Tuesday, October 30, 2007

St. Francis continued... as promised...

My friend studying in HK Baptist Theological Seminary has forwarded my previous post to Dr. Moye, and then he has forwarded Dr. Moye's reply to me. And this is the email I wrote in reply on what I have learnt from St. Francis. (With some adapation for the very public internet...)

Dear Dr. Moye,

I am the friend of your student from the Baptist seminary, the one who wrote about the Gospel and St. Francis on my blog. He has forwarded your letter to him about what I wrote. In your email, you said you were unsure what I have learnt from St. Francis. (I think you’re absolutely right in what you said in the email about teaching and long term relationships being the best way of giving people understanding on what it means to be a Christian.)

I was reading this novel written by an Anglican priest about an fictional evangelical pastor who had lost his faith and sought counsel from his uncle who was a Catholic priest. And his uncle introduced St. Francis to him and led him into his spiritual pilgrimage.

I knew little about St. Francis before I read the book, apart from the song with the lyrics from his prayer, and that he was the son of a rich guy who abandoned his riches for God and some stories about him from the previous church history course I took.

In the book, I read the story about his calling to rebuild God’s church and how he took off all his clothes and severed his ties to his father, calling God his only father. How he is the patron saint of ecology and a nature mystic. The book also talked about how art is used by God, and how St. Francis spread the Gospel through art, and his creative sermons. (I think that might be one of the reasons you like him?) “Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use the words.” He also taught the friars preaching the good news was useless unless they were the good news. How he was a peacemaker between Muslims and Christians, his life in absolute poverty and how he helped people even when he had nothing. In short, how he lived his life fully according to the Gospel. For me, this whole package is the Gospel, not just “you have sinned, accept Jesus as your personal saviour and you’ll have eternal life.”

In the middle of the book, the pastor said he was half-afraid that when this pilgrimage was over, he might go home a Catholic. That was exactly how I felt in the past couple of months, maybe that’s why the book was so striking to me. I’ve been sick of all the “evangelical” ways, plus I have gotten rid of the prejudice against Catholics I got that are prevalent among Protestants long ago. I've been seriously thinking about converting to a more “traditional” Christian church for some time. That was why I had enrolled in the church history class to search for the roots of why I believe in what I believe in. There has never been any doubt in God in my mind, I just stopped believing in the form of Christianity/Gospel portrayed by the evangelical churches nowadays. I have never heard of evangelical crusades organized by Catholics.

St. Francis lived in a time when the church was corrupted, people were disillusioned. In a way similar to what we’re facing now. And the pastor wrote to St. Francis in his journal in the later part of the book, “Francis, you changed the church (in fact, you reevangelized it)—not through being critical but through forming a community that confounded it. For the last few years, I’ve been a self-righteous critic of the church and all of Christendom, and I need to give that up.”

I guess whatever church I’m in, there’ll still be problems. I like what St. Francis did, he “didn’t criticize the institutional church nor did he settle for doing church the way it had always been done. He rose above those two alternatives and decided that the best way to overhaul something was to keep your mouth shut and simply do it better.”

I guess that is the lesson I have to learn. And I still have no idea how to do it better, now I just feel frustrated most of the times and wanted to scream at people sometimes. And I have always had the problem to keep my mouth shut. When I can’t keep my mouth shut, sometimes I got all these wide eye stares/rebukes from people who are skeptical of what I think the Gospel really is.

Thanks for just reading this email. It’s getting really long.

Amy

No comments: