Aligning Ourselves to the Little Ones

Dear Friend,

As I write this, the novices are preparing for departure; their year of training, prayer, and study, has come to an end.  In a small and simple ceremony on Thursday afternoon, they professed their first vows to live according to the Gospel in the way set forth by St. Francis and made formal by our Constitutions as the Order of Friars Minor.  The global pandemic brought their novitiate year to a strange and, as one novice put it, “surreal” conclusion.  

The root meaning of the word surreal is something like “beyond the real” or, possibly, “ab-normal.”  How we interpret and respond to such a reality – our current reality – depends in part on how we read Jesus’s words in this Sunday’s Gospel text from Matthew.  Jesus makes a prayer to his Father: “What you have hidden from the learned and the wise,” he exclaims, “you have revealed to little ones.”  As I read these words, I hear a call to a change in perspective.   The words imply that we must be willing to see ourselves in a new way.  We are called to align ourselves to the little ones.  This means looking again at the world we’re creating for ourselves.

“Come to me and learn from me,” says Jesus, “for I am meek and humble of heart.”  He offers us a yoke, a way of staying connected to him and, through him, to others.  St. Francis wanted his group to be called little or “lesser” brothers (Friars Minor) and for a reason.  Mission Santa Barbara was founded in that tradition and today a deadly virus has done a lot to humble us, as has the movement of Black Lives Matter.  In the light of the Gospel, those challenges offer us all a chance to become novices, to begin again, to re-found the Mission entrusted to our care.

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm