Are you feeling a call to follow Jesus as St. Francis did? Franciscan Sister of Christian Charity Sister Kathleen Murphy shares a poem entitled Seen on the Way. Jesus and St. Francis walk with us on our road of life. Maybe you are on your way to an Assisi pilgrimage or a smaller more intimate journey to a shrine or place of God near you? Sister Kathleen’s home parish is St. Mary Help of Christians, Briggsville, Wisconsin, St. John Henry Newman Pastorate in the Diocese of Madison. Pilgrims find their way there. We find God in the ordinariness of our day. Discernment is ever a movement of freedom and grace and prayer. Come.
Seen on the Way
Francis,
be father, fostering my future
be brother, bearing burden, beside–because,
be pulsing prism to me
catching the Son,
taking that Incomprehensible Light
containing it in colors
my small spirit can catch.
Be not a plastic presence
posing on the lawns of life.
Be not a poem
sung soberly sweet from history’s habit.
Be not a holy, be-haloed hero painted and parted,
preserved from the pitiful
by some saintly caste.
Be riot of restlessness
racing after the Only Reason.
Be tide of holiness
reaching high then draining low to the rhythms of creation.
Be shelter for the searching
who long to walk the Way undoubtedly unshod.
Be passion
personified plainly.
Be frustrated focus,
come to clarity by way of a cross.
Filter that Terrible Brightness,
that I may surrender to the seeing,
that I may live the loving,
that I may reflect the reasons
Seen, loved and reasoned by you,
Be father,
Be brother.
Be saint-spirit and human-hand
Saint seen along the way.
