25th Anniversary as a Third Order Franciscan

May the power of your love, Lord Christ, fiery and sweet as honey,
wean my heart from all that is under heaven,
so that I may die for love of your love,
who was so good as to die for love of my love.


This is a prayer of St. Francis
that has been a challenge and inspiration for me for years.

At the suggestion of my Spiritual Director,
this will be my Franciscan witness to 25 plus years
of living a Rule of Life as a Third Order Franciscan,
not a sermon, but a witness,
an occasion to stand and deliver
about what being a Franciscan has meant to me.

I am thankful for this opportunity to share personally with you this evening.
One doesn’t often get the chance to talk about one’s self.
So here is something of my personal story.

I began exploring this Anglican religious order of Franciscans
who can be married and living in the world,
because, out of the blue, my husband said that he was going to do this,
and he asked me to consider it too.
I never figured out fully his attraction
or even how he came to learn about the Third Order,
but what happened pretty quickly for me
was the discovery of a whole world wide community
with the same spiritual values and practice
as I had been attempting to live out on my own.

This was an amazing and delightful discovery,
and also like finding water in the desert.
I could see immediately how the Rule of Life and community
were going to be significant supports and important spiritual resources
for my own personal work in living faithfully
what I had been baptized into – Life in Christ.

So I began this journey and formation process in 1981
as the Franciscan world celebrated the 800th anniversary
of the birth of St. Francis of Assisi.

St. Francis became a guide, role model, exemplar, mentor for me
in how I too would be in discipleship with Jesus.
The more I studied Francis’ life,
the more I discovered the depth of this man’s soul,
way beyond the bird bath
and some simplistic and archaic sounding stories
from the devotional book, The Little Flowers of St. Francis,
which previously seemed to me as being overly sweet.

Instead I discovered a complex man who felt deeply
and with great courage faced hard truths about himself.
Here was someone who could ignore what his father wanted of him,
who was not afraid to act counter culturally,
who could give all of himself to our Lord Jesus
when he discovered that Jesus had put a claim on him,
and who would struggle honestly to live his life with extreme integrity.

Now I don’t claim to have walked in his footsteps to the same degree.
For one thing I have never disrobed in public
except to get into a hot tub,
which is not at all making a profound statement
of renunciation and faith like Francis did.

But I have found myself keeping on the look out for lepers to kiss,
and I have kissed a number of them along the way.

The first one I remember quite clearly.
It was 1985, June 8 to be exact,
the day of my ordination to the diaconate,
to which order Francis had also been compelled by the Church.
The big impressive liturgy at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco,
of the ordination of four priests and 8 deacons
came to the final hymn followed by the spectacular postlude,
the toccata from the 5th Symphony by Vidor.
We poured out of the cathedral through the beautiful Ghiberti replica doors
into the balmy bright sunlight,
and there was someone I hadn’t seen in two years.
The last time I had seen him he was healthy and vigorous.
That day as I looked at him I was aghast.
His hair had turned all grey and hung limp,
he had lost weight
and was slowly and painfully walking bowed over two canes.
His face looked haggard as though he had aged at least ten years.
I gasped and asked him what happened.
He said simply, “AIDS.”

Now this was 1985,
and I was currently serving as a chaplain
in a cutting edge trauma and research hospital in Houston.
The impact of the AIDS epidemic was just beginning,
and not much was known about it then,
so the fear was great about how contagious it was
and how it was transmitted,
and all our AIDS patients in the hospital
were kept under strictest isolation precautions.
But here was a human being in front of me, not a stranger
and someone undergoing great suffering.
Without hesitation I enveloped him in my arms and held him
as we both wept.

What I was given that day
was a taste of the sweetness Francis had experienced
when he embraced the rotting form
of a leper confronting him on the road.
Francis later wrote: (from the Testament, 1226)
The Lord gave me, Brother Francis,
thus to begin doing penance in this way:
for when I was in sin,
it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers.
And the Lord Himself led me among them
and I showed mercy to them.

And when I left them,
what had seemed bitter to me
was turned into sweetness of soul and body.
And afterwards I delayed a little and left the world. …

And he goes on to write:
And after the Lord gave me some brothers,
no one showed me what I had to do,
but the Most High Himself revealed to me
that I should live according to the pattern of the Holy Gospel.

