In an internet discussion forum, where manners are a little looser and the wording a little sharper than usual, someone once objected to me that the OFS, the Franciscan lay community, consisted of “monastery bedbugs and would-be monks”. At its core, the charge presumably means that the OFS does not live a convincing form of Christian faith. According to this, the community would consist of people who merely live passively, as consumers, off the spirituality of the First Order (“monastery bedbugs”), or who got stuck far too early in their Christian way of life and want to cover this up by busying themselves with clerical externals (“would-be monks”).
From my own long experience with many people in the OFS I know, of course, that the charge has little to do with reality. Even so, it naturally raises questions: what does it actually mean to live Franciscan spirituality as a lay person? What kind of life plan, and what inner attitude, lie behind it? What do terms such as “vocation” or “promise” mean in this context? How can the relationship between the First and the Third Order be understood? First of all, one thing is certainly important: the members of the OFS are lay people and nothing else. (There are, it is true, some parish priests and deacons in the OFS, but they expressly do not regard themselves as members of a religious order.) In the history of the Franciscan lay movement this was at times seen differently, but it is of central importance for our way of life. For it means that Franciscan lay people hold no office in the Church and have no precedence of any kind. They have an effect only through who they are and how they live.
A second observation is just as important: because of our way of life, with work and family, most of us cannot acquire a theological education or keep a regular life of prayer on the scale of men and women in religious orders. However important lifelong learning and above all prayer are for members of the OFS too, the heart of our vocation lies elsewhere. What is truly distinctive about our way of life is that we live our vocation “in the world”. As quite ordinary people we are in direct and unguarded contact with people of the most varied backgrounds, convictions, personalities and social positions. It is precisely here that we are to live the values of the Gospel: solidarity with the weaker, helpfulness, trust, courage for life. And precisely here, in this everyday sphere, it must also prove true that these Gospel values are not naive whitewash but guidelines by which one can shape one’s life meaningfully and fruitfully.
Anyone who has ever walked this path knows how many personal difficulties it brings and how much patience and humility it demands. It is not easy really to do without advantages and privileges, or not to respond to attacks with defensiveness and aggression, especially when you feel you are in the right. It is not easy to stand up for those who are pushed to the margins and overlooked (at work, in the neighbourhood or in the family). It is not easy to be tolerant of world views and values that you consider wrong, and still to represent your own conviction calmly and objectively.
A further task is to shape, actively and creatively, the areas that lie within our responsibility. It is about changing conditions marked by violence, building just structures, questioning the goals and processes of our working world as to their humanity, showing our children ways to develop, and giving old and sick people a place in our lives. In other words, it is about working, from a Franciscan perspective, towards what Pope John Paul II called the “civilisation of love”. This needs a wealth of ideas and perseverance, and of course, again and again, communal and personal prayer. To put it in the words of liberation theology, we must “stand with one foot on the Bible and the other on the newspaper”.
If this way of life is taken seriously, it is no “second-class vocation”, a sort of hobby Franciscanism; it is just as close to the original intention of Saint Francis as the vocation to monastic life in the First Order. For that is exactly what Francis wanted: simply to live at the side of people, above all the poor; to proclaim the Gospel not so much by words as by a convincing life; to replace structures of hatred with structures of love. Because the First Order, already in the Middle Ages, developed away from a community of lay brothers towards a monastic community of Franciscan clerics, the two branches of the Order are, so to speak, ordered towards each other. The First Order has recognised this again and again, and has never given up its bond with the lay people, even in times of crisis in the Third Order.
The community lived within the OFS, the regular meetings, the organisational work on the councils, the shared activities – none of this is an end in itself; its purpose is to strengthen us for our real tasks, which are to be found in the family, at work, in the parish and in the neighbourhood. This is also how the promise should be seen: it is not only the promise to belong to a certain group for life, but is about the difficult and adventurous path of translating Franciscan values into our own everyday lives throughout our whole life, of finding the poor in our own world and standing by them, of finding Christ in our everyday lives and following him.