“Called: What Happens After Saying YES To God”
Casey Cole, OFM
Fifty years ago, I read the national bestseller The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. The book made him famous, and it opened for me the first door out of the religious fundamentalism into which I had been born. Other doors came later, including many that led into rooms occupied by Roman Catholics. I attended Catholic schools, listened to Catholic sermons, traveled to Catholic shrines, and made Catholic friends. I am certain I am not the only Protestant whose world was enriched by the reading of that single, best-selling book so very long ago.
Other people will have the same experience while reading Called: What Happens After Saying Yes to God. This book won’t achieve the recognition of the Merton book, and I doubt its author will end up as famous. But who knows?
Casey Cole is Director of Catholic Student Ministry at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Would you believe one quarter of the 39,000 students at that university register as Catholics? He has a big job, but I predict he will be very successful.
Success is important to Casey, as he himself confesses in the final chapter of this book of essays. So are poverty, celibacy, and obedience—which are the three vows he took when he entered the Order of Friars Minor. Or the Franciscans, as we know them.
He weaves into the six chapters a score or more of the blogs he wrote during his journey from active high school youth group, through collegiate ministry experience at Furman University and ministerial formation at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, to full vows into the order. And besides these blogs, he has a YouTube channel, and you can join the 46,000 subscribers to his occasional musings about the journey of life and ministry. Find it on his web site at breakinginthehabit.org.
Many non-Catholics will discover what I did when first I read Thomas Merton: Catholics have serious spiritual encounters, have deep commitment to Jesus as Lord and Savior, and have struggles with the same issues that plague, well, just about everybody: self-esteem, vocation, sexuality, religion, failure, finances.
Casey writes frankly about his love for life and his love for a few women and how the love for the latter tested his love for God and his calling into the order. He writes about the struggle to live with other Franciscans whose sense of cleanliness and responsibility and poverty are different than his.
Throughout the book he educates us on the life and vision of Francis himself: not the current pope but the privileged Italian who gave it all up and launched the Order 800 years ago. The original Francis felted called to save the whole Church (from the ignorance, corruption, and worldliness that held all Christendom it their grip).
Cole identifies four qualities of the movement Francis ignited: prayer, equality, community, and reconciliation. The Franciscans, together with other transnational orders (such as the Dominicans and the Jesuits) get much of the credit for reforming the Roman Catholic Church and restoring true spirituality and service to its core functions.
Which got me wondering if such a strategy would work in our day—a day of far more division among Christians than eight centuries ago; a day of suspicion, competition, and condemnation among and between Christians.
I once asked some Dominicans, the Order of Preachers, if I could join without becoming a Catholic; I was told no. But I wonder. I wonder if a new order—not strictly Catholic and not strictly non-Catholic, an order open to all Christians in any country, of every tradition—might be a way forward: a way forward for the Church of Jesus Christ, a way forward for peace-loving, people-helping, gospel-living folk everywhere, a way forward for the human community.
I would join such an Order and would invite you to do the same, even if it required me to wear some sort of distinctive clothing—like a habit, or a scarf, or a hat, or even a tattoo!! I think it could have the same revolutionary impact in our time that the formation of the Franciscans did in the Middle Ages.
reviewed by Dwight A. Moody
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watch Dr. Moody’s conversation with Fr Cole on the PODCAST page of this web site.
