Reading Francis

“Jeff! Ti aspetto da due anni!” Jeff! I’ve been waiting two years for you!

Whenever we go to Assisi, we start each day with Mass. Six days a week, we walk down the hill from our hotel through town to the Basilica of Santa Chiara and settle into the intimate Chapel of San Giorgio (which predates the 13th century Basilica), in front of the San Damiano crucifix through which God spoke to St. Francis and before which St. Clare prayed for almost 40 years of her life. The chapel is connected to the cloister of the Sisters of Poor Clare, so while they remain cloistered and out of sight, we in the pews participate in worship with those behind the grate. In addition to the traditional religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the Poor Clares take a fourth vow, to remain in the cloister, devoting their lives to prayer and to each other. 

(For those unfamiliar, think Sound of Music. It’s as close a pop culture example as I can think of, though Maria was part of a different religious order.)

The morning Mass requires one of the sisters to serve as sacristan, which means being outside the cloister to stage manage (essentially) the morning worship services, turning on the lights and mic and ensuring that the books and bread and wine are all where they’re supposed to be. This is a role that a few of the sisters rotate in and out of, and it’s the only one that takes any of them outside of the walls of the cloister, even if it’s just into the main Basilica.

It was the sacristan who greeted me right after our first Mass back in Assisi with those words. 

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This is the primary story of the Assisi retreat for me; almost everything else that was memorable was a variation on the theme.

I spent a lot of the retreat reflecting on encouragement: what it means to encourage others, how to do it well, and why it isn’t a more central part of our lives as Christians, or really just as humans. The story of the sacristan is a major reason why.

Assisi has become our spiritual second home. We try to go as often as we can, not as a sightseeing tour (though it is beautiful and there are so many nearby villages we have yet to explore) or a gluttonous vacation (though my word, we ate a lot of amazing food), but as a retreat. We go, we pray, we rest, we read, (we eat).

Our last trip was two years ago, and one thing that struck me during those morning Masses was that, while the sisters in the cloister sang from behind the wall, I could hear the sacristan singing her part from behind us, with the outsiders. It was a beautiful image of how we can be apart from each other but still a part of a community with each other, which is a pretty good life metaphor.

On the last day of our trip, I gave the sacristan a note that I had written in Italian with the help of Google Translate, thanking her for her service as sacristan, for the joy and good humor with which she does it (she brought a different level of energy to the role from her sisters), and sharing as best I could the insight I had from hearing her sing her part from outside the walls. I don’t remember whether she had the opportunity to read it before we left, but I do recall that I was able to tell her (in my awful Italian) that it was our last day of the trip. She asked if we come back every year, and, not having the vocabulary to explain that, while that’s our goal, the following year was unlikely because our daughter was graduating from college and we would be using our vacation time to go to LA for that, I said “Sì.” Hopefully I added a qualifier, but it’s been two years, and I don’t really remember.

In several subsequent conversations with her this year, she shared that my observation spoke exactly to her vocation, encouraging her with the message she needed to hear at the moment she most needed to hear it.

She, April and I had a wonderful conversation when she was off-duty, in a meeting room connected to the cloister, separated by a grate, sharing this and other stories and building a friendship. (By the end of the trip, my Italian had progressed from awful to mediocre.)

Obviously, there were things about how she would react to the note I wrote that I could not have known or predicted. But it didn’t surprise me that the act of encouragement would be meaningful and would open the door to friendship, because I see that happen all the time. April and I (and I have learned a lot of this from watching April encourage people) have built a habit of encouraging the people around us, particularly those in service roles that can too often be treated as invisible. April is a “surrogate mom” to an entire Starbucks or two. For me, it’s a Kahwa. We have good friends who we know, love and pray for who we met because they waited on our table at a favorite restaurant. Our life is incredibly enriched through these relationships of encouragement.

We aren’t particularly insightful or charming, mind you. What we invariably hear from the folks we notice is that the vast majority of people they serve see right through them. An artist we know who sells religious art to pilgrims in Assisi was brought to tears when April told him that we think of him and pray for him whenever we look at his work. How he doesn’t hear that from everyone, I cannot understand.

Encouragement, as I have been thinking about it, is not a difficult process. 

1. It starts by paying attention, by noticing the person in front of you. Simone Weil said “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I’ve never seen the movie Lady Bird, but I’ve watched the scene in which the main character denies loving her hometown; she just pays attention. To which the nun she’s talking with replies, “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing – love and attention?”
2. To that, add kind curiosity, wondering about the person’s story, asking questions (if you can) about their lives. 
3. Then, identify what you can be grateful for in the person and your interaction. Sometimes it’s the way they go about their work. Sometimes, it’s the inspiration of seeing someone grow in confidence. Sometimes, it’s recognizing the bigger picture of what they do, how the coffee they’re making is really a part of building a space that is welcoming or providing a familiar ritual to start a long day. 
4. Finally, the encouragement comes when you reflect back the gratitude for what you’ve noticed.

That’s the formula I’ve settled on for now: 

Noticing + Kind Curiosity + Gratitude + Reflecting Back = Encouragement. 

I have never experienced encouragement as anything but a win-win, positivity compounding proposition. When I have been in my own dark spaces, I have found that, perhaps paradoxically, focusing on encouraging others rather than dwelling on my worries has reset and brightened my outlook along with those I encourage.

The Friday after we returned from Assisi was June 11th, the Feast of St. Barnabas. He’s not a major character in the Bible, but he shows up in the Acts of the Apostles as the companion of St. Paul. The author of Acts makes a point of saying that Barnabas was known as “the Son of Encouragement,” which may be the best nickname in the Bible.

May we all grow to be his children in spirit.