Communities of Salt and Light

Dear Friend,

I continue to be fascinated and inspired by the conversion story of Nicholas Herman (later Brother Lawrence). He was eighteen years old. (It was the early 1600’s.) 

According to a priest who interviewed him some decades later, it was a cold winter day and he, Nicholas, was looking at a tree stripped of its leaves. The thought then occurred to him that “within a little time the leaves would be renewed and after that the flowers and fruit appear.” 

It was a revelation. As he reported to his interviewer, he received at that moment “a high view of the Providence and Power of God” which was never erased from his soul. What’s more, the experience kindled in him “a love of God, that perfectly set him loose from the world.” He joined a monastery, “thinking that he would there be made to “smart” (i.e. hurt) for his awkwardness and faults and so sacrifice his life to God, with its pleasures. But God “disappointed him,” since as a monk he was “met with nothing but satisfaction.”

I would call this being bowled over by the flavor of God’s activity, a power working through weakness and even deadness. It is the flavor and light released by the action of getting close to the poor, to those in need, to the humble of the earth, and to the earth itself. 

Saint Francis got close to the poor leper, whose sores and deformity meant he was “dead” by the world’s standards. Francis wrote years later that the Lord “led him” to the lepers and “what had been bitter to him was made sweet.”  

The mercy of God is never artificial. In times of growing malice, bitterness, and aggression, Jesus Christ, in the Eucharist, forms communities of salt and light.

Gratefully,

Father Dan ofm