trying to live on the edge...

Recently the words of Fr. Richard Rohr really hit home. Reflecting on the wisdom and importance of the spirituality of St. Francis and St. Clare for our era, Rohr wrote: "Francis and Clare of Assisi both found their inner and outer freedom by structurally living on the edge of the inside of both church and society." As others have observed, the spiritual path that these two saints shared with the world was never about preserving the status quo of the institutional church or bourgeois society. Instead, they invited individuals to take up the path of freedom, integrity, joy, meaning, prayer, accountability, and community through acts of incarnational compassion informed by the periphery rather than the middle of the road. It is a vision born from below as Bonhoeffer used to say. An encounter with the sacred from the borders of life. To be sure, Francis and Clare remained tender towards imperfect structures, organizations, organized faith traditions, and social norms, but they refused to become enmeshed in them. 

Living on the edge of both church and society allowed them to practice a way of being that was in harmony with the seasons - shaped by the wisdom of creation itself - and grounded in real life. One of my friends and former colleagues put it like this in a Facebook meme: 

A poem that showed up in my mailbox this morning evoked much that same truth, too as I read it during breakfast:

If you often find yourself at a loss for words

or don’t know what to say to those you love,

just extract poetry out of poverty, this dystopia

of civilization rendered fragrant,

blossoming onto star-blue fields of loosestrife,

heady spools of spike lavender, of edible clover

beckoning to say without bruising

a jot of dog’s tooth violet, a nib of larkspur notes,

or the day’s perfumed reports of indigo

in the gloaming—

what to say to those

whom you love in this world?

Use floriography, or as the flower-sellers put it,

Say it with flowers.

—Indigo, larkspur, star-blue, my dear.

Yesterday I gathered dried, autumn leaves in the afternoon sun for composting. Today I will take out the remaining cherry tomato plants from the garden to hang upside down in our basement. I already have hung three other tomato plants down there. And just as my gardening resources for New England predicted, they are all slowly changing from green to red. Amazing. For me, awakening to the wisdom of the seasons has been a slow process. Like ripening itself, it has been incremental. And uneven. Apparently that's just how it goes - especially when you're trying to live on the edge of both church and society.