“The Reverse Prayer of St. Francis”, author unknown.

Lord, make me a channel of disturbance.

Where there is apathy, let me provoke;

Where this is compliance, let me bring questioning;

Where there is silence, may I be a voice.

Where there is too much comfort and too little action, great disruption;

Where three are doors closed and hearts locked,

Grant the willingness to loisten.

Where laws dictate and pain is overlooked,

When tradition speaks louder than need,

Grant that I may seek rather to do justice than to talk about it;

Disturb us, O Lord.

To be with, as well as for, the alienated;

To love the unlovable as well as the lovely;

Lord, make me a channel of disturbance.

What makes a life vibrant?

Vibrancy is the act of living, pulsing, moving, existing beyond existing.

Vibrancy is colour, is action, is joy, is wonder, is celebration.

Vibrancy is grief, remorse, doubt, anger, angst;

Vibrancy is giving, receiving from those who give.

Vibrancy is not a cure to stagnation. Vibrancy cannot exist where there is no willingness to be “vibrant.”

Our church is vibrant.

We feed the poor. We embrace our pain. We unite our suffering, and our joy, with Christ’s.

We act in justice, speaking truth where others dare not.

We celebrate liturgy, but beyond that, understand trauma can infiltrate and make dark what is light.

Vibrancy is not given. Vibrancy is active. It is “YEET”.

It is the flag moving, the wind blowing: it is the moving everywhere.

The Eucharist is vibrancy. The Rosary is vibrancy. The words on the page, the reading, it is the moving everywhere.

Vibrancy is the Holy Spirit in between a cup of coffee and a smile that is yet to happen.

It is the Father, holding the Cross.

It is the Son in His passion.

Vibrancy is the space between the hand, the seed, the ground.

It is the distance between the mustard seed and the tree.

It is the distance between the wine and the Blood.

Vibrancy abhors cutting corners. Vibrancy dies in the presence of empty desire. 

Lusting, needing, wearing, owning, consuming–these are the killers of vibrancy.

You cannot dance if you simply expect to tango.

You cannot ride a horse if you simply sit on a saddle.

You cannot drink the Blood if you have not consecrated the wine.

Stale, empty the robes and the acts of those who lack vibrancy.

Dance.

Dance like Jesus at the wedding at Cana.

The first reaction I had when I saw this was omfg punctuation? The second reaction was to try and argue that my faith was not a death cult at all, but to attempt to explain how in fact it was anything but a death cult. My third reaction was: why, on the fourth day of my honeymoon in Japan, am I still thinking about this?

Rather than try and justify my faith, or explain my faith, what I’m called to do is ask for forgiveness.

My faith journey has taken me through different faith expressions, some of them are being awakened as I travel around the Japanese countryside. Everything has life–the stones, the ancient trees, the birds, the insects, every stream has a surprise, every grove of bamboo that moves in the breeze, the trees slowly turning colour before us. There are cultural expressions of co-existence with nature everywhere. Temples and shrines are linked to thousand-year old places of peace and serenity, and while there is urban sprawl through the entire nation, every house has a space for life outside of concrete. It may only be a few pots of flowers, or trees, or it may be wild flowers and grasses growing in meridians and along the sidewalks, or wonderful, magical channels of water that run alongside most roads, some covered, some not and full with mosses, grasses, flowers, trees, small fish and crabs, frogs, koi–there is room for life here. There is a need and a desire for most people to have that nearby.

Historically, Christendom and Christianity have been at odds, and most of the time Christendom has won over. Christendom is the political, the need to control, to use the Gospel to manipulate, to control, to contort; Christendom strives to make others conform to an ideal Christ-ness that fits one concept that has it’s feet on the ground. It can’t fly. It needs to move in two dimensions, pushing over, running over, crushing anything in its path that doesn’t conform. Because my faith tradition has moved through what Christendom is, it has to touch some responsibility for the trauma it has caused. Specifically, in my case, to 2SLGBTQIAP+ people.

In that light, the post that I’ve been thinking about for days now is, in part, an expression of the trauma Christendom has caused. It is an out-moving fact pushing against the crushing forces that are now dying from their own toxicity. People aren’t coming back to churches because entering through the doors of Christendom is to be subject to the limitations of a two dimensional spirituality.

When I touched the bark of a 750 year old cypress two days ago, felt it’s life force under my hands, I didn’t do so as a Zen Buddhist, or as someone who walks a Medicine path. I did so as a Franciscan. And yet, I believe I had the same experience that a Zen Buddhist or someone who walks a Medicine path (or an atheist or agnostic for that matter) likely would’ve had. My experience saw that tree as a brother, a sister, and as such somehow an expression of the Divine. When I saw the 1100 year old cypress, I saw an expression of time.

Christianity is a four dimensional faith. Where Christendom can only move forwards, backwards, left, right, Christianity has the ability to see above, to move bellow, and within. The mystical nature of our faith teaches us that death is merely another way of moving through time. To see death as the be-all and end-all of our faith is, unfortunately, an expression influenced by the trauma of Christendom.

As a Franciscan, I have to remind myself that if I react in defense of my faith, I’m forgetting the principle teaching of Saint Francis: namely, seek God in the other. While I understand my faith to be a walk of embracing love by expressing love, sometimes that love must be willing to accept the anger expressed to us and simply accept it without engaging with it. Difficult to do because our culture is one of being right over wrong, blame over reconciliation.

