Fr Ben Garren

Siblings in Christ

We come today to the feast of the Portiuncula, the Little Portion… a feast day celebrating a small patch of arable land outside the city of Assisi. During the early church a group of hermits were given this little portion of fertile soil to provide for their life of simple prayer. Eventually, however, issues of banditry and war brought the community to dissolve and abandon their small farm and chapel. The roots and bushes, insects and birds, took over both and perhaps worshiped God there in their own way.

Around a thousand years later Francis came across The Portiuncula, nearly lost amidst the brush and vegetation, and entered into the remains of a small chapel. It took less than eight steps to get from the entrance to the altar… where he saw a fresco, still preserved, of Mary surrounded by the angels of heaven. Something about this little abandoned space stirred the hope he had for the church.

Thus The Portiuncula was included in Francis’ very pragmatic interpretation of the command God had given him to “Rebuild the Church” and Our Lady of Angels was restored. As he prayed amid the small space he received a second vision, one of Jesus, the Blessed Mother, and All the Angels administering mercy and forgiveness to all who come to them in need. It was here, in this scrap of arable land and near a miniature chapel, that Francis began to gather the first community of friars.

The tale of The Portiuncula always gives me a bit of hope. A scrap of land given away, abandoned, discovered in a ramshackle state, and slowly brought back to life by people trying to conceive some new way of Christian discipleship. The church is now a shrine with an entire Basilica built around it and the patch of fertile land now the grounds around such… a reality that gives hope to many, especially those making pilgrimage to it today. I want to suggest, however, that there is a hope that can come from large Basilicas and the gatherings of great church institutions but that the hope we are called to truly look for is the hope found in the Portiuncula that are yet to become shrines within Basilicas. Where we are truly called to find hope as Christians are not in the words coming from great gatherings of church leaders, which are limited, but the voices of faith found in more abandoned, ramshackle, and forgotten places. That our hope should be drawn not from the greatest amongst us but the least.

Pax,
Ben