The Sublime and the Scruffy

Dear Friend,

Peace and all good be yours!

I’m on a retreat this week with friars down in San Luis Rey Mission. We’re gathered for a time of reflection focused on our history and our future as we continue our pilgrimage into a new nation-wide Province under the patronage of Our Lady of Guadalupe this coming October. These are heady times for us friars in St. Barbara Province - exhilarating, hopeful, and a little scary.  

In the midst of all our prayer and conversation, with the music, scripture, memories - what I keep coming back to is a photograph hanging in the corridor near our bedrooms, a copy of which graces the cover of this week’s bulletin. Taken in the late 1800’s, it captures a moment in front of the San Luis Rey Mission when it appears that six or seven friars have just exited the church along with a diocesan priest. To their right, a few ranch hands are looking on. A pretty scruffy bunch, all in all - and not just the ranch hands - the whole lot, rough and tumble, unpolished, like the facade of the church itself, which features peeling plaster and an empty niche where very likely a saint once stood.  

What’s helpful for me about the photograph is its real life echo of life as it was - and is. It depicts for me the (unlikely?) ground into which the word of God is planted. Whatever occasion had been celebrated in the church in the hour before the photo was taken, the Gospel had surely been proclaimed, “sown” here (here!), precisely among these. 

The Word of God will be proclaimed this Sunday at Mission Santa Barbara. It will fall like snow and rain, as Isaiah says, with a purpose. The sublime will again meet the scruffy in the rough and tumble of history. 

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor, Pastor