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FOLLOWING FRANCIS

The Franciscan Way for Everyone

Church Publishing Incorporated

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WHY FOLLOW FRANCIS?

One day ... Friar Masseo desired to test how great [Francis'] humility was and went up to him and, as if in jest, said, "Why after you? Why after you? Why after you?" Francis answered, "What are you saying?" Friar Masseo said, "I say, why does all the world follow after you, and why does every man seem to desire to see you and to hear you and to obey you? You are not a man beautiful of body, you are not greatly learned, you are not noble: why then should all the world follow after you?" Hearing this, St. Francis rejoiced greatly in spirit ... and said, "Would you know 'why after me'? Why all the world follows after me? I have this from those eyes of the most high God, which in every place behold the good and the wicked: namely, because those most holy eyes have not seen among sinners any more vile, or more insufficient, or a greater sinner than I am ... [T]herefore, He has chosen me to confound the nobility and the pride and the strength and the beauty and wisdom of the world, so that it may know that every virtue and every good thing is from Him...."

—The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi, p. 24

If it was a mystery to Masseo why people followed Francis during his lifetime, it's even more perplexing that people all over the world are still following him eight hundred years later. Of course, Francis is one of the most loved and admired saints the Church has ever produced, but it's one thing to admire a saint from a distance and quite another to take him as your model for the most important endeavor of your life. What makes people want to do this? There are really two questions here: first, what makes an otherwise ordinary person want to join a religious order at all—especially in mid-life, mid-career, even mid-marriage? Second, if a religious order at all, why Francis' order? All Franciscans have their own answers to these questions, of course, and I can only answer them with my own story.

After a decade-long hiatus following some painful experiences in the Church, I began to scratch and claw my way back to faith in the mid 1990s. As a freshman Christian I majored in penance, spending years in the phase the classical spiritual writers have called "purgation." Sunday after Sunday I wept my way through church, and on the days in between I wept some more. Luckily for me, the famous Anglican reserve held out and nobody bothered me too much, although they did make me welcome. I knew they meant it, but I also knew that I had no right to be there; I just kept coming back because there was no place else to go. I was supposed to be a "new creation," and my old self was supposed to pass away (2 Cor 5:17). Yet my old self was not only alive, but positively athletic. At the same time, I was running into professional difficulties that beat up my ego even more. God was busy knocking every support out from under me, presumably so that I'd lean on him alone. I had some faith in this explanation, but it didn't diminish my sorrow, or my fear that God's patience was running out.

Then suddenly things began to change. Old attitudes and habits of thinking and acting dissipated, apparently without my doing anything much about them, and sorrow was increasingly displaced by joy. In short, God began liberating me from myself in his own good time. I felt like someone who's been knocking at a door for so long that she finally leans against it, exhausted, when it suddenly gives way and hurtles her headlong into the greatest party of all time. It's said that God's strength is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor 12:9), and I can at least say that I gave him ample opportunity to show off. Yet the more he did, the more isolated I felt. I imagine that many of the people in my parish have been through similar experiences, but no one ever seemed to talk about it. After-church coffee hour chat is superficial almost by definition, and adult classes, workshops and study groups all seemed to avoid getting too personal.

Occasionally there were glimpses of communities where people shared their spiritual journeys, but these communities didn't seem to be organized on the parish level. This makes sense, since most congregations are a mix of fresh- faced seekers and seasoned old saints, not to mention kids, young adults, couples, singles and ordinary screwed up folk. Unless the parish is a very large one, there's hardly a group to meet every need. I met one man whose community formed out of an ecumenical study group, but that seemed the sort of thing that either happens or it doesn't. Then I read Kathleen Norris's books describing her formation as a Benedictine oblate, and discovered that ordinary people could become attached to existing religious communities, and how much that experience had meant to her. It seemed an idea worth investigating. My parish happens to count among its members a Benedictine monk, who was willing to give me a crash course in religious orders and their different "styles."

I learned that Benedictines are specialists in moderation: "nothing harsh, nothing burdensome" as Benedict's famous Rule says. Their lives are centered around a disciplined schedule of prayer, study and work, and they are committed to the notion of balance—there's time in every day for the things that matter. They are also unique among monastic traditions in that they take a vow of stability, ordinarily staying put in the same house until death, though they may move as a matter of obedience. Stability, balance, moderation—I admire Benedictines, but I am not one of them.

The Trappists are an offshoot of the Benedictine Order, one of the reforms that went in the direction of a more stringent Rule. I mention them mainly because of the current popularity of "centering prayer," one of whose main spokesmen is a Trappist monk named Thomas Keating. Centering prayer is a method that involves sitting in silence for twenty minutes at a time, and using a "sacred word" chosen by the person as a means of dealing with intrusive thoughts. When thoughts interrupt the silence, you simply repeat the sacred word and let the thoughts float away. Centering prayer is big in these parts, and I've found the use of a sacred word to be an immensely helpful way of coping with distractions. But while I can see the value in having the pray-er maintain silence for the course of the sitting, I find it disturbing that, according to some of its proponents, this prayer also requires God to maintain silence throughout. I've put the question to several teachers of this method: What if God wants to speak, what am I supposed to do then? In each case, I was told to ignore anything that intrudes on the silence, that "if it's important, God will repeat it later when you can listen." Keating himself says, "Even if you see the heavens opening and Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father, forget it. Return to the sacred word." I don't know if all Trappists have the stones to tell the creator of the universe to keep quiet till their twenty minutes are up—maybe you get pretty tough when you follow a Rule as austere as theirs. But my frustration with centering prayer ended when I realized that of course Keating's approach would be rigid about silence: he's a Trappist, for God's sake. And I'm not.

The Carmelites, on the other hand, understand the beauty and importance of silence without being rigid about it. I love Teresa of Avila's mix of radical devotion and relaxed openness: "If you want to make progress on the path and ascend to the places you have longed for, the important thing is not to think much but to love much, and so to do whatever best awakens you to love." Indeed, I have learned so much from Teresa that she will be appearing often in this work, singing backup to Francis' lead. And I love a
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Excerpted from FOLLOWING FRANCIS by Susan Pitchford. Copyright © 2006 by Susan Pitchford. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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