemorative months provides us with a kind of rhythm in an often offbeat world. And we’ve likely already compartmentalized the health of our environment to Earth Day and the beginning of spring.

But what if we considered incorporating ecological awareness and stewardship into our daily life instead of one day a year? Doing so connects strongly with our faith’s call to care for God’s creation and could very well surprise us with new ways to grow in our spiritual lives. Recent developments in the Church and renewed calls for ecological conversion shed light on the importance of care for creation.

Our Earth Cries Out Taking care of the earth is not new to Catholic social teaching. In a 1971 apostolic letter, Pope Paul VI wrote, “Man is suddenly becoming aware that by an ill-considered exploitation of nature he risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation” (“Octogesima Adveniens,” 21). St. John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI furthered the cause for ecological preservation in their papacies, and the primary focus of Pope Francis’ second encyclical (“Laudato Si’”) is our moral obligation to care for creation and respond to climate change.

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Perhaps nowhere is the evidence of humankind’s abuse of the environment more apparent than the Amazon rain forest. Often referred to as “the earth’s lungs,” this vibrant and diverse ecosystem is facing an epic crisis. By 2018, after decades of deforestation, about 17 percent of the rain forest had been destroyed, primarily to make way for lucrative cattle ranches. The “slash-andburn” method of deforesting has led to ongoing wildfires in the region. Following the discovery of fossil fuel reservoirs in the 1970s, it has been an uphill battle for many indigenous groups to keep oil companies from entering the Amazon and destroying more forest by building roads and setting up drill sites.

The Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region that met last October made a strong link between poverty of people and poverty of the earth. Part of the final document of the synod reads, “Listening to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor and of the peoples of the Amazon with whom we walk, calls us to a true integral conversion, to a simple and modest style of life, all

Our moral obligation is to care for creation.

nourished by a mystical spirituality in the style of St. Francis of Assisi, a model of integral conversion lived with Christian happiness and joy” (17).

Caring for creation doesn’t have an impact only on those living in poverty who work the land; it’s intertwined with the ongoing conversions that are a part of all of our faith journeys. If we allow ourselves to be moved by the “cry of the earth.”

Practicing What We Preach The immense problems facing the environment are on a global scale, and, considering the size and complexity of the crisis, we might be tempted to simply give up before even trying. We need to be patient with ourselves—and with others—as we find out what’s within our sphere of influence. Starting small is always OK. Set recurring reminders on your phone to offer up a quick prayer for our earth. It could be a prayer of gratitude, for solidarity with the 700 million people struggling with water scarcity, or a few lines from St. Francis’ “Canticle of the Sun.” With a calendar at hand, try making some weekly goals.

Money holds many of us back from happiness and holiness. Letting go of some in the form of a donation is a very Lenten exercise.

Organizations such as the Catholic Climate Covenant (CatholicClimateCovenant.org) and Poverty USA (PovertyUSA.org) are great educational resources that also make donating easy.

Pope Francis wrote in “Laudato Si’” about the environmental crisis, “A great cultural, spiritual, and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal” (202). Taking to heart the pope’s words, now is the time to take up that journey.

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Sister Dorothy Stang: Angel of the Amazon

by Tina Neyer A version of this article appeared in the February 2012 issue of St. Anthony Messenger

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ngel of the Amazon is an American opera written and composed by Evan Mack, a young man who exhibits great zeal for Sister Dorothy Stang, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur who was assassinated in 2005 in the Amazon rain forest.

Sister Dorothy worked for 40 years defending the rights of poor farmers who had been granted land by the Brazilian government. The farmers struggled to gain access to the land, though, due to the greed of a small number of wealthy cattle ranchers and loggers. She was murdered for her stand.

Heroic Life From 1966 until her death, Sister Dorothy championed the cause of peasant farmers who have

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been denied land for decades. She taught farmers how to preserve the land while growing food to sustain themselves. Her focus on the importance of community helped her to develop plans in each settlement to build a school, a chapel and a gathering place for adults along the Trans-Amazonian Highway.

The opera embodies Sister Dorothy’s struggle, portraying one logger in particular and the government officials charged with overseeing land grants to populate the highway.

Throughout the opera’s 90-minute journey, Sister Dorothy’s mission is clearly spelled out.

Mack has focused on the last six days of her life, with flashbacks to bring the audience along, exposing the complicated nature of the struggle between the wealthy ranchers and the poor in Brazil. He shows how Sister Dorothy worked every day to empower the poor to own their right to the land. She struggled to work with the government, the local bishop, and the loggers and ranchers.

Mack says the production reflects grassroots efforts to fight to save the Amazon rain forest.

Sister Dorothy’s Mission By the 1990s Sister Dorothy had fought—with some success—malnutrition and poverty in her area. Meanwhile, though, loggers clear-cut the land for industrial-export agriculture, hiring thugs and bribing local police, threatening anyone in their way. The local farmers’ living standards became more developed. There was limited electricity, a school building and a fruit factory in the town of Boa Esperanza.

Though the local power brokers considered it a failed experiment, Boa Esperanza, which means “good hope,” was working and growing, taking up viable land and profits from loggers and ranchers. That settlement is one setting for Angel of the Amazon. Sister Dorothy was shot six times by two men on the road to Boa Esperanza. The night before she died, she had met with her wouldbe assassins, trying to reach the basic good she believed was in everyone and everything. She offered them food and kindness, trying to reason with the two men.

Inspired by Sister Dorothy A young Brazilian woman watches a gray-haired woman in a T-shirt and long skirt from a window deep in the Amazon. The older woman is in the forest dancing—something very odd to the young woman. Suddenly, as if she could not contain herself, the older woman hugs a tree.

Then, turning toward the building where the young woman stands, she hollers, “You must hug someone every day, Tecla. And if you can’t find a person to hug, hug a tree.”

Maria Tecla di Silva Gaia is evidence of the continuation of the song of Sister Dorothy Stang.

Tecla is a Brazilian who entered Sister Dorothy’s order, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, 10 years ago. She is a joyful, earthy presence, with a laugh as light as sunshine on the forest floor.

“She was the simplest of the simple, transparent,” Tecla says of Sister Dorothy. The bubbly sister, who is in the United States for an immersion experience, speaks in broken English, jabbing at the air as she paints a picture of her mentor.

“She was very lovable and dear.” Quickly her expression turns to a childlike sternness. But then she laughs again, saying, “Irma Dorothy [Portuguese for Sister Dorothy] was very stubborn, determined.”

Tecla, in a sweater the jeweled blue of a macaw, speaks through Sister Joan Krimm, as her English is not as good as Tecla hopes it will be someday.

She grew up in Bragancia, Brazil, as one of the people Sister Dorothy served.

With a broad smile she says, “Irma Dorothy saw injustices and fought for a life of dignity for the farmers.” Tecla folds her arms in her lap as Sister Joan says that Sister Dorothy loved the people of Brazil so much that she had dual citizenship. Tecla exudes a serene joy with a voice as rhythmic as a Brazilian samba, recounting the favorite qualities of Sister Dorothy: “Her smile was her greatest asset.”

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