They met me in St. Louis

My weekend encounter with ecumenical Franciscans

I went to Poverello of Assisi kindergarten run by Mexican Poor Clare Missionary Sisters. My confirmation name, as is my “Christian” one, is the same as my uncle Jack’s, KIA in WWII, “Francis.” My high school overlooked venerable Mission San Fernando; my parish one over from San Gabriel’s sister site a day’s travel away by foot.

I had two great-uncles who were “Third Order Regular” friars in Pennsylvania. My Irish grandmother was buried in a brown shroud, once the custom for lay members of the “Third Order Secular” established by the Poor Man of Assisi early in his ministry, circa 1209, so that men and women in the world could benefit from the movement as well as First Order brethren and Second Order nuns. This was an innovation: in a time then as now when so many misguided individuals strayed from a sensible path, this afforded fathers, mothers, husbands, and wives a way to join in the good works and to practice the faith which then as now alienated many by its affluent hypocrisy.

In Ireland, they called with typical wit the Franciscan tertiaries “The Happy Death Society,” as back then it was more of a pious devotional circle, and less of the force for social engagement the Founders intended. However, everybody from St Louis, King of France #IX, to Miguel Cervantes, Joan of Arc to Mother Cabrini, Pope John XXIII to Matt Talbot, Louis Pasteur to Franz Liszt, Dante to Franz Jagerstatter joined the ranks of folks called to further peace, justice, charitable, and practical, street corner demonstrations of the gospel, which remains the core of the dynamo for Franciscans.

So, I’ve always been interested in this milieu. My own confidence in eternal verities wavers throughout my lifespan, but my fascination with the cultural complexities of Catholicism I’ll never tire of, I predict. About six years ago, a pair of striking and vivid dreams about becoming a Franciscan occurred. Never a joiner, quite an agnostic on my less sleepy of mornings and always during my insomniac nights, I felt there may be a subtle, steady energy nudging me within, as it short-circuited and fried any genetic current which INTJ, Enneagram 1, introverted yet intuitional me alternates or directs.

I don’t delve into immaterial notions often on a public forum. But my wife encouraged me to do so, in the reasoning it’d help me work out some of my “situation.” And this a few days before her unhappy sudden death, when in the prime of health she and I discussed our outlooks as they evolved and our current orientations (both skeptical at best of “religion” but me as a sympathizer for its creative legacy and she as a dissenter for its collateral and targeted weapons of mass destruction) among a landscape in California and Ecuador where Catholicism had left deep impacts over the Americas.

This time nearly exactly half a dozen summers ago, I contacted a member of the local Secular Franciscans. Six months had passed with no answer from them when I wondered online, and I figured that “Third Orders” had vanished post-Vatican II. However, a third inquiry finally clicked. He and I discussed the community; he guided me during four years of attending its monthly meetings at an L.A. parish, while I got an annulment of my first brief obviously failed “Church” marriage three dozen-odd years ago. A block of blacked-out, repressed and mentally blocked pain I’ve relegated to the cobwebbed corners far within my consciousness, from which meeting my wife was the only rescue. . Getting the paperwork, filling out grueling questionnaires (9000 words plumbing psychic damage, wrenching lovelessness), witnesses to my condition then who now were as hazy as I was, and going through massive red tape and delays, even then, by now two summers ago, having met their demands before I could even begin to seriously advance into formation, the OFS told me no-go. For now I needed a blessing of my current “irregular” relationship of thirty-plus summers by a priest.

We both refused. I saw it as an insult. She saw it as an example of the reasons why she increasingly grew disdainful of “organized you-know-what” as she lived with me the past four years watching what it did to me, and fearing rejection again would hobble me. It was not an easy topic as my ties to Jewish affinity by marriage remained strong inside, even as their external circumstances faded for a variety of not unfamiliar events. I’d spent a dozen years with a Buddhist teacher, but that too didn’t bring the contented good self supposedly resulting from dharma-practice, as absolutely nobody noticed any change! (I know that one does not seek enlightenment as an item to check off on a bucket list. But the tendency of the style in which I was supervised had subtly evolved from contemplation towards navel-gazing study tilted towards one’s psyche under stress: not what I was looking for, the path towards detachment veering into teach-yourself psychiatry.) Yet it taught me to stay still, composed, without fidgeting. Even if a bad knee and a Western posture prevent me from anywhere near lotus style.

