The story of Catherine Damen, the foundress of the Sisters of Saint Francis of Penance and Christian Charity, is engraved on my memory. She starts a community known as the Sisters of the Steps. Since during this time in the 1800's, religious congregations have been banned as the prequel and sequel to the French Revolution, the community is, essentially, a group living as the beguines lived during the thirteenth century. They come together, living and working together to meet a social need in their local community -- the education of the children in the town. Fast foward a few years, and the group is now in a different time and place in what is now the Netherlands (national governance of the locale kept switching between Belgium and the Netherlands as the results of war outcomes). The community has a building now, known at the Kreppel. They continue to meet the same social need of the time, the education of children, but now the community of the Kreppel can also accept boarders. In a few years, the community officially becomes a religious order in the Catholic Church. There is a wrinkle in the plan for the future of the school, though. The Catholic bishop of the local diocese and the priest placed in charge of the sisters at the Kreppel think that the foundress, Catherine Damen -- now known in the order as Mother Magdalen, is not capable of running the community running a school. So, they have her replaced by another sister who is better educated and, in their estimation, more capable of successfully running a boarding school.
Now, in the wake of the French Revolution, Mother Magdalen did not know of her evangelical roots in the footprints of Francis of Assisi as we know those roots to be today. (That is, I would like to see some solid research into the life and times of Catherine Damen which would give solid historical evidence that she knew about and followed "Franciscan evangelical life" as we define it to be today.) She did know, in my estimation, that she was meeting a very real social need of her time. A major feature of meeting that need was the way in which they were doing it, as a group of women living in community, that is living together, and working together. So, there may be different views of this beginning and how it fits into the context that we now in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries call Franciscan evangelical life (perhaps re-writing history to make it fit a bit). But, the major feature that sticks in my mind, especially in the stories told about Mother Magdalen and her graciousness, is that this original band of women enjoyed sharing their lives together in community, in work and contemplation. I look at the stories handed down about Mother Magdalen, and it seems to me that shared living included hardship (not enough food the eat as times) but also joy in meeting the social needs of the community together. I would submit that they found something worthwhile in sharing the same work together.
I am saying this because today, now, I enjoy working side by side with members of my community, with my sisters. We do different kinds of work (me the nerdier stuff) but, we all see the worthwhile-ness of doing what we do for the voiceless and vulnerable in our local area -- and we like doing it together. In working together, our community experiences a synergy that ripples through our greater community of volunteers. It is evangelical, but not necessarily post-Modern evangelical. That is, we like working together and being in community together -- and not just "doing my own thing" in a separate silo as Franciscan evangelical is often applied today. Francis' evangelical was not Mother Magdalen's evangelical because, unlike Francis, Magdalen did not have the problem of maintaining community when people were sent out two-by-two. Magdalen did not send people out two-by-two. Different time. Different context. Apples and oranges -- and someone is drenching the apples in orange juice today.
