A Ministry of Action and Contemplation
This week’s Daily Meditations focus on the Franciscan unified vision of contemplation and action. Father Richard recounts an early story about Francis of Assisi’s (1182–1226) vocational path:
One of the foundational charisms of St. Francis of Assisi was the way he integrated contemplation and action. Early on, he is attracted to contemplation and to living in silence out in nature. But he’s not sure if this is what God wants him to do. So Francis sends two brothers to Sister Clare and Brother Sylvester to ask each one to pray for an answer: should he live in prayerful seclusion, or should he travel through Italy and minister to people as a preacher?
When the brothers return, Francis is ready to do whatever they say. Both give the same reply: Clare and Sylvester each said that it was God’s will “that the herald of Christ should preach.” Francis gets up, and quickly takes to the roads in obedience to God. [1]
Francis’s eagerness to serve God by preaching did not limit his deep love for meeting God in prayer. When he needed rest from the crowds who gathered to hear him, it was customary for Francis “to divide the time given him . . . to spend some of it to benefit his neighbors and use the rest in the blessed solitude of contemplation.” [2]
Father Richard describes how Francis desired the same combination of contemplative and active ministry for his friars:
The Franciscan worldview is that the Christ is everywhere. In fact, this was my Bachelor of Arts thesis in college. I wrote it on the quote from Francis where he says, “Don’t speak to me of Benedict; don’t speak to me of Augustine! The Lord called me to a different way.” [3]
Francis didn’t need to create a monastery, as the Benedictines and Augustinians had done. He didn’t want us to be enclosed monks. He wanted us to be friars, living in the middle of the people. To this day, Franciscan friaries are in the heart of most major European cities.
Over thirty-five years ago, when we named our organization the Center for Action and Contemplation, I was just being a good Franciscan. It was St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) at the University of Paris who had to debate the secular (diocesan) priests who said that the Franciscan way of putting action and contemplation together would not work. They wanted Franciscans to choose one or the other. The secular priests worked with the people in the parishes, while the “true” religious people went off to monasteries. Francis and his followers thought there had to be a way to do both.
That was unique. It’s almost like human consciousness just couldn’t imagine that anyone could find God except by going into the desert, into the monastery, away from troubles, away from marriage, away from people.
And eight hundred years later, we’re still trying to learn how to balance contemplation and action.
Living the Gospel without Gloss
Father Richard writes about how a radical change in lifestyle is at the heart of Franciscan spirituality and the gospel of Jesus:
Since Jesus himself was humble and poor, Francis made the pure and simple imitation of Jesus his life’s agenda. In fact, he often did it in an almost absurdly literal way. He was a fundamentalist—not about doctrinal Scriptures—but about lifestyle Scriptures: take nothing for your journey; eat what is set before you; work for your wages; wear no shoes. This is still revolutionary thinking for most Christians, although it is the very “marrow of the Gospel,” to use Francis’s own phrase. [1] He knew that humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living. (This is one of the CAC’s Core Principles.)
“When we are weak, we are strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10) might have been the motto of the early Franciscans. In chapter nine of his First Rule, Francis wrote, “They must rejoice when they live among people considered of little value. . . .” [2] Biblically, they reflected the primitive and practical Christianity found in the Letter of James and the heart-based mysticism of the Eastern Church. While most male Franciscans eventually became clericalized and proper churchmen, we did not begin that way.
The more radical forms of Christianity have never thrived for long, starting with Pentecost itself and the first “sharing of all things in common” (Acts 2:44–45): the desert fathers and mothers, the early Celtic monastics, and faith communities on through history, down to the Catholic Workers and the Sant’Egidio Community in our own time. Unless such groups become strongly institutionalized—even juridical—they tend to be short-lived or very small, but always wonderful experiments that challenge the rest of us. They are always like a new room with a new view, offering the rest of us an essential viewpoint that we have lost.
The early Franciscan friars and the Poor Clares wanted to be Gospel practitioners instead of merely “inspectors” or “museum curators” as Pope Francis calls some clergy. Both Francis and Clare offered their Rules as a forma vitae, or “form of life,” to use their own words. They saw orthopraxy (“correct practice”) as a necessary parallel, and maybe even precedent, to mere verbal orthodoxy (“correct teaching”) and not an optional add-on or a possible implication. History has shown that a rather large percentage of Christians never get to the practical implications of their beliefs! “Why aren’t you doing what you say you believe?” the prophet invariably asks.
The Franciscan school found a way to be both very traditional and very revolutionary at the same time by emphasizing practice over theory. At the heart of their orthopraxy was the practice of paying attention to different things (nature, people on the margins, humility, itinerancy, mendicancy, mission) instead of shoring up the home base. They tried to live the Gospels “without gloss,” as Francis put it. [3]
