I was educated by Mission San Jose Dominican Sisters and Franciscan Friars at St. Elizabeth High School in Oakland. From a friar, I learned about Teilhard. From a couple of the sisters, I learned about the active and passive life. The good sisters taught me, in good Dominican fashion, that the active and the passive are in a dynamic tension that needs to be kept in balance. The active is "doing stuff," or ministry to the sisters. The passive is contemplative prayer or meditation. In this context, one should not do too much of either one. One needs to follow the golden rule of moderation in keeping them in harmony. Somehow, that never really worked for me.
I learned meditation of a sort, at least breathing exercises, from Judo classes at age eleven. For me, at eleven, the breathing calmed my heart and relaxed my muscles as a warm-up to (or cool-down from) movement. As I grew older and learned Ignatian exercises and other forms of contemplative prayer, I did not experience meditation as something opposed to action. If anything, meditation and contemplation energized movement. As I earned a black belt in Aikido in my early twenties, I found that movement (the active) was one facet of contemplation (passive). That is, one could be in a contemplative state while moving very quickly. I think athletes often describe the phenomenon as "being in the zone." For me, the active and the passive were not opposites held in a tension. In embodied movement as well as in silence, my experience was that the contemplative gave life to, enlivened, the activity -- the passive energized the active. Even now, after some amount of contemplation, I need to go DO something. For example, I get wiggly and need to go wash the dishes or engage my mind. So, here is what I discovered today in reading the articles by Joe, who is the president of the Franciscan School of Theology. I knew, at age eleven, what Francis of Assisi discovered about 800 years prior. Here's what Joe wrote in 1987 on "The Institutionalization of the Franciscan Charism:"
(1) Neither ministry nor formal prayer is the determining characteristic of the vita evangelica. In fact, the dichotomy which is implied between contemplation and action, a dichotomy which has entered into our self-understanding since the sixteenth century, was not present in the experience of Francis and Clare in the same way that it is today. Francis had available to him both the vita monastica and the vita apostolica. He focused his life neither on prayer, nor on ministry, but on the person, on the person of Jesus Christ. The issue is not how we pray nor what we do, but, in this context how we experience the presence of God through Christ . . . (3) In other words, the Franciscan life has neither a liturgical foundation nor a ministerial foundation as its starting point, but an anthropological one. In other words, neither withdrawal from the world nor action in it were adequate categories for the life. There were for the brothers times of contemplation (i.e. enjoyment of God alone) alone and times of contemplation in work. God was available everywhere. There was neither cloister nor world; in fact, as the Sacrum Commercium testifies, they were the same. . . (4) It was precisely his synthesis between itineracy and community which made for a unique form of religious life, dominated neither by the regularity of monasticism nor by the wandering nature of the apostolic life. Again, the synthesis was located on the level of the person.
My eleven year old self was intuitively Franciscan even before I knew the term. Joe writes in another location in the article: "(2) The primary locus of the life is the person and the sharing among persons of the experience of Christ . . . The reciprocity of people lies at the heart of experience. It is more important than either ministry or place." In the 1983 article, "A Franciscan Experience in the Life of the Spirit," Joe emphasizes obedience in terms of relationality: "This understanding of obedience is very important, for what binds the community together is not a commonly discerned work, unless that be the commitment to 'live according to the form of the holy gospel.' What binds the community together are personal ties, the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood."
As the council members have told me, it's all about relationship. And as I have said publicly at the chapter meeting, I have fallen in love with the people of this province. About contemplation, active and passive are a both/and for Francis, and that's good enough for me. So, on my essential needs list so far are:
- a religious life in community
- as a Franciscan in relationship
- where contemplation energizes activity
