{"id":405,"date":"2021-03-18T13:51:24","date_gmt":"2021-03-18T13:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/?page_id=405"},"modified":"2022-01-09T09:35:38","modified_gmt":"2022-01-09T09:35:38","slug":"a-free-range-franciscan","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/february-2021-vol-502\/a-free-range-franciscan\/","title":{"rendered":"A Free-Range Franciscan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebecca<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Friends may remember me making an incomprehensible announcement after Meeting at the end of September. For anyone who might still be wondering what the heck it was all about, here is an explanation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Francis of Assisi, founder of the Order of Friars Minor; oldest known portrait in existence of the saint, dating back to St. Francis’s retreat to Subiaco (1223\u20131224), from Wikipedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On 3 October 2020, I made my Life Profession in the Third Order of the Society of St. Francis. This is a \u2018dispersed order\u2019 within the Church of England, which contains a mixture of genders, ages, married and single people, ordained and lay people. (The First and Second Orders are for full-time brothers and sisters in communities; people might know the Sisters at Freeland, who are a Second Order house.) A friend described the Third Order as the \u2018Free-Range Franciscans\u2019, a description I like very much and which Quakers would find less objectionable than the analogy I had previously used, which was the Territorials.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You might ask at this point \u2018Yes, OK, but what do you actually do<\/i>?\u2019 The answer to this is that that it depends to a large extent on the individual Tertiary and their circumstances. We all make an individual Rule of Life which we review annually and adjust if necessary. The Rule has sections such as Retreats, Personal Prayer and Study, and everyone works out what they will commit to under each heading. We aim to lead lives characterised by humility, love, and joy, which are qualities that prompt us to live simply, loving all and attempting to share Christ\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>love. Quakers will probably find these aims familiar as there is plenty of common ground between the Franciscan Principles and the Quaker Testimonies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tertiaries are organised into small groups, and in normal times, everyone in an area meets up two or three times a year for a day of worship, talks, and general mingling. This is a joyful occasion and I am looking forward to a time when such events are allowed again. Small groups meet monthly for prayer and discussion in each other\u2019s homes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Life Profession is when a Novice becomes a fully-fledged Tertiary, after two to three years of preparation. It is a dedication of one\u2019s life to trying to follow Jesus\u2019s teachings as exemplified by St. Francis, though we don\u2019t necessarily subject ourselves to the same level of self-denial. (At the end of his life, Francis apologised to his body, which he called \u2018Brother Ass\u2019, for some of his more severe practices.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There is no requirement to call a Tertiary \u2018Sister\u2019 or \u2018Brother\u2019. Please keep calling me Rebecca, as you usually would. I do have a friend who calls me \u2018Sister Rebecca\u2019 to wind me up; the first time he did this, I was quite taken aback!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If anyone wants to know any more about the Third Order, do feel free to speak to me about it \u2013 I am not an expert yet, but I know some people who are. My email is: bexadella@googlemail.com<\/p>\n

\n

Back to February 2021 Newsletter Main Page<\/a><\/p>\n

Forty-Three<\/em> Newsletter \u2022 Number 502 \u2022 February 2021
\n<\/strong>Oxford Friends Meeting
\n43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW<\/p>\n

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Friends may remember me making an incomprehensible announcement after Meeting at the end of September. For anyone who might still be wondering what the heck it was all about, here is an explanation.\u00a0 On 3 October 2020, I made my Life Profession in the Third Order of the Society of St. Francis. This is … Continue reading A Free-Range Franciscan<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"parent":341,"menu_order":184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-405","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1282,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/405\/revisions\/1282"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}