carolynseal_jr65

As a recovering perfectionist, although I have been professed for more than 24 years, my spiritual stretching or limberness has varied throughout the years.  Physically, I’ve never been able to bend over and touch my toes without bending my knees. Spiritually, I continue to work on allowing God to lead.

Using a Franciscan lens, Christ, the center of the Blessed Trinity, is the one who reveals to us a loving and fruitful relationship between all of creation and the Trinity—God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. My prayer for you is that Christ, the hope of glory, will dwell in your heart now and forever more.

Thankfully, we have the Franciscan tradition to give us some good examples of how to live this Gospel sense of fraternity, stories that we share in common that encourage and  challenge us in living fraternity.

Pope Francis is addressing First Order friars, but his thoughts on fraternity are also relevant to Secular Franciscans. He observes that Francis considered fraternity a gift. How is fraternity a gift to you?

Fr. John said, “Seeing St. Clare’s life in the context of the 13th century allows us to see that we are not called to pretend or to ‘imitate’ the details of what she did, but to respond to grace within our own contexts and lives.”