"Be The Bread"

Jesus saying he's the bread of life ("They who come to me never will hunger") always strikes me as a riddle. Do we ever feel permanently fed by our spiritual experiences? If we have to come back each week for a Eucharistic or doctrinal tuneup (and the church definitely hopes we will), where's the permanence in that? How's what God's serving any different from In-N-Out Burger? Fr. Tom Herbts and his brother Franciscans suggested one answer. In what St. Bonaventure called "the furnace of love," we become the bread and make of our lives and world what Fr. Tom called the very substance of heaven. My sermon for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost is here.

Can't Beat The Retreat

I've spent the last two days at the retreat house of the Mission San Luis Rey near Oceanside, California, established by the Franciscans in 1789 and operated by them to this day. Two nights, $200, and that includes three hearty, long walk-inducing meals a day. Information about the Mission and retreat center here.

This afternoon prayers were ascending, as Bishop Diane Jardine Bruce likes to say, for three firefighters injured while tangling with this brush fire near the entrance to Camp Pendleton, the Marine base. The fire was a little under five miles from the high point on the Mission grounds. I can still smell the smoke as I work in the library Thursday evening.

Walking the Stations of the Cross, as I did in the eucalyptus grove behind the mission, can take on deeper meaning after you've trod the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Today it felt more personal than usual. Jesus falls the first time. Hasn't God's grace abounded when I've failed, when I've hurt others or let them down? Jesus falls a third time. What do we tell people whose suffering will have no end? Jesus comforts the women of Jerusalem. When have my preoccupations deafened me to others' needs? Veronica comforts Jesus. Why is it easier for some of us to give than accept? Jesus is stripped of his garments. Why do we worry so much about the opinions of others?

The main church, which I photographed Wednesday at dusk, is closed while workers accomplish an earthquake retrofit. Built in 1811, it's the third church building on the site.

The grounds, serene and quiet, are home to the oldest pepper tree in California, or so it told me.

Other than St. Francis, I don't have any pictures of people. Waving a smart phone at fellow retreatants seems inapt. But there was Br. Tom Herbst, all the way from the Franciscan International Study Center in Canterbury, who gave a spirited talk this morning about the incarnational heart of Franciscan spirituality. He said St. Bonaventure, on whom he's an authority, called the cross a "furnace of love." His talk inspired my intimate walk with our suffering LORD. Jackie and Br. Chris, who welcomed me so graciously. Suzanne, with whom I had the run of the place Wednesday and who can't wait to come back. The two Long Island natives, now living in San Diego, who lingered so long chatting after Br. Tom's evening reprise that they needed my key to escape the grounds.

And the Loyola Marymount students who arrived this afternoon and have set the place alight with shouts and laughter. Some of the kids are having intense theological and social conversations in the common room. The rest are chasing each other around with a soccer ball. I asked a group of young men what they were working on. "Bonding," said one. Is there anything better than the sound of happy children on a summer evening?

Fearless Obedience To Jesus

Jamie Arpin-Ricci on the quiet radicalism of St. Francis of Assisi:

What made his life so appealing to so many? Among other things, Francis's love for Jesus was so explicit that he was naive enough to believe that Jesus actually meant for us to do the things he taught us. And while such a radical devotion often led him to extremes -- like when he interpreted Jesus' command to "preach the gospel to every creature" and so began to proclaim the good news to the birds -- it also produced in him a commitment to love God through loving others, especially those who lived on the margins of society, such as the poor and the lepers. He managed to draw to his movement both the simpleton and the academic, the lawyer and butcher, because his was a faith of actively imitating Christ.

Francis lived in a time when the church had taken for granted its position in the culture. Often compromised by wealth and political power, the church had lost credibility among the people. Many would worship Jesus at Mass, but few truly followed his teaching or example. Francis became a reformer, not through angry protests and recriminations against the corrupted clergy, but through his life of humble yet fearless obedience to Jesus. In other words, he knew that the best rebuke of the bad was the embodiment of the better.

They Didn't Really Need It

A Nova Scotia couple wins $11 million and gives almost all of it away. What was it St. Francis said about preaching the gospel?

Maybe It Was Uncle Francis

This prayer is and has been a favorite of many Christians, including Mother Teresa, who said it every day:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Many believe the prayer was written by St. Francis of Assisi, who was born in the 12th century. Now the New York Times reports:

An article published this week in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said the prayer in its current form dates only from 1912, when it appeared in a French Catholic periodical.

And it became wildly popular only after it was reprinted in L’Osservatore Romano in 1916 at the behest of Pope Benedict XV, who wanted a prayer for peace in the throes of World War I.

Although news to many, the truth about the prayer had apparently been hiding in plain sight.

Including in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church, most recently revised in the 1970s, which calls it "a prayer attributed to [emphasis added] St. Francis." That's the BCP version above. Another supposedly Franciscan formulation that is a favorite of preachers but has always seemed a little too perfect to be true: "Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words."