Which proved a blessing. As my sagacious mentor, who like me I aver meanders nearer the Dao, under the redwoods six hours drive north up the coast counseled, today’s liminal state is where I must after all be, as I’ve written about here and here.

Well, the formation director of the SFO having gone to bat for me and being literally suspended for the season by the manager-umpire-coach triumvirate, he and I as free agents found what I’d misremembered from my initial search in 2018 as the “Order of Environmental Franciscans.” He somehow recalled them, and I was then reminded too.

We both sought admittance to this Ecumenical commitment. He as a professed Franciscan began the process of a transfer in; I as a newbie with four years hard time not credited towards my time served applied, was accepted after a half year’s supervision which due to COVID et al turned out to be a year. Thus, a year ago I entered the novice stage, over Zoom from Ecuador. This is typically done in person at the OEF’s annual Chapter, but as my son got married that same weekend in Oregon, I figured I had a good excuse. This year, due to the generous assistance of my mentor, with whom I meet once a month to talk, and the necessity of me being in California due to those sadly unanticipated circumstances, I flew to St. Louis last Wednesday. That Sunday would have been our 33rd anniversary; that Tuesday was my birthday.

I’m not going to go through the details of the Convocation. But hearing from its founders forty years ago, in the UCC in the Dakotas (among which in none other than Mandan whose fort I compelled my distaff half to visit on our Great Plains Road Trip, complete with a statue of Seaman, sheepdog sidekick on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, who looks over the Missouri River patiently), who felt moved to seek out despite their own faith traditions a Francis-centered ministry as prairie pastors, I understood better how this message expanded through individual contacts, chance conversations, curious web-searches, and both word-of-mouth and inner turmoil.

Many, like myself and my OFS colleague, wound up there after detours into other Franciscan groups, few Catholic contrary to what I’d have assumed. A few were converts to Christianity, but most were raised with varying degrees of conviction in mainstream Protestantism. A few from Southern Baptist or evangelical upbringings. Quite a few practicing in ministry as their primary occupation. Twelve-steppers not uncommon, whose philosophy I’ve been learning about for the first time through reading, right now, David Foster Wallace’s manic epic, Infinite Jest. A handful of former Catholic clergy, and at least one Anglican friar, who’d often had to live lives of closeted shame within systems which proclaimed their hatred of the sin for which their confreres closeted also indulged in after hours, in civilian garb, only to preach against their own cohort. This dissonance maddened them; a few found their way to OEF, as did Christians from trans and queer-identity affinities, lately increasingly so.

The time from Thursday through Sunday morning spent in many hours under light strips and in plastic chairs reminiscent of decades of meetings any of us know all too well, interspersed with worship in the utterly 1969 round sanctuary where once stood a Pallottine convent school under German nuns, now a “renewal center” near the Mississippi, showed the changes in the physical plant, paralleling those as the Church relentlessly modernized. The European roots of Midwestern Christian evangelism, less than two centuries on in our nation’s core, had withered. Yet the outstretched on high concrete bulk stood firm, its winged branches of quiet rooms down three floors of well-kept halls, and the—I have to confess for one who generally recoils from participatory, contemporary, denuded ecclesiastical architecture—not-as-bad-as-it-could-be-stained-glass, composed setting helped me focus. Due to my back, combined with need for downtime, I played hooky a couple of times. I cannot sit, despite the Buddha’s example, without respite within stuffy rooms full of closely packed, however cheerful, sorts, hour upon hour. And the surroundings as seen here, prove tranquil. People do seem friendlier in the middle of the country, I found more than once lately.

The issues revolved around the expected agendas of any yearly gathering of an organization dispersed and distracted by the cares and necessities of demanding careers, often in leadership. Vast majority of OEF’ers work in the “caring professions.” Discussions over how online chat’s stirred up discontent among LGBT members; how to treat any degree of disagreement with a worldview codified in OEF guidelines; what to do about a member who refused further contact and wanted to leave; the easier one of how to let a member transfer to another community; how to amend bylaws and whether “exploit” should amend, accompany, or replace “enrich” within the language of the Principle decrying privilege, power, small-p pride, and patriarchy. These motions underwent a Quaker-patterned “prayerful discernment” model. Issues had scribes, and listeners who sought the guidance of the divine presence in assessing the wisdom of acting accordingly, blended into the Roberts Rules of Order-type of self-governance. People didn’t undertake these advisory roles lightly. Watching this an an outsider, I reflected how I’d never joined any event with this arrangement carried out.

