Filed under: Convergence, Ecumenical, Mother Ann, the Shakers and Friends, Roman Catholic Church, St. Francis and Company | Tags: Catholicism, community, Convergences, ecumenism, Francis of Assisi, religion, Roman Catholicism, Third Order of St. Francis
March 13, 2013, less than a month ago, was a great day for Frances and for Francis. Sr. Frances Carr celebrated a birthday. She’s a little older than Pope Francis, who was, in a sense, “born” on that day, since there had never been a Pope Francis in the two thousand year history of the Roman Catholic Church. They also share the fact that they were both baptized Catholics as infants.
Not long ago, Sister Frances celebrated her seventy-fifth anniversary as a member of the religious community in the rural Maine which she now heads, along with Brother Arnold Hadd, who is some thirty year younger than Sr. Frances. Like the Pope, Sister has a great fondness for the saint of Assisi. Her community shares with St. Francis, and Pope Francis, a love for the poor and marginalized among God’s children and, like the two Francises, lives simply. Like other religious communities, including the Franciscans, their numbers have dwindled significantly. Sr. June Carpenter joined the community some decades ago after a career as a librarian. Others have tried the life for varying lengths of time, some staying through a year’s novitiate, but none have made it to a permanent commitment since Sr. June.
Yet the small community still grows much of their own food, sells herbs they grow themselves, as well as honey from their own hives and apples from their orchards. Like other communities they need the assistance of some hired hands and a dedicated group of friends who not only volunteer their labor but also raise money for specific projects. A number of friends spend extended periods of the summer months, living, working and worshiping with the community. Friends from the surrounding community join them for worship on Sunday mornings, summer and winter.
In 1974, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the community’s first American foundation, some friends formed a non-profit organization with members from all across the U.S. A surprising number of Catholics, including myself, are among the members of the Friends.
You see, Sr. Frances Carr is Eldress of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Church in Maine. The spiritual name, which each Shaker community had beginning in the early 19th century, of the SDL community is “Chosen Land,” an apt designation for the one remaining Shaker community in the world. Sister Frances came to the community when she was ten. Three siblings were also given over to the care of the Chosen Land Shaker family, but Sr. Frances was the only one who chose to commit herself to the Shaker Church.
Recently, Siena College, a Franciscan school outside of Albany NY, was the scene of a program sponsored by the Shaker Heritage Society, which runs a museum in Colonie, NY on the grounds of what was the site of the first Shaker community in America. A conversation was held via Skype with Br. Arnold in a Google Hang Out. Brother was asked, among other things, about the future of the Shaker Church. His response was a statement of his strong faith that that God would provide Believers, as Shakers often refer to themselves, to continue the Shaker Testimony “because it is the truth.”
As a believing and practicing Catholic, there are an number of Shaker beliefs and practices I cannot embrace. Yet, precisely as a Catholic and as a third order Franciscan, I find in Shakerism and in the lives of Shakers I have known, treasures that I embrace which nourish my Catholic faith and practice. Perhaps in another post, I will explore these with my readers.
Here, let me utter a simple prayer that God will indeed continue to bring new Believers to continue the Shaker testimony. And may the same Spirit who has brought light and warmth to Chosen Land through the life and witness of Sr. Frances, repair in our day the Catholic “house” through the ministry of our new Holy Father Francis as the ministry of our holy father, Francis of Assisi, did for the Church in his day.
As Francis of Assisi prayed to know his vocation in the dilapidated Assisi chapel of San Damiano, Jesus spoke to him from the icon crucifix upon which Francis gazed as he prayed, saying: “Francis, repair my house, which you can see is falling into ruin.” 
http://www.maineshakers.com http://www.friendsoftheshakers.org Books by Sr. Frances Carr: Growing Up Shaker and Shaker Your Plate: of Shaker Cooks and Cooking, are both available through
maineshakers.com
Filed under: Almanac, Convergence, Ecumenical, Inter-Faith, People, Movements, Communities, Organizations | Tags: authors, Christianity, community, Convergences, dialogue. writers, Easter.liturgy, ecumenism, Exodus. Episcopal church, Judaism, peace, Pesach, Roman Catholicism, social justice
Coming together
Friends (i.e. Quakers), Romans (i.e. Catholics), Countrymen and women (i.e. fellow citizens of synagogue, mosque or meditation hall) Lent me your ears.
Our commonweal is in a woeful state. The body politic should probably be in a cast. Our imperial posturing abroad loses us friends and influences badly. (All right. Yes I’m still on my Lincoln hobby horse.)
On Monday, February 20, 2012, that monstrosity known as Presidents’ Day, which is nobody’s day but giant retailers, WAMC F.M., our local NPR affiliate in Albany, NY, aired F. Murray Abraham’s reading of Abe Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
Before and after the speech, Alan Chartock talked with Harold Holzer, the eminent Lincoln scholar, about Lincoln and the speech. When Chartock questioned Holzer about Lincoln’s slipping from #1 in recent rankings of American presidents, Holzer told the story of a television “contest” in which historians were charged with convincing a group of participants that each historian’s choice was the # 1 best president. Lincoln lost the number one slot to Reagan! Holzer opined that faded photos of Old Abe’s war weary face can’t compete against a handsome former movie actor president whom you can see walking around smiling in film clips.
