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.
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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.”
I thought of you, each member of our Order, as I pondered these readings (from Franciscan Morning and Evening Praise) for the Feast of All the Saints of the Franciscan Order (Nov. 29):
As suggested by Jan, our National Minister, we would like to provide “DID YOU KNOW” blogs in the coming months of what this tremendous site has in store for us. We will start with The CALENDARS pages.
No matter what method we use to help us get things done, there are times in life when we are stopped dead in our tracks. It may be loss, conflict or confusion, but when something big lands right in our path, we are often stopped short. ... Purity of heart sets us free. St. Francis calls us to this freedom, to “put aside every care and anxiety, to serve, love, honor and adore the Lord God with a clean heart and a pure mind."
Betty Frank, OFS, who was professed 70 years ago and is one of the longest living professed Secular Franciscans in the U.S., helped to unveil the “Welcome to Utica” sign for city officials during the 160th Anniversary Celebration of St. Joseph Fraternity. Founded in March 1859, the fraternity is the second oldest in the country.