The OEF confronts how the mission of Franciscans tangles with colonial, capitalist, and cruel systems, betraying the intended motivations which spurred the start of the motley assembly, drawn from across class and entitlement, as the Little Brothers. This aspect increasingly comprises a fundamental component of the embedded progressive orientation of the OEF. The polarization between as I saw on a t-shirt at the airport in St. L. expanded from “God + Guns” to cover the considerable girth of a guy of a certain age (i.e., mine) as “Family, Faith, Firearms, Flag, Friends, Freedom” vs. “pronouns and Palestine” might, all the same, find bridges and not gaps, as lots of OEF’ers live, work, and pray in smaller towns in red states. Given my own novel perspective, widened as the only gringo I’ve seen outside of a hotel or tourist transport, for ten km around in Ecuador, I’ve tried in meetings online about these topics to widen how we conceive of ‘indigenous’ and I’ve raised the Irish example as how Europeans have been complicit in destruction within their own continent, too.

You can find out about the OEF’s outlook, organizing, and projects at their website. I’d say that they live up to the countercultural image of the original brothers and sisters: they opposed the force of arms prevalent in medieval times; they wanted to make the Church better by reviving fresh gospel truths; they needed to act rather than pontificate. They pioneered sincerely Christian service beyond the monasteries, into the cities. Much I’ve left out, but the reception of newly professed-for-life, novices, and postulants fittingly highlighted the Saturday ceremony. As a relevant aside, unlike most “lay” fraternities, the OEF allows members to wear habits in their proper roles. While the original, simple use of a Tau cross for novices and a San Damiano (below) one for professed sufficed, I found it noteworthy how quite a few of the latter donned tunic, hood, and cord, with sandals, which defines a Franciscan. I think such signs of identification are useful; otherwise how does any stranger know you’re otherwise?

The rationale when I was growing up of “well, we can relate better if we dress like them,” made no sense, for any means of recognizing those who precisely were sought out because they weren’t like you and me seems the point of a calling where one seeks to spread the Good News and live it among others. About half of all the members attended, if my guesstimate holds, as far away as Ireland, New Zealand, and, well, indirectly, Ecuador! I realize after being in their midst how necessary this fellowship is for “siblings” each anniversary.” Like many family reunions during summers, food and conversation enrich and overlap. For a general perspective, as I wrote on the chat:

Attending my first Chapter in person, thanks to the generous welcome, guidance, and generosity of siblings, 1) the sense of being "at home" which some have related as their instantaneous reaction when arriving for their initial encounter and 2) the striking repetition of how many who shared their stories have found their way here via detours into other Franciscan communities stand out for me, listening as a newbie. I didn't expect so often that lots of those in the OEF have taken circuitous routes, and navigated devilish roadblocks, to wind up in a savvy, smart, safe, and relatively sane extended clan. Myself from a small, insular, uneasy family, this dynamic is new. Mature members across generations recount, advise, and dream through wisdom, humor, humility, and communal discernment rather than rules, regulations, and legalese. Plus, the OEF chapel services were, believe it or not at my grey-haired age, the very first time I got to hear a homily and a communion led by women, rather than Catholic clerics...

The breakfast granola was fantastic, non sequitur. We ate in the part of the building that corresponds to the base of the cruciform design above. I drank weird orphaned grab bags of Yogi, Celestial Seasonings, and odd-and-ends institutional “not for individual sale” tea. I ate quite a bit, both wisely and foolishly, for in said heartland, no matter how radical or non-binary one asserts one’s beliefs as lived experience, snacks abound as well as “pop” (still, I eschew the latter). I gained no weight, which baffled me. The winds were too strong to keep me outdoors. I tried half an hour, with blasts having me hold down with both hands the pages of “Good Things out of Nazareth,” which features (quite poorly edited but nevertheless insightful, wry, and thought-provoking) letters among Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Caroline Gordon, and Allen Tate. Seems to be a book which is now out of time; doesn’t seem to have made a ripple. Coming out months before June 2020, during which biographer Paul Elie’s astutely timed critique of O’Connor’s unreconstructed Southern attitudes may have lessened tolerance of her nowadays by eggheads, misfits, grotesques, if maybe not Goth[ic]s…. Lots for nourishing scattered seeds from that mid-century Catholic efflorescence, when literate, talented converts drawn in brought sass, smarts and savvy, for our own solstice season. Where heat intensifies, airplanes wait on the runways (three out of my four flights nearly or an hour late; can’t take off with a full load of passengers, SLC altitude didn’t help; storms diverted millions of my peers.)