I accept that Christendom is responsible for infinite traumas; I accept that to minimize those traumas to just two words also reduces the suffering and pain of those traumas that are in most cases generational and cultural traumas. I accept that reconciliation begins with acknowledging the causes, recognizing the need not just for the asking of forgiveness, but also tangible acts and motions that give forgiveness meaning. Some will not be willing to seek reconciliation. For them, it ends with the confusion of two belief systems.

I aspire to think four dimensionally as a Catholic, and as a Franciscan. I aspire to move beyond my own religious trauma because to dwell within it keeps me two dimensional, poisons my very being.

That seems to me to be the actual death cult.

of your peace–

when there is hatred–hatred within and outside of myself–let me sow love, especially when it is challenging to love myself;

where there is injury–injury I have caused through my willfulness or ignorance, injury that has happened to me because of the willfulness or ignorance of others–let me sow pardon; allow me the grace to pardon;

where there is doubt–doubt in myself, doubt in the intentions of others, doubt caused by trauma, or fear, or greed–let me sow faith, knowing that faith may be all that I have to hold onto;

where there is despair–in myself, caused by my own thoughts, outside of myself, caused by the world around me–hope; hope in the promises of the Risen Lord, in the knowledge that people can be good, and loving, and wonderful when they choose to be so;

where there is darkness–darkness in the world, in my heart–let me be the light: the light reflected from the Light of Lights;

where there is sadness–grief–let me sow joy, acknowledging that from the grief comes strength, wisdom.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled–but to console, knowing in my own sufferings that I am able to relate to the sufferings of others;

to be understood, as to understand–to listen, to listen to what is being said sometimes without words, or in words that may not perfectly name the situation, knowing that to be understood ourselves, we must make first the effort to understand.

to be loved as to love–loved as Christ, loving as if everyone we embrace, we meet, we see, is somehow a reflection of Christ, knowing in the face of rage and hate and discrimination, we witness the Passion.

For it is in giving that we receive–in letting go of what we see as controlling our direction, we receive the grace of God’s direction;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned–for in no situation of our lives have we not been either a bully or a victim, and in being one of each, know perfectly the states and conditions of each;

and in dying that we are born into eternal life.

Amen.

Today is the feast of the Impression of the Stigmata upon St. Francis of Assisi.

Memories flood back to me today of being in a small oratory in Toronto receiving the remainder of my minor orders, the deaconate. It was a warm day; the light glistened off Lake Ontario. I sweat so much.

The next day, meeting at the church we’d rented–the same church used in Kim’s Convenience, the Vietnamese Victory Church. I was ordained a priest in Appa’s Church. The Sunday following where I celebrated my first Mass, sweat a lot more, made mistakes, but it was ok!

When I was preaching today, I talked about what it must have been like for Francis, to want to hide the stigmata from his brothers, from those in his community; how they must have hurt. I can only imagine the pain of that blessing.

I talked today about how we, as Christians, are called to see when we receive the mark of Christ. Doing the right thing, carrying our cross, is never easy. Each time we are challenged to call out injustice, we are called to advocate for justice, when we are called into the silence of prayer, or the praise of celebration we are finding the marks of Christ.

We should not be ashamed, or afraid. Be proud, have courage. Know that we are loved by God, that we share siblingship with Our Lord, Jesus Christ.

I know, I know. It’s a line that I never saw myself as writing either.

When I was a young child, my parent’s would take me to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in the evenings. There was (and is!) a large triceratops skull there–at the time, it was in the basement of the museum such that as a young child I could crawl on it. It was tangible, it was real, it was cool! It was old. Older than anything I knew about.

History leaves imprints like fossils. At first, we may not know how to handle or explain the evidence in front of us. Dragon bones! Then bones assembled in all kinds of ways, creating all kinds of strange looking animal remains. When we applied common sense, patience, and knowledge of the evidence around us, the skeletons started to look different. We started to have a more detailed understanding of what these creatures were, how they lived, and now with the additional information of the fossil record, we know what some of their skins looked like, and that some may have had feathers, and that their ancestors fly around us to this day as birds.

It is often easier to believe in dinosaurs than it is that a man, a teacher, was crucified around 2000 years ago, was buried in a tomb, then three days later returned to the living because he was both God and man.

It’s ludicrous!

For starters, people don’t come back from the dead. It is a simpler concept that his body was taken from the tomb by his followers or by others to create the image that he was raised from the dead. It was more profitable somehow to do this.

There are, however, some fossils in the record that may help us.

People, including Jesus’ close followers, were consistently persecuted, killed for what they believed. This past Sunday, we said Mass on an altar stone that contained the relics of three saints and martyrs (even though we can’t be 100% sure who they are because there are a few saints and martyrs with the same names as the ones listed in the documentation that comes with this stone) that were killed between the mid 200’s and 1000 AD. That’s an 800 year stretch that people were killed for believing that a man was crucified, died, and was buried before returning from the dead three days later. Yes, people today die for their convictions and beliefs. These people also died for believing fundamental principles and values about the dignity of human life, the necessity of acts of charity and love. They believed the teachings of this particular man, a man who was God incarnate.

If they’d been killed for “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”, that would’ve been one thing. But it wasn’t just that. They believed this man was the son of God.

They believed that the sacrifice of the Mass was a direct connection to that death, the resurrection, a direct and tangible thing that recalled us to knowing this man personally. Do this in memory of me. Touch, taste, eat, drink, know. Do this in a certain way, gathered together as a family.