In two days, Western Christians will begin the holy, penitential season of Lent, a solemn season of approximately 40 days preparing us to commemorate and experience the High Holy Days of the Christian calendar. Holy Week begins on Palm Sunday, commemorating Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem amidst cheerful disciples, culminating in the Solemn Triduum [Three Days]: Holy or Maundy (for mandate) Thursday on which Christ mandated, during the Passover meal, that the disciples serve one another as Jesus had served them and that they celebrate “the Breaking of the Bread” (the Eucharist) in memory of his sacrifice; Good Friday on which Christ was crucified by the Imperial Roman occupiers, encouraged by the religious elites; and Holy Saturday/Easter Sunday when Solemn Vigil is kept until the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
I do not equate Lincoln with Jesus Christ, though he was assassinated on Good Friday. Yet, as Christians believe they are incorporated by their baptism into Christ, Lincoln may, I think, legitimately be viewed as a martyr (i.e. witness) and that his death within the Triduum can be seen to speak to the call for self-sacrifice and repentance in light of the closing words of the Second Inaugural Address. Abraham Lincoln said:
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan–to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
How precious those words ought to be to us, from the lips of a man who was no pacifist: to bind up wounds, to care for victims, to do all to achieve and to cherish a just and lasting peace at home and abroad.
So I am bold to suggest: Let us take Lincoln’s words be our text this Lent. Let the words of the Great Emancipator help us free ourselves from our bondage to bickering and belligerence. Let our campaign be a passover from partisan posturing “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
Filed under: Ecumenical, People, Movements, Communities, Organizations | Tags: Baha'i, Christianity, Convergences, Destitution, dialogue. writers, ecumenism, Exodus. Episcopal church, Franciscan Tertiary, non-violence, peace, Roman Catholicism, Secular Franciscan Order
I get annoyed with the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church messing with the liturgical calendar. My particular beef today is with the booting of Saint Sir Thomas More from his proper feast, traditionally, with some exceptions, the day of the saint’s death. For Sir Thomas, that would be today, July 6, on which day in 1535 he lost his head because he wouldn’t lose his integrity by affirming publicly that Henry VIII was the head of the Church of England.
What they did to Sir Thomas, a layman, was stuff him into June 22 where he’s “second fiddle” to Bishop John Fisher, who was indeed executed by Henry on that June date in the same year as Sir Thomas. More was a Franciscan Tertiary, as am I. Millions know him because of the magnificent play and film, A Man for All Seasons, by atheist, Robert Bolt. See it!
Few know of the poor young woman who bumped him back to the Bishop’s day.
But July 6 now celebrates the child martyr, Maria Goretti, who died at age 12 on July 6, 1902 from stab wounds suffered during her attempt to fight off her 18 year old rapist, Alessandro Serenelli. Alessandro and his widowed, impoverished father had been taken into the already penurious Goretti household by the Goretti’s to share the work and puny profits from their meager tenant farm.
Maria’s story is touching, alarming, sobering–and appalling. Maria was what might have been called in her day “simple,” in ours developmentally disabled, although physically developed for her age. Devout, prayerful and dutiful even as a young child, she took on the household duties, including care for her younger siblings, seeing all she had to do as “done for Jesus,” when her mother replaced her father in the fields upon his death,.
While trying to fight Alessandro off, she pleaded with him to stop because “. . . God does not wish it. It is a sin. You would go to hell for it.”
In fact, he went to prison.
Six years into his sentence, after seeing a vision of Maria forgiving him, he repented. Released after serving 27 of his 30 year sentence, Alessandro was present, aged 66, at her canonization. Maria had said as she lay dying, “I forgive him and I want him with me in paradise.”
In her excellent The Saint Book, the late Mary Reed Newland contends that while Maria is a martyr because she was murdered, she is a saint because of how she lived. Newland goes on to Alessandro’s eventual repentance and Maria’s mother Assunta’s forgiveness and even embrace of him as “my beloved son.” Newland urges her readers to reject the death penalty in the light of both. Furthermore, Newland, in light of the dreadful poverty that enveloped both of these families, with attendant financial, psychological and social pathologies, indites “the crimes of the wealthy and powerful and the indifferent who produce and tolerate poverty and injustice that afflict the poor.” She concludes, “And such crimes still claim victims today in any community which cares more for money than people.” Oh, my how current!
The Church of England has done some “repenting.” Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher are celebrated as martyrs on their liturgical calendar, though neither on June 22 nor July 6 but on October 6 (along with William Tyndale, also martyred by Henry VIII in 1536!) according to James Kiefer (see: http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kilroy/JEK/indexcal.html).
The Roman Church has yet to repent for the martyrdom of Jan Huss of Bohemia on July 6 1415, though he’s on the Anglican calendar for today. Check him out on Kiefer. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to give Huss short shrift (so to speak) today except to say that there are hints of his being rehabilitated by Rome. It is clear that he was no heretic. One of his initial “indiscretions” was objecting to the practice of restricting reception of communion from the chalice to the celebrant. That is no longer the case in the Roman Church. He got tangled up in the mess of multiple popes in the Western Schism, 1378 to 1417. He was appalled by the sale of indulgences. (Aren’t we all?) In his wonderful collection of “Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets and Witnesses for Our Time,” entitled All Saints, Robert Ellsberg mentions reports that Pope JPII favored Hus’ “rehabilitation.” I like that idea.
July 6—Martyrs Day. Enough already! Let us ALL repent.
"Everything That Rises Must Converge" 