Entering Into Discipleship

Dear Friend,

As a child I was fascinated by the faraway small towns of Minnesota where my parents grew up. I wanted to know what it was like to grow up in Pine City when my mom was a girl or in Two Harbors, my dad’s hometown. Even then I was faintly aware (and even beginning to grieve) that I was living at a time when an old way of being an American – one I would never fully know – was completely passing away.

Turns out that this week – and I’m writing this on the Feast of St. Joseph – Father Jack is giving a class to the novices on the history of the Franciscans in the United States. He offers this wisdom: “History is a conversation with people who have been to a place we can never go.” Ah yes, the sting of knowing there are limits to what I can know and where I can go. Learning history (and, God knows, living it) is a humbling endeavor, yet there’s hope in the offer of conversation…

What Jesus endured I will never know, and yet this week I am invited to enter the place of his suffering where a sacred conversation can begin. Saint Francis, it is said, once turned to a group of brothers quietly scrutinizing him - fascinated no doubt – and said: “If you want to know me, know yourselves.” Dare I go there, with what I have, to this conversation, which is my life, my discipleship? As with my parents – as with Saint Joseph and Saint Francis - I am invited to let go and allow a new story to begin. I learn and do what is mine to do. The cross is the doorway. In love I enter history and its redemption. 

Gratefully,

Father Dan ofm, Pastor