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Friar Stories: Journeys to Franciscan Life

Fr. Jerome Kelly, OFM

Father Jerome A. Kelly has been a Franciscan for nearly 59 years. During that time he taught at the seminary in Callicoon, N.Y., at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, N.Y, and directed the Franciscan students at Holy Name College in Washington, D.C. and at the novitiate in Brookline, Mass.

While I was in the eighth grade in 1925, a prize had been awarded for some work or other in class. I had won it by guessing correctly a certain number which the teacher at her desk had written down on a slip of paper.

I still have it: a little picture of St. Francis of Assisi. I have never had any trouble imagining Francis as speaking to me the words printed beneath his picture: "Blessed are the poor in spirit." To this picture I attribute the first stirrings of my desire to become a follower of Francis.

While living out my Franciscan story over the following years, I came gradually to recognize that my final vows as a friar constituted a covenant
relationship with God. Within this framework, I recognized my profession as my deliberate response to Christ's loving invitation to follow him. "You give up your will and I will draw you into the fullness of my Father's will." There is my vow of obedience.

"You give up whatever and all you possess and I will share with you the riches of the king-dom of God." There is my vow of poverty. "You give up the happiness and the pleasures of married life and I will satisfy your heart with infinite love forever" And there is my vow of chastity, which is radically a celibate way of loving.

An experience that I consider formative for my life as a Franciscan came while I was teaching at St. Bonaventure University some 30 years ago. A student had to be hospitalized because of a breakdown. During my visits to him, we prayed together. A few nights later, I sat with him on the edge of his bed with his parents standing beside us. When we finished praying, he leaned forward, embraced me and said, "1 love you very much." My response was honest, believe me. "1 love you, too, John, very much."

Later when back at the friary, the more I thought of what had just happened, the more the experience unsettled me. For all my years as a Franciscan, a brother living day after day with brothers, I had never thought to say to any one of them — nor had any one of them ever said to me — "Brother, I love you very much."

Which failure for the first time ever in my life as a friar — a brother — struck me as peculiar even to the point of being outlandish. Because at the heart of Franciscan life has to be what Francis had in mind when he posed this question in the Rule of 1223: "If a mother cherishes and loves the son whom her flesh has borne, how much more diligently should one love and cherish one who is his brother according to he Spirit?"

All my study of the mind of Francis and my reflections on it issued in the conviction that his
poverty and humility are inseparably interwoven with a genuine, basic, active, brotherly, and Christ-like love. "Seraphic," a Hebrew word for "the burning ones," is an accolade that fittingly becomes Francis.

It becomes his brothers as well, when we are all he expects us to be in imitation of himself. So the fairest and the full measure of my success in fulfilling my vocation as a friar must be taken not so much, really, by my poverty or my humility but by my love.

Precisely the lesson that the Church has always been teaching all of us in her liturgical prayer on
the feast of St. Francis where we ask the Father: "May we follow your Son by walking in the footsteps of Francis of Assisi and by imitating his joyful love." All I need to say to that for the rest of my life is "Amen."

—This essay was written in 1989 when Fr. Jerome was in retirement at St. Anthony Residence in Boston. It appeared in the Spring 1989 issue of The Anthonian magazine.