To Evangelize American Culture: A Franciscan Approach

Abstract

ESSAYS TO EVANGELIZE AMERICAN CULTURE: A FRANCISCAN APPROACH The task of evangelizing American culture can be intimidating. Ours is a complicated way of living that seems impervious to the message of the Gospel. Moreover, many of us still suffer from that "immigrant inferiority" which cripples our ability to bring the insights of our faith to bear in the public order. This reflection is an attempt to overcome that intimidation and to suggest that the Franciscan vision offers some helpful ways of renewing our understanding of "work," an activity which sociologists and philosophers judge to be the key to a renewal of American life and culture.1 The first object of evangelization is ourselves. Before we presume to bear witness, we need to involve ourselves in the power of the Gospel. Secondly, we are commissioned to involve others in the power of the Gospel by helping them to construct new ways of thinking and doing things. As Francis showed during his "silent sermon"2 walking through Assisi with Brother Leo, we do this best by insinuating ourselves into the fabric of life, creating as imperceptibly as salt flavors and yeast makes rise a new vision and a new embodiment of God. When I was a novice I met a friar who collected the memorial cards my province issues when a friar dies. These cards are simply photos of the deceased with dates of birth, profession, and death inscribed on the back. I was only twenty-three and thought it weird that someone was so preoccupied with a somewhat morbid project like this. But today I have my own collection of such cards. Franciscans are a "community of memory" that is flesh and blood. As 1 Robert Bellah, ed. Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 287-88. 2 Pirmin Hasenohrl, Meditations on the Rule and Life of the Friars Minor (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1945) II 473. IODANIEL MCLELLAN often as I look at these men, I come to a better sense of who I am. I realize that these men developed ways of thinking and doing that involved black Americans, Jamaicans, college students, Franciscan novices, New Jersey Catholics, and peoples of the Orient in the power of the Gospel. These men were cut from the same flesh and blood as ourselves. They came from the streets of Manhattan, the coal fields of Pennsylvania, the neighborhoods of Buffalo. But in their own time and place they learned to embody Someone that captivated me. Ghrough these men I came to know Jesus as Francis knew him. In a simple, straight-forward way, these friars had done what God gave them to do. I remember these men, not because I am sentimental (some I loved, some disappointed me), but because I dare not forget that God's pastoral care is still incarnate; I need to trust that flesh and blood, recreated in baptism, can transform the world. I can never forget that I live amid the stuff of creation which, however scarred by human sin, is also scarred with the vestigium Dei. This "community of memory" helps me never forget that the care of that scarred creation is work entrusted to me. Moreover, this community of memory is testimony that the work of evangelizing American culture can be successfully undertaken by those who are products of that culture. AMERICAN AND FRANCISCAN: HOW COMPATIBLE? Perhaps when we are asked to evangelize American culture out of our Franciscan heritage we might wonder what an 800-yearold tradition rooted in Umbria has to say to a way of life only 200 years old. It ought to be clear that an evangelizer needs to speak the language of those among whom he goes. The way a person walks, dresses, combs his hair, votes, spends her money, the art he admires, the movies she walks out of—all this is language. Language is a device for communicating meaning: the meaning of our thoughts, our feelings, our fears and hopes. Do we American Franciscans "speak" a language our fellow Americans can understand? Believing that actions, our habits of living, are our most powerful words, let us explore the possibility of Americans understanding the Gospel as it...