Chasing Francis

My decision to join the Catholic church happened after a year of discernment that was less focused on getting all the theology “right” but on experiencing God from a Catholic vantage point. I had spent the 10 years before my discernment year slowly coming to terms with Catholic theology, but abandoning my career and financial stability required more then theological agreement. I needed to know that God was with me.

 In truth it was probably the hardest decision that I have ever had to make. In doing it I had to lay down all my hope and dreams, as well as a key part of my identity to embrace a future that remains wide, unknown, and terrifying. What I found was a deep well of spirituality and sentimentality that embraced me so deeply I knew that things would never be the same again.

Many of the conversion stories I have read have focused on doctrine and apologetics and have failed to capture the driving force that brought me into the Catholic church: intimacy. I have often wondered what it would look like if I wrote a narrative account of my own journey from a protestant minister to a Catholic lay person. In a lot of ways it would be like Chasing Francis a book by Ian Morgan Cron which I read this week.

The work is a fictional account of a mega-church pastor who loses his faith in the God of evangelicalism and falls in love with Jesus all over as he explores the life of St. Francis on his own little pilgrimage to Italy. As a former evangelical minister who became Catholic after a quest of my own this book has been a very powerful source of healing and joy. I have cried, smiled, and sensed God at work in the beauty.

I encourage everyone to read this book. It really was very well written, and conveys a certain intimacy that I have rarely seen outside of autobiographies. It isn’t polemical or contrived. It expresses an honest portrait of what is like to be a pastor who struggles with their faith and finds new hope in the spirituality of the Catholic tradition (I should know!) My only beef with Cron’s marvelous tale is that the ending (which I won’t give away) seems to fall short of radical vision of Francis… but I suppose my own life does too.

Part of the genius of St. Francis is his ability to inspire everyone to a more radical love of neighbor.

So, read the book! You won’t be sorry.