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A Visit to Uncle Frank's house

Posted Jul 3, 10:02 AM | 2 comments | by Editor | Link

By Will Barrett and David Smith:

As the result of a budding friendship with Brother Juan and a few local friars in Tampa, I found myself working, praying, sharing, and exploring at the St. Francis Inn (a soup kitchen and place of hospitality) in north Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. I couldn’t help but find their organically egalitarian structure attractive, demonstrating some of the best characteristics of emergent but from a starkly different church background. What follows are brief observations on the Franciscans’ belief and praxis, comparison with those of emergent and how the two can benefit from each other.

St. Jude, pray for us.

Incense, liturgy, lectio divina. Dispensing with the obvious similarities between Frankies and emergents, another more distinctive aspect of Franciscan church caught my eye. Each morning, we celebrated mass in the round (well semi-circle).This isn’t just a spatial convenience but one that reflects their understanding of the Body of Christ. They strive to see Christ in every person they come across and to display Christ in themselves for their neighbor. Their faith is found looking into the eyes of their friends, and they sit accordingly. The priest sits at the head of the arc behind the knee-high altar and lectionary, all at the same level as the people. After the homily, the priest says something I didn’t expect to hear outside a cohort meeting. “Feel free to share any thoughts or ideas,” says Father Franky, at which point we begin passing ideas between friars, nuns, lay workers, homeless and even protestant-for-lack-of-a-better-term mutts like me. This scene conveys well the overarching idea of reconciliation (without condescension) that bubbles throughout this and other Franciscan communities. We celebrate mass in the morning because we want to break bread together first and then serve our brothers and sisters throughout the day at the soup kitchen. It’s about reconciling with one another in order to reconcile with the surrounding community. There is solidarity there that cannot be faked any more than it can go unnoticed by the people of Kensington. This cell of the Body sees church as not a lovely painting which we all agree to admire but a mosaic in which every piece of broken glass (us as individuals) adds to the beauty of the final work.

The St. Francis Inn’s mission statement states their aim ”... to build relationships with those that we serve by respecting their human dignity and by helping them to restore hope in their lives, and by living simply among them.” Whereas existing monastic communities were often isolated in order to focus on God and the inner life, St. Francis proposed monastic communities in more urban settings, closer to the poor and marginalized. Story has it that Pope Innocent III had a dream soon after St. Francis’ proposition in which he saw a picture of St. Francis holding up the falling Catholic church, symbolizing a repairer to the then crumbling apostolic body. His spirit of reform found expression not so much by looking within the church, but by focusing outward on the people. You’re not likely to hear any familiar buzzwords around the Inn, but it’s clear to see that they take missional living seriously. “Love thy neighbor” is a bold and revolutionary command when thy neighbor is anyone in thy geographic vicinity. This is more than an emphasis or a featured program; it is the very thrust of the community, and here we find more common ground with emergent missional approach. Both groups work to recover the biblical idea of being blessed to be a blessing for others, that our true blessing is being the city on the hill, the salt of the earth that Jesus told us we are. In Kensington and in emergent this involves digging our fingers deep into culture and striving to relate, befriend and serve those around us. If we look at the new monastic movement, we find that intentional community, relocation and solidarity with the poor bind our two faith cultures together. The emergent emphasis on the environment and local/global justice as well as general care for creation echoes back to St. Francis’ unbridled love for all living things and for their reconciliation with humans as told in Fioretti di San Francesco.

Can we save ourselves a lot of argument for the moment and assume a general understanding of emergent theology? Thanks. Turning, then to the Franciscans, can we find common ground between dogmatic Catholics and ecumenical emergents? In my time in Kensington a few significant theological similarities became apparent. Most notably, Frankies see the gray. A brother in Kensington told me that God is found in every situation, even the most dire, buried beneath the filth, always close, he always is there and probably weeping with us. The idea of God’s solidarity with all of us mandates that we imitate God in the same fashion toward our neighbor and not an object of cold charity (chilling that those two words should ever be found together), our black-and-white theology of saved/lost, brother/other and sinner/saint is … insufficient. In a community of faith that requires doctrinal adherence to articles of faith, they sure do question a lot of it. This posture moves them to hold their theology humbly, always rigorously seeking truth but never convincing themselves that they’ve got it all down. Another commonality is an appreciation for something Catholics have understood since antiquity: mystery. God is approached with the same fear and trembling that we work out our salvation. When grilled about the Trinity or the Eucharist, they respond not with the acrid defensiveness of many an evangelical but with a solemn and accepting trust in One who is beyond our understanding. Franciscans more than most, even among Catholics, embrace paradox; not as a cop-out of hard questions, but recognizing the limits of our own understanding, seeing dimly as we do through a sometimes very muddy glass. Their faith is found in the threshold of knowing the saving Love of God is around, inside, and working through them, but living that love out in the muddled, chaotic, and uncertain world of the poor.

Both groups are reformers of a counter-cultural, out-with-the-old-wineskins spirit. The Order of Friars Minor is a part of a much larger Roman Catholic Church, whose strict adherence to conformity for the sake of unity and doctrinal purity is the standard of dogmatism. Emergent has the advantage of existing cross-denominationally, with much greater freedom to dissent, and a culture of awareness that encourages calling someone out when necessary. For all the bold ideas and gray theology I found among the Frankies, there is a reluctance to bring it outside of their community. You cannot have a prophetic, envelop pushing, no-holds-barred voice within such an institution as the RCC. Obedience to Mother Church is one of the vows they take, so it’s really no surprise that the counter-cultural Franciscan voice isn’t more openly broadcast … but I still wish it was. After this softening of one’s voice (maybe one does speak up but collectively not enough to cause any deep shift) you are tucked away in the corner of the warehouse. This point is mentioned not to rile up dissension within the Order, but as observation based on the sometimes very bold theological statements made in individual conversation with brothers and sisters at the Inn that will never make it beyond such a personal setting into the wider and more open world of theological discourse.

The Franciscan community, with their unassuming and distinctively egalitarian ways, their rejection of power and their refusal to isolate themselves from God’s people, are something of an anomaly with the larger Catholic Church. They don’t seem to fit in, even among their own; and this is a comforting thought. There is animosity between emergents and the larger evangelical/ mainline community, with the H-word (heresy) thrown about, but a look at the Frankies gives us hope that we can flourish within our own faith without compromising either truth or love. The Frankies exist in a very dogmatic religious setting, but it doesn’t keep them from engaging in open dialogue or from engaging their communities. It seems like there is an inverse relationship between quality of theology and depth of compassion, how refreshing, then to find a group as modest and uncompromising in their theology, whose passion for the poor and the disenfranchised … frankly, shames us. Doctrinal orthodoxy and populist compassionate solidarity are not as strange bedfellows as we make them out to be, and this vagabond has friends in Kensington to thank for that.

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Images: “St. Francis Receives the Stigmata” by Lawrence OP and “Franciscans at Grace Cathedral” by samdessordi

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