Reading Francis

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever growing insistency.”

– Daniel Burnham

I am definitely a Daniel Burnham guy. Even before I read The Devil in the White City, which captures his story as a ground-breaking and ambitious architect and urban planner, I had a t-shirt from the Chicago Architectural Foundation with the beginning of his most famous quote: Make no little plans. I wear it every year at strategic planning time.

It’s likely due to that affinity for Burnham’s love of grand scale that I have struggled to accept a message I’ve gotten over and over again, including on my most recent retreat: Think small.

There were a lot of themes and takeaways from my time away that were meaningful to me, and maybe at some point I can dig into them here. I overstuffed the agenda – with nine themes that both St. Francis of Assisi and Pope Francis evoke, with 2-3 really good books with different retreat plans that were each multifaceted, with too many places to go and things to do and food to eat. I guess you could say that I had big plans.

The week of the trip, I pulled out a book I hadn’t read in years, Francis Chan’s Forgotten God, and it got me thinking about how the call to becoming who you are meant to be is a call to be radical, to commit to the root of the Gospel. I have trouble thinking of someone who lived a truly holy life who wasn’t radical in their commitment to their purpose, their values, their Love. I mean, John the Baptist ATE LOCUSTS. That’s commitment, right there.

But the underlying message of the time away was this: most of the best people, whether they made huge changes in the world or not, focus not on grand plans but on being small-time radicals. I have made fun of St. Francis of Assisi for literally rebuilding broken down sanctuaries with his bare hands when he heard God tell him to “rebuild [His] church,” with the hindsight that later his approach to holiness would lead to a rebirth within the big-C Church, which seems like what God was trying to tell him the first time. But then I remember that Francis didn’t go recruit followers; he just committed to his choice to radically follow Jesus, and eventually people started asking if they could tag along. Maybe the renovation projects were less a misunderstanding than a Karate Kid-esque preparation. Wax on, wax off style.

It happens now, too. Greg Boyle didn’t set out to create the largest gang intervention program in the country; he just listened to what the people in his poor little church said they needed and worked together with them to pursue a radical vision of kinship. I also picked up Bob Goff’s Everybody Always again, and while he is less well-known, he has an amazing story to tell about what happens when you commit to a radical value of loving everybody, always. 

They all committed to being radicals in their different ways, and the results, big or small, were kind of an unplanned afterthought. The legacy of their choices wasn’t a logical diagram but an illogical perseverance in love and joy and peace, or poverty and humility and obedience, in the face of harsh realities and real limitations. That’s what stirs people’s blood.

When you’re more of a “big plan” kind of guy, the call to be a small-time radical seems like a cop-out. There is no clear path to success in small-time radicality; in fact, achieving something meaningful isn’t even part of the calculus. Committing to belonging to God, to each other, and to the rest of creation in a truly radical way requires you to abandon contingency plans and depend on Someone other than yourself to make something beautiful out of it all. Even if things work out well, it will seem more chaotic and less orchestrated than Burnham would want.

It’s a gamble. You could eat bugs in the desert and still have your head handed to you. But that was the takeaway I got from this retreat, again. Work on being a radical for peace, joy, and love and let the rest take care of itself. As I have heard before, “you do you (the you that you were meant to be)”, and let’s see if it’ll set the world on fire.