franciscan - January 1997
© The Society of Saint Francis, 1996
Why I Came
by Brother Nicholas Alan SSF, Novice
As the rain fell steadily in the darkness, soaking slowly into my coat, I could only see the way ahead by the grey strip of sky between the not-quite-touching trees overhead. I had walked to Sherborne that morning and was now walking the ten miles back to Hilfield Friary having missed the last bus. It was Francistide and at Sherborne Abbey I had stumbled across a choir festival in honour of Saint Francis.
Standing in the Abbey, I had suddenly felt a great longing to be there as a Franciscan, a brother of the SSF, and as I walked along the lanes back to the Friary later that evening something was still singing inside me as I sang out into the night. And as I walked I felt as though God was saying to me: “It will be hard, but I will be with you.” When I eventually got back, the Friary was in darkness – the storm had brought down some electricity cables – so I lit a candle and sank gratefully into a steaming bath. It felt good to be home.
I had come to Hilfield having finished a degree in theology and wanting somewhere to think through some of the half-digested ideas of three years’ study. One of the things that spoke to me most during those four months was the Franciscan ideal of poverty. There was something wonderfully reckless and life-affirming about Francis’s disregard for possessions. I remember a question asked by a Buddhist monk in a book I once read: “How can you be both rich and compassionate?”
It’s a simple question to which the only answer I have is the one which led me here. I feel deeply the injustice of having too much while millions are starving, and wanting to be a Franciscan is certainly bound up with wanting to make some kind of statement against the accumulated wealth of the West.
But this uneasiness about possessions was not in the end the main factor for me. As St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians,
to follow in the way of Christ is to be “poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, yet possessing everything.”
That vision captures my imagination and I feel its truth in my bones. Choosing poverty seemed to me not a response
to guilt but a celebration of the richness of God’s creation. I wanted to let go of what I had, truly to enjoy
and share in God’s great generosity and open-handedness.
* * *
Travelling through Greece and Turkey with a friend from college my thoughts kept returning to the question of choosing
a celibate life. How can anyone know that this is what God wants for them? Then one evening, as the golden sun
sank into the Aegean and the wake of the ferry stretched out to the horizon, I stood at the rails of the boat watching
some gulls soaring and darting as they followed alongside. And the words came welling up from inside: “ . . . and
there will be others.”
After leaving Hilfield I spent the next two and a half years living in a small community in inner-city Nottingham.
I have many happy memories of my time there: the meals together, the friendships, the early morning prayer and
the Eucharists we shared in the basement chapel. But it was also a time to discover some of the stresses and strains
of living together as a small group, with all the clashes of personality and temperament, and just of living amid
the pressures of an ‘urban priority area’. But what it did show me was something of the value of simply attempting
to live together, living the Christian life. I don’t like living alone. I need times of solitude and a space of
my own, but I also need others around me, just to share the day-to-day experience of living. So being able to live
in community with both its freedom of space and its warmth of support was another of the factors drawing me to
the SSF.
But it’s not just about the SSF. It’s also about joining the family of all Religious of whatever denomination and
indeed through the ages, becoming a brother with many, many brothers and sisters. Becoming part of that wider family
brings a great sense of belonging and of finding a place and meaning in life.
* * *
Incense hung in the warm summer air. The golden statue of the Buddha looked serenely down, offerings of flowers
and fruit spread at his feet. Seated around the room, our bodies stiff from a day’s meditation, we listened to
the tick of the clock counting the last few moments of our time together. And then the slightest breeze brushed
against a chime hanging from the eaves of the temple. And suddenly I knew: that’s it. That’s what I want.
After two years of inter-faith work in Nottingham and two years studying Buddhism in Bristol, I wanted to know more about Buddhism as it is lived in Asia. This led me to Korea for three years with the Church Mission Society to teach English at the Anglican university in Seoul and to explore further the dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity.
Getting to know people of other faiths has convinced me that perhaps the most important meeting point of all is in prayer. It is as we pray that we find ourselves in the presence of that which is beyond us all, and I came to realise that in order to know my friends of other faiths more fully I would have to go into my own faith more deeply as well, particularly in the life of prayer. But praying by yourself is so difficult. I knew something of the strength of the corporate saying of the Offices and the encouragement of living with others committed to prayer. I knew that I needed that again if I was to go further myself.
Early one crisp Spring Sunday morning in the crypt chapel of Seoul Anglican Cathedral, kneeling next to one of the sisters of the Society of the Holy Cross, I knew in myself that the time had come. It was as if an alarm-clock had gone off in my head, or a rain-swollen river finally burst its banks.
It seems to me that vocation is not something that comes from outside imposing demands, but something that wells up from within, with all the strength and urgency of a deep inner longing. In the end, I came because I wanted to come. Not that the superficial ‘I’, the personality and character I so hang on to and depend on, wanted this life which challenges and unsettles in so many ways: but that the deeper ‘I’, the one I long to set free, that self heard the rumours of this life as if from a far distance and came running. It was time to come home. §