As a guest, I must mention the hospitality shown me abundantly, both at the center and at the airport. Despite my Dodger blue hoodie and cap, I found helpful directions and cheerful pointers in my addled state, deep within red Cards country. I hope to return next year. Meanwhile, in my e-copy, this welcome “Jewish Annotated New Testament” not from a messianic breakaway but rabbinical, scholarly foundation, will lessen my bare-bones, haven’t studied it since high school level of parochial scriptural incompetence, with a twist, as I hang out at bible study weekly via Zoom. To think my sister in North Carolina’s doing the same, NIV translation in hand, with Baptist neighbors alongside her husband. Parents raising us such-and-such; we finding ourselves drifting ever after. My wife chided my wandering, but I think it’s my fate.

If you ask me about denomination, my disenchantment with the current incoherence-meets-cult of personality that’s Rome rule under the pontiff of a certain name; my preference for the very rare combo of that Latin-Spanish-English mass pre-COVID and Pope F. gave me solace at the humble chapel in East L.A. built a century ago by Mesican refugees from the Cristero uprising; my utter bafflement whether the divinity of Christ or the existence of a Jesus beyond an ornery, memorable, clever, sly rabbi can be “proven”; the incarnational nature of Franciscan theology where the Subtle Doctor John Duns Scotus’ minority opinion (thus the jibe that led to reification as the “dunce” hat donned by holdouts against the Angelic Doc Thomas Aquinas’ verdict) that even if Adam and Eve never fell, God the Pa would’ve sent JC junior to enter into the human condition, out of paternal affection rather than Pauline debt repaid for sin.

1613 “La Chakana” Juan de Sta. Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, a depiction of the Andean cosmological vision, with no boundary between “belief” and living.

Redemption never rang true inside me; the life-force reverberates enough to sway me. I remember my wife and I both took the Pew quizzes about religious typology. She got 8% or something rather than an atheist zilch because she, like me, clicked agreement with the question whether we believed that inanimate objects—say a rock—or animate ones possessed their own energies. Which, the more I wake up to the sight of Imbabura’s volcanic slopes in the Andes, I gravitate towards an indigenous worldview.

Nobody asked, but the pro-Muslim slant in OEF, sparked by Francis’ brave meeting with the Sultan in Damietta during the Crusades—OEF-friendly progressives today tend to forget that friars were already rendered mincemeat after trying the conversion gambit among the Moroccans, and that Francis wasn’t making his own foray into the enemy camp just to say arrivaderci—might be adjusted by a careful look at the three Orders’ “Jewish interactions.” Franciscans were invited as “custodians of the Holy Land” eight centuries ago, soon after their founding; this revenue-stream generated by pilgrims meant these pacific with a small-p capital-C mendicants--begging friars—found vows of poverty tested early in their existence. Which ensured the Poor Men of Assisi wouldn't kill their golden goose by egging on Muslim rulers or Palestinian Christians. Worth investigating: did this alliance spur Franciscan antisemitism?

Odd how I am probably the most traditionally leaning in ritual and maybe among the most distanced from the daily, confrontational, street-wise reality. Aligning my eclectic, quirky, irreverent, reserved, anarchic, magpie, owlish, muddled, antinomian intellectual bent or emotional divergences which may not neatly “lean in” to (geometrically) obtuse degrees of what’s the standard deviation configured in this contingent. Meanwhile, a riptide of dispiriting decisions, language barriers, inner tumult, visa restrictions churn amidst what’s already a choppy cruise with lawyers, notaries, banks, financial implosion, autopay, wrong passwords, and, yeah, raw grief.

But even there, feeling press-ganged, shanghai’d, and bereft of even the King’s shilling, that last item on my agenda may have brought a tentative ray of proverbial hope. (The setting sun’s stained beams hit me square in the face more than once in chapel—the one pictured herein— so that must be some trinitarian prismatic manifestation of “listen up, dude” or a Bodhisattva’s fire klaxon, or a plain ol’ alarm clock, which I needed in smartphone form for those 7:30am prayers each morning.) Let’s just say that, after the closing celebration yesterday, another in the OEF who recognized that we shared a shattering, fresh, and sadly not-uncommon loss has come forward to offer when needed comfort and counsel, which deeply resonates in me…