It's been quite a few months since I've blogged. Life has been busy. Other more important things seem to have taken precedent. But, now is the time to resume. A Franciscan friend asked me to write again. And, I am moved by a recent occurrence within the Franciscan community which I wish to share. But, first, a bit of memoir.
I was a young, naive social worker performing food stamp home visits in the winter of 1975. I didn't understand then, but now I do, some of my encounters with senior citizen couples living on the edge of poverty. Often, these retired couples -- who had been married to one another for forty, fifty, or sixty years, lived in dingy, low cost apartments. Side by side easy chairs, often threadbare and worn, bespoke of lives blended into one, of their one heart. Their financial circumstances were as threadbare. Typically, one spouse had been awarded minimal social security disability while the other would have a part time job. The purpose of the social services home visit, of my presence in their apartment, was to ensure that the one individual in the pair who had been receiving maximum food stamps without cost, stored, cooked, and consumed food separately from the other. There could be no sharing. For, even though they still considered themselves to be married, legally these couples had divorced in order to survive. Legally on paper, these couples were no longer married. In their hearts, they were. On paper, they had parted company and lived as roommates. In reality, they lived still as one heart.
At the age of 22, and married a little over year in the winter of 1975, I was bewildered by what these couples had done. They would offer me a cup of coffee, show me the pictures of their adult children, brag about their grand children, and then pull out the divorce papers. I would inspect the kitchen and note the two bottles of ketchup, the two salt shakers, the separate shelves for food storage in the fridge, and certify that the food stamp requirement had been met. My head comprehended that they were fooling the government by meeting the letter of the law. But, at the time, my newly wed heart did not truly understand how life had forced them into such an absurdity. I was busy learning how to blend two very independent lives, mine and my new husband's, into a single life together. I was busy trying to do what these senior citizen couples had undone in their lives, with a simple stroke of a juridcal pen by divorcing, and what they had done in their divorcing seemed crazy to me. Truly, how they were living didn't make sense to the twenty-something me. It has taken me almost four decades to clearly fathom the genius of what these couples had done.
These senior couples understood Franciscan relationship. They knew that legalities could not touch the depth of their love and caring for one another. After 34 years of living as one with my husband and soul mate, I could understand that kind of relationship -- the kind that continues even after one of the pair might die. I could understand that a marriage certificate could keep a marriage from unraveling in the worst of times, but once woven together, a divorce certificate could never split those two lives apart again. These senior citizen couples understood that their marital legal status had little to do with their marital heart status.
Since my initial encounters with "divorced married" couples during my early twenties, I have witnessed other couples doing the same -- a retired immigrant Russian couple divorced so the husband might get help for his blindness, another couple legally divorced so a spouse might get skilled nursing care for a heart problem. In these instances, the juridical status had little to do with the reality of the relationships.
In the last two or three weeks, I have come to understand that this seems to be my situation with the Franciscan sisters in this province. My juridical or canonical status has little to do with the reality of my relationships. I live in a Franciscan community. I pray in a Franciscan community. I work in a Franciscan community. My friends who are sisters are still my sisters in the community. Little has changed in Franciscan relationship, in the heart of what it means to be Franciscan. I have just stepped over the legal line, and that has allowed me to live into Franciscan life more that before.
