I have to say that Brother David is the only monk I have ever known who, a few minutes after meeting you, rolls up his left sleeve and proceeds to tell you the story of the 8-inch scar embedded in his forearm.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s an okay story.
The night I heard it, he had taken over our table as we choked down our pizza and had quickly convinced us he could have been a professional comedian. He managed to tell us his life story, how he tried to get the lowest grades possible and still pass, and how the scar was from getting jumped by five guys in the aftershocks of a rather boisterous party. Eventually, waxing a little sentimental, he reminisced about receiving the call to be a Franciscan and saying goodbye to his beloved Danielle.
At this point, there was an uncomfortable pause. Fortunately, one of the grey nuns walked in, clapped Brother David jovially on the shoulder, and said, “Don’t believe a word he says.” Of course, this placed us all in a reasonably awkward position. I decided to believe the nun. Then a young, attractive senior, renowned for her tact, blurted,
“Hey, is that Danielle?”
Actually, Brother David isn’t the only one of these grey Franciscans who’s bound to make an impression. You can’t miss any of them. Each nun is robed and rerobed and wimpled until all you can see is her face protruding from beneath her big black veil. The monks keep their heads shaved and their beards down to the navel, which makes for a very interesting effect. Their habits are roughly knit, patched and repatched, and, as I learned over the pizza, actually made from old summer camp blankets. Altogether, they are at once subdued and striking, and this perfectly expresses their character. For the entire retreat they gave us was spent in making familiar things suddenly unfamiliar, strange, and wonderful.
After all, there’s nothing so familiar (and perhaps boring) as the sight of a monk, especially a Franciscan. But there is indeed something remarkable about a Franciscan with a hairstyle like an upside down Don King and a habit made of an old camp blanket that has more badly patched holes then the theory of evolution. You realize you have met, probably for the first time, a real Franciscan.
A gym is another commonplace thing, and an exposed monstrance is a fairly routine business as well. But when the gym is pitch black, and the monstrance is reflected in the glow of fifty candles that slope beneath It in flaming tiers seven feet high, something happens. You are in a temple, kneeling, soaring in pagan awe and love, staring through the ritual darkness at an ancient golden god rising on the high altar lit by sacrificial candles. And the instant you realize with a shock what you’re thinking, you see, with a greater shock, that the graven image of the sun really does contain the Divine. Your feelings are absolutely right. The Eucharist is the brilliant culmination of centuries of pagan longing, the fulfillment of all the dreams and fantasies that were real shadows of the Light of the World. As Tolkien said to C.S. Lewis, it is a myth, the Myth that came true.
What the friars and nuns did for the Eucharist, they did for the rest of the Faith. As they spoke about free will or personal responsibility or Evangelium Vitae, they wrested boring things from the rut of routine. It wasn’t that these ideas were changed, watered down, or presented in some syrupy washed-out style “for the youth” that would have offended a preschooler. They were near-dead ideas that you had heard since you were a kid, but they suddenly made sense. The Mystical Body of Christ came alive.
These Franciscans simply showed us that life. They made everything come together—all the doctrines, dogmas, and morality that lie dead and gray and lifeless when separated sprang up in a single movement that brought Faith and Life into union and made them inseparable. You could not feel one without the other. It was not that the Faith permeated their life, or ruled their life, or directed their life; it was their life, and it made the world alive with them.
In fact, the typical misconception of Catholics—fools leveling all things, trashing all joys, smoothing mountains, smashing barriers, and shutting out the sun for fear of going blind until life degenerates into a single, ominous Buddhist hum with hands folded and eyes closed—could not be farther from these Franciscans and the Truth. When they laughed, they laughed hard, sometimes harder than the kids around them. When they spoke, they spoke from the heart, something that doesn’t happen terribly often on any subject. When they prayed, they prayed hard, but unlike many I’ve seen, they seemed to enjoy that too. Because they were among the few people in the world that thought they had found Someone worth talking to.