Francis has been the inspiration in my life
challenging me always to go to the next level in living out
what I say are my beliefs and values.
In his extreme example of following Jesus in literal gospel poverty
Francis provided me with permission and encouragement
to take my own spiritual journey much more seriously
than the cultural norm,
which affirms being “religious” as long as you are not fanatical.
Extreme spiritual work is looked upon with suspicion,
and for good reason as we can readily see in the world today
with the extremes of fundamentalism in every world religion
that results in spiritual terrorism.

But Francis lived his extreme devotion to our Lord in such way
that others were drawn to life, not death,
to ecological integration, not exclusiveness and separation,
to realization of union with Christ so deeply and completely
that he bore in his body the same wounds of the Cross.

Francis became a welcome beacon light for me,
an encouragement of the possibility of living every more fully
into the fullness of my human potential as a follower of Jesus.

From him I was able in my own small way
to discover the secret of gospel poverty, of non-possession.

A number of you have heard my story
of preparing to take a two year sabbatical
in order to devote myself fully to meditation
and scripture study.
I was delighting in selling or giving away most of my possessions.
But one thing remained – my house.
It had been on the market to be sold for months,
and no one even was looking at it.
The date I was scheduled to begin the sabbatical was rapidly approaching
and this one thing stood in the way.

A week prior to the end of my job and the beginning of this sabbatical
I went to see my spiritual director
and we talked about this concern
about how this one thing was holding me back
from being able to freely and whole heartedly
dive into the meditation work.
He said to me simply this, “Well, you’re a Franciscan aren’t you?
You could give your house away.”

Suddenly the light bulb came on,
and with a rush of joy I realized I could really be a Franciscan now.
I went home and called the diocesan planned giving officer
and told him I wanted to gift my house to the diocese.
He was quite delighted,
but told me that it would take awhile
for all the paper work to be done,
and he would need to be in communication with the bishop,
board of directors, trustees of the diocese, chancellor,
diocesan council, standing committee.
So meanwhile continue to have the house on the market
while he worked out all the details.

The following Sunday people started coming to the door to see the house.
On Monday an offer was made,
and by Thursday we had agreed on a counter offer.
Three weeks later the transaction closed and keys were handed over.
I tithed what I gained from that sale to the diocese.
God’s mercies are so great, and I have been so blest.

One more illustration of what I have learned from Francis,
a significant awareness he has given me regarding sin.
Francis would speak of himself as being a great sinner.
Sure, his youth was spent in revelry and excess,
something he certainly was repentant about after his conversion,
but his repentance went on and on life long.
He expressed his concern that coming so far,
up to the very gates of the Kingdom of Heaven,
he should find himself excluded because of his sins.

One might say,
“Oh, Francis, what a baseless worry.
You are so good, so self-sacrificing, so scrupulous.”
But, no, I am coming to understand what he was saying.
It was not a statement of super pious self-effacing humility.
It was a statement of fact.
The more we awaken to reality, the truth of life,
the more we are aware of the work of the Holy Spirit within us,
the more we are engaged in the spiritual process of discipleship,
the more we come to recognize the subtlety of our own sin.

The gross sins, the blatant sins are not a problem.
It is what is at the core of our beings,
what emerges in attitude and habit and motive and desire.
It is essential in the spiritual life to be brought beyond our self-delusion
to the truth about our huge need for God’s mercy
and of our utter reliance on Jesus
to heal and transform and bring us to the wholeness
in which we are created.

Francis, by all the time spent in deep self-reflection,
gave me permission to leave behind other ambitions,
more recognizable and acceptable to the culture of this world,
and to give myself ever more fully to this excruciating
but also exhilarating process of purgation/purification,
which I engage in meditation practice.
So I am one of many, some 3,000 of us Anglican Franciscans world wide,
and this is my testimony.
I consider myself very blest to be among the company
of other great tertiaries, who are also inspirations and examples,
other Third Order Franciscans such as:
Desmond Tutu
Emily Gardner Neal
Peter Funk (of Funk and Wagnell)
and Bishop Mark MacDonald,
who will be our speaker on January 30
at the Communion With Creation conference,
and so many others I meet at our Franciscan gatherings
when I hear about their many exciting ministries,
and Dianne Aid and Susan Pitchford and Steve Best
and Diane Brelsford and Carole Hoerauf
and Bill Berge and Edie Burkhalter
and Nedi Rivera
and so many more.

This is a fellowship which sustains me,
and supports my heart’s greatest desire in living my life in Jesus.


May the power of your love, Lord Christ, fiery and sweet as honey,
wean my heart from all that is under heaven,
so that I may die for love of your love,
who was so good as to die for love of my love. Amen.