Foolish, weak and inefficient...

We must learn to trust God. Developing that trust is worth some particular attention, worth making time to stop and pray, and be quiet in God.

That may be impractical, but the way of faith is not the way of efficiency. God has not called us to an efficient way of life. We are called to a way of faith. Much is a matter of listening and waiting.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations

I am already forgetting the only thing that the silence has taught me: our lives are useable for God. We need not be effective, but only transparent and vulnerable.

God takes it all from there, and there is not much point in comparing who is better, right, higher or lower, or supposedly saved. We are all partial images slowly coming into focus, to the degree we allow and filter the Light and Love of God.

Richard Rohr, from Contemplation in Action

When we discover ourselves "hidden with Christ in God," we don't need any kind of self-image at all. I hope this doesn't sound too esoteric, because it isn't; it's what happens in true prayer.

This is what will happen when we expose ourselves to silence and stop exposing ourselves to the judgments of the world; when we stop continuously "picking up" the energy of others; when we stop thinking about what others think of us and what they take us to be. We are who we are in God - no more and no less.

Richard Rohr, from Simplicity

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

1 Corinthians 1.26-29

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

Colossians 3.1-4

I always seem to come back to this disconnect between myself and "the world" of England in 2008. I think that what is happening to me, in itself a development of the character I was born with, I guess, is an outworking of the call to be a Tertiary, a Franciscan living not in a religious community, but in "the world". I have always struggled slightly with some of the Principles of the Thrid Order, where they speak of (4, 12 for example) of doing things "in the spirit" of the evangelical counsels. It comes over almost as a cop-out: OK, we Tertiaries are all caught up in property, marriage and careers, but hey, we'll have a play at being religious, just so long as it doesn't interfere too much with our lives.

Now, I know this isn't how Francis saw the Third Order at its inception, and it certainly isn't how most of my fellow Tertiaries live, but it has always felt a bit this way to me. More than likely, that's because of my own weakness, and my own tendency to seize on excuses for laxity! I have prayed long and perplexedly about it, and what seems to be emerging into the fog of my own confusion is what Rohr is saying in the passages I've quoted above.

Trying to follow our dear brother St. Francis, especially in the contemplative aspects of his life, is always going to set us against society's preconceptions about life. We are taught from an early age that learning and cleverness, strength, dynamism and effectiveness, are the best things we have to offer life; and in return, life will give us - or rather, we will seize - the "good things in life": wealth, fame, sexual conquest. The way of Francis, which is after all only the way of Christ, runs utterly counter to this philosophy. It does indeed look like a steep and narrow way sometimes, gazing up from the Oxford Street along the way to the desert, but at the end is glory!

The seventy returned [to Jesus] with joy, saying, "Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!" He said to them, "I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."

At that same hour Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."

Then turning to the disciples, Jesus said to them privately, "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it."

Luke 10.17-24