Who Are My Family?

Still reflecting on my retreat last month on St. Francis and St. Clare.  Today I remember our conversation the day we hiked up Mt. Subasio.  When we set out on a journey, what must we leave behind?

"You know how Francis publicly rejected his father in the town square, announced to the crowd that from then on his only father was God?  How there is not one word in the written records, legends or canonization testimony about Francis ever again relating to his birth family, his mother or father or siblings? 

“Would you do that, if you sensed that God’s call to you meant you had to leave family behind completely?  Put another way, might it be that there are times or situations in our faith or life journey when we are just done with our family, just never need or want to see them again?”

That’s a question I asked my fellow hikers as we walked out of Assisi and 4 miles up the slopes of Mt. Subasio to the isolated forest caves where Francis and his first followers spent many days in solitude and prayer.  Like Jesus, they sometimes felt the need to escape the city and the crowds for some quiet and intense time with God.  Assisi is not a big city, but it has every city’s bustle and buildings and markets and obligations.  On that hike day, this privileged 21^st century retreatant, like 13^th century Francis, was quite happy to escape the city for several hours.   

All through our 8-day retreat last month in Assisi I tried to walk in Francis' and Clare's shoes.  What could I learn from their lives of faith and the choices they made?  That wandering homeless outrageous "troubadour for Christ" (Francis called himself) or the strong willed, 40-year cloistered, community-building abbess (Clare) - any relevance for my life? 

Easy answer is no, so drastic are the differences and settings.  But I too am a follower of Christ.  And as an ordained minister, I am in some sense called to model my life on him and other holy ones.  At least give it a second thought?

Both Francis and Clare were rebels (see my first column of this series, For all the Saints) and defied their parents’ expectations of what a good son or daughter should do and be.  Carry on the father’s business – rejected.  Be a wife and mother – no way.  When Clare first ran away from home her family ran after her and physically tried to drag her back home.  But eventually Clare’s chosen life of faith drew even her own sister and mother into her community.  She was still the abbess, they simple members, but at least they all lived in the same place, related in some way.  Clare was affirmed in her choice, if she needed that (probably not) – Mom and Sis chose the same path.

But Francis was a man of the streets, not just Assisi, but into the whole world, as far as Spain and Egypt he travelled, he had no constraints, unlike Clare, on where he could or would go.  But he never went back home.  There are enough sweet probably apocryphal legends of his deep personal relationships with lambs and flowers and strangers to suggest that if his advocates had wanted to paint him as a prodigal son, returning at some point to the love and affirmation of his parents, they could have easily added that happy plot line to the official saint biographies the Pope commissioned. 

But no, not one word about Mom and Dad from the day he rejected them.  Many of the embellished tales of Francis are designed to point out the so-called uncanny similarities with Jesus’s life – born in a stable, 12 followers, rejected, despised, acquainted with grief.  But even Jesus spoke with his mother, ate with her, so did his brothers. She was there when he died.  By all accounts Francis’ mother was on his side before the public separation, hid him, defended his strange behavior, covered for him from his angry, bewildered father.  Not even a nice word for Mom?

As we hiked up the steady steep mountainside we shared the stories of our call to ministry and what our parents and spouses thought about it.  We are among the first or second generation of a large wave of women going into ministry, so our parents might have been as surprised as were Francis’ at our career choice, even if we did keep our clothes on (Francis stripped and handed his father the fancy clothes he had as a cloth merchant’s son) and went to work in a nice local church.  Surely all our parents were proud we were doing good work, encouraging people to be loving and help others. 

No, said one of our group, her mother actively discouraged her, said she would be lonely and rejected by friends if she became a minister, and never much supported her.  Slightly different from Francis and Clare – they were the children, taking the initiative to reject their parents.  But still the estrangement, the conflicting visions, parent and child, of what kind of life we are called to live.  A very changed family relationship, if any relationship at all.

Sometimes walking it is easier to share such a sad tale, not looking each other in the eye.  I listened in silence, and then felt a little outraged, sorry for my new friend.  But it was done, choices had been made.  I counted my own blessings. 

Church built over caves where Francis prayed on Mt. SubasioBut the woman who told this tale did not seem devastated by it, she had followed her call, made a good life for herself, found other close companions on the journey. 

We were panting a bit as it got steeper, and we wondered if Francis and his first followers, when they came up this mountain walked at a slow pace as we were, were silent and prayerful, or did they scramble straight up creek beds laughing with joy and singing in praise.  Probably the latter.  And probably with not much thought of all they had left behind.  Each had promised to sell all they had, give it to the poor, before they could follow in Francis’ way. They had left a lot behind, not just family.  Their life might seem hard to us, but in fact their burden was much lighter than ours, they carried much less.

I am sure there are scholarly articles on the question of why the Francis story has him rejecting family even more drastically than Jesus did.  I’m resisting the temptation to do some research and get the official right answer to this question.  I’ll just make some prayerful suggestions:

• Francis was very clear he was not a priest or a monk.  But he was choosing a life more like them than that of, say, a cloth merchant.  He was following the gospel call to leave your old life behind and follow Jesus.
• Francis was nothing if not extreme in all he did.  He ate very little, hardly slept, etc etc.  So leaving meant Really Leaving, rejecting everything from the past.  Done.
• And he actually did have a family for the rest of his (short) life.   “When the Lord gave me brothers” is how he describes the beginning of his ministry (he wouldn’t call it “ministry,” maybe “life of joy.”)  He did not lose family, he built a new one. He called his group friars, brothers.
• Many people are estranged for various reasons from their birth families and quite happily and healthily build new families.  Maybe my wondering and sadness about poor motherless Francis is just a “Leave It to Beaver” pipe dream, he goes home for a good meal every night.  That’s not who he was.
• Our retreat teachers said that Clare didn’t so much reject her family as just want with all her heart to be left alone, to live a life devoted to one thing – God.  Again, many people chose this kind of life, happy solitude and devotion.  She had more of a cultural context for her life than Francis, that’s what nuns did and do, they must cut off family ties.  She was blessed at least to have some connection still with mother and sister.  (There, I’m still at it, romanticizing that, maybe she wished they’d go live somewhere else!)

Francis and his brothers, his family, would spend days in those forest caves praying.  And at night they would go out and look at the stars – there’s a great set of sculptures of three of them up there pointing to the beauty of the heavens.  That’s the kind of crazy thing you do with brothers more than parents, your new family. 

As Francis would say whenever he greeted anyone, “Peace and all good.”

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter