** Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and perhaps share advice. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. :-)
I've always been fascinated by St. Francis of Assisi. I love animals, and he's well known as the patron saint of animals and ecology, but this is the merest tip of Francis' iceberg. In Catholic tradition, canonical saints have a job to do in conveying something about holiness, and no other saint in the whole tradition managed such a mind-bogglingly literal imitation of Christ in practically every aspect of his life. Remember his (alleged) saying, "preach always; use words if you have to"?
Why did he do it? It wasn't because he thought everybody ought to live in utter poverty and so forth, but in order to make the true spirit of the gospel visible to regular people. The major reason was to be a force of renewal in society and in the church, "salt" and "light," the leaven of the kingdom of God in the dough of humanity. As a young man, he had a spiritual experience of Jesus telling him to "repair my church, which you can see is falling into ruin." He took it literally at first, physically rebuilding the crumbling San Damiano chapel and other country churches. Later he sought to rebuild the Church with living stones, men and women committed to living the gospel authentically.
One thing that often gets missed as we admire the "free spirit" quality we see in Francis, is how totally he aligned himself and his order of Friars Minor with the Vatican, and how enthusiastically he venerated churches, the sacraments, holy writings, etc. See, unlike other reformers, Francis' way was not to rail and criticize but to be utterly humble in relation to the Church, and simply let people notice that he and his simple friars were more Christ-like than the priests and more Catholic than the Pope. And people utterly loved him for it.
I don't think I've talked about this on WYFP before, but I returned to the Roman Catholic Church in late February of this year, after having been away from it since I became an atheist as a teenager. Basically I grew a lot in my spiritual life, and religion started to make a new kind of sense. I go to daily Mass now. The past 7+ months have been a fascinating and mostly great experience, but I had a lot of terror about it at first. I had plenty of reservations about the Catholic Church. But I'd also studied the life of St. Francis, and had been surprised and fascinated by the jiu-jitsu of how much his loyalty, humility, and lack of a reform agenda succeeded in repairing the Church. I decided to trust Francis on this. When in Rome, I would do as the Romans did, and even moreso.
You know what, being on God's side works, because it means God is on your side. You would not believe the conversation I had with a priest on Thursday on a topic of great interest to progressives. I am not even going to say anything about it though.
I don't think everyone needs to be religious, much less Christian, any more than Francis believed everyone needed to live in total poverty and kiss lepers. Atheists have some wonderful messages for the world too, and can live beautiful lives. Religion can go very wrong or very right. It goes right especially when people stay in community and decide to do it right, humbly giving of themselves, rather than leaving in disgust. Maybe this is what St. Francis would want to say to us, to remind us he's not just the "birdbath saint." :-)
I'll let you figure out from that what my effing problem is, since I'm way late by now and I'm having a hard time narrowing down the main idea of what I wrote.
Well... what's on your mind tonight?