I for one hope that we never go back to those crazy numbers that we had during the 20th century. It’s unmanageable. Communities turn into institutions and fraternal life becomes dorm life. You can live with people for five years and never get to know anything about them. Living in community is supposed to be fraternal. There is nothing familial about more than 10 people in a house. I currently live with two and it’s an incredible difference. We actually know everything about each other.
We can tell just by the look on each other’s face when someone is having a good day and when you should just keep your distance and give him his space. You know when he’s thinking about his mother who is sick, whom he can’t go visit, because it’s too far and you know all of his brothers and sisters by name. That’s community life as St. Francis envisioned it, not white elephants that cost millions of dollars to build and then more millions over the years to maintain.
The Dominican Friars had the same problem. Fraternity was key to Dominic’s way of seeing religious life. Had it not been, he could have founded an order of canons. They’re priests and they preach. But he founded an order of friars, because these priests were to live as brothers, not as an army or worse, as if they were Trappist Monks, with 100 men living in a house where they saw each other at prayer and meals, but did not speak to each other during the day, because you can’t possibly have a significant conversation with 100 people during a one hour community recreation period, which is all that you get per day in those large houses.
The greater the number, the more structured you have to be. Friaries and priories become barracks with schedules for everything from brushing your teeth to playing checkers. When you have three people in a house, you can decide that tomorrow we can get a later start, because no one has to be anywhere at 7:00. So we can get up at 7:00 and say morning prayer at 7:30. Then the next day, you get up at 4:45, because your brother has to be out the door by 6:00 to catch a bus to go to a 7:00 class at the university. Even though you don’t have to go to a 7:00 class, you get up for the sake of your brother, so that you can pray with him before he goes to take that exam or whatever he’s going to do at the university.
Silence is never an issue. There aren’t enough of you in the house to make a lot of noise. You can speak to each other without disturbing the one who is praying, studying or resting.
As you move from house to house, over the course of your lifetime, you know most of the brothers in your province. I love when our houses come together for the annual retreat. All of our apostolates come to a dead stop for one week. Parishes close down, pregnancy centers are run by volunteers, classes at the university are canceled, hospital chaplains come home and hand over the coverage to the nearest parish. Everyone is there for an entire week, praying, sharing, walking, discerning and most important, being present to each other. We could not do that in the days when provinces had 800 friars.
With the smaller communities breaking away from the larger order, we’re still part of the Franciscan family, but we’re also closer to each other. The perfection of charity is achieved in the day to day life of community. Patience, tenderness, kindness, empathy, sympathy, fraternal correction, emotional support, and a helping hand are the little things that make for the perfection of charity. It’s not something that you accomplish over night. It’s a lifetime journey that you take along with a few brothers.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
THAT’S NOT A HOUSE!!! That’s a province or even an entire order. They actually lived in three buildings.