Previous Post – Reflection on Christian Unity
In the past few years of exploring the life of St. Francis of Assisi & the Franciscan tradition, one of the greatest blessings has been meeting others on that journey. Among them have been a few members of the Order of Friars Minor (Ordo Fratrum Minorum). Thanks to the blogosphere, I have most recently come across Brother Dan P. Horan, OFM- @DanHoranOFM on Twitter & Dating God on Facebook (all worthy following). His insights into life, faith and culture are excellent and compelling.
However, rather than trying to tell you about him myself, I thought I would have chat with him and let him tell you about himself. Hope you enjoy!
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Jamie Arpin-Ricci: Briefly Tell us about coming to embrace your vocation as Franciscan friar.
Br. Dan Horan: That is perhaps the most frequent question I receive, yet I never have a really good or concise response. The basic story is that from a very young age I was fascinated with the Church. I came from your basic Irish Roman Catholic family, we went to Mass every Sunday, but we weren’t overtly religious – no praying the Rosary as a family or daily Mass attending for us. I was very active in my parish all the way through elementary and high school and when it came time for college, I felt pretty sure I wanted to study to be a priest for my home diocese. I only looked at Catholic colleges where I could study theology. By some chance, the details of which I don’t recall, I ended deciding to go to St. Bonaventure University in Western New York – A Franciscan college. I loved it.
As the years went by and I got to know the friars more and more, I couldn’t shake this feeling that the Holy Spirit was showing me something important. And I eventually came to believe wholeheartedly that there was really no other way of life, no religious charism that made more sense for me than the Franciscans. The more I read the writings of Francis and studied the tradition, the clearer it became and the more I fell in love with the rich history, example and way of life. I entered the Order right after college and, even though I’m the youngest in the province, I believe it has been a perfect fit for me.
I feel very lucky to have such an opportunity to connect with a community that brings to fruition the expression of Gospel living with which I most closely identify. I like to say sometimes that I may have discovered my vocation to ordained ministry first, in that I felt from an early age that God wanted me to be a priest in some capacity, but that my spiritual DNA is Franciscan and my truest vocation is to be a Franciscan friar above all else.
JAR: Other Franciscan brothers I know talk about the difficulty getting young people into such vocations. As a friar under 30, why do you think this is so? How should the Church respond?
DH: Yeah, this is a topic of much conversation in my province and in the wider Church today. In some way I think the expression of difficulty about young people entering religious life is true, but I – along with many younger men and women in religious life that I have spoken with – aren’t really as concerned with the numbers as some of our older brothers and sisters. I think this might have to do with the fact that the younger generation of religious haven’t experienced first-hand a time when there was an abundance of sisters, brothers and priests in ministry (here I’m thinking of the 1950s and 1960s).
The Catholic theologian Sandra Schneiders has written about this issue and has said that the Holy Spirit has always called, generally speaking, a small percentage of the population to a unique life of religious profession. It is only in certain “fluke” (for lack of a better word) periods in history when there has been a boom in the numbers. My personal feeling is that the Holy Spirit continues to work in the hearts and lives of men and women, calling them to religious life.
The challenge for the Church today, though, is to be present and recognizable so that these people who might feel this spiritual stirring can find the community where their vocation meets its authentic expression. These people, including young people, are out there. I don’t believe they are out there in the artificially inflated numbers of, say, the 1950s, but people like my classmate (who is also in his 20s) and me are out there. So, to your question about why is there a struggle in vocations today, I would say that it’s, to use a business image, more a “PR” or “image” problem than a problem of the Holy Spirit.
The greatest vocational challenge today for the Church generally and the Franciscans specifically is visibility. Priests, sisters, religious communities – these groups are simply not seen by young people as often as they were half a century ago. Part of the issue is the shift in cultural contexts, where the audience (today’s young men and women) are faced with much more stimuli and the competition for the attention of people is much more complicated and fierce. How do you begin to have a conversation with a young man about the possibility of spending his life as a Franciscan friar if he’s never heard of or seen a Franciscan before? The Church needs to respond by being a so-called player on the cultural stage, involved in Gospel matters of social concern and relevance. The Franciscans – and all religious communities – need to meet people where they are, only then will those who are called by the Spirit to live this sort of life come to find the right communities.
JAR: Part of meeting people where they are at these days is through technology. When people think of friars, technology doesn’t usually come to mind. Yet you make excellent use of social media, etc. Help us to understand the connection.
DH: Haha, yes that is probably a fair assessment, which is precisely the problem I identified in responding to your last question. Friars – and all ministers in the church – need to get over themselves and this notion that social media, the internet and the like are simply fads that are the domain of the young and therefore not worth pursuing in any serious manner. This is patently untrue and it is something that Pope Benedict XVI and many of the North American Bishops in the U.S. and Canada have discussed as something of “a new land in need of evangelization.” The arrogance of some ministers today, friars included, in their unfavorable disposition to technology is part of the reason I believe young people don’t know who we are and what our tradition is about. How quickly many forget the long-standing tradition of the Church’s use of new media – lest we forget that the first text published by Gutenberg with his new printing technology (now centuries-old, but once “new social media”) was the Bible.
On a more positive note, I have become increasingly more convinced that if, as Franciscans, we are called to “live according to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ,” as Francis set forth, then sharing the Good News of God’s Kingdom with the world must take place where the people are. The use of social media and technology is not optional, but it is a ministerial imperative. That said, technology is only part of the whole picture. Social media is a tool that helps connect people, share ideas and build a new kind of community, but that community is also called to come together in real time and in real space – that is the sacramental side of the Church, the real tangible, physical, temporal realization that God continues to be in relationship with humanity in time, space and history.
Will Facebook and Twitter be around in another 20 years? Probably not, at least not as we know it now. Such was the case with the telegraph and telephone – did Alexander Graham Bell ever imagine the iPhone? But this technological revolution that has produced new media like Facebook and Twitter has irrevocably changed the game we call communication and the Church, which is always and everywhere the people of God, has a right to be ministered to in a language it understands and in the places where it is located. Today, that includes the Internet.
JAR: Your blog and your forthcoming book are both titled “Dating God.” Tell us more about why that name & the book itself.
DH: Well, this is a great question to follow the previous one. The blog, www.DatingGod.org, was something I began reluctantly. It emerged from the prompting of the editorial staff at St. Anthony Messenger Press, the publishers of my forthcoming book. The idea was that today’s authors need to have a web presence, precisely for the reasons I mentioned that the Church needs to have a web presence – that is where the people are.
The name of the book (and blog) originated about five years ago when I was working with some of the writings of St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi. I was attending a workshop and was asked by another friar what I thought about the way the writings were striking me. My response was that the intimacy with which these two saints wrote about God reminded me of the way one speaks about someone he or she is dating. In their writing there is honesty, a forthcoming relationship that grows more intimate in a spiritual sense, but it is also very ordinary and human. That metaphor was made more significant for me after I spent ten days in a hermitage in the snowy woods of Pennsylvania as a novice, which resulted in the publication of an article, “Dating God: A Young Friar’s Experience of Solitude” in the magazine America (June 2007).
Flash forward three years and I’m in dialogue with Lisa Biedenbach at St. Anthony Messenger Press who is very interested in me writing a book on contemporary Franciscan spirituality. This metaphoric theme, that of imagining our relationship with God as like dating, seemed to be the perfect thread to tie together a reading of the Franciscan spiritual tradition for a new generation. The book is a journey through some of the major themes of the spiritual life of the reader; themes like understanding your true self, how to pray, seeking solitude, coping with the feeling that God is at times distant, the relationship between our life with God and our life with the community, social justice and creation, among others.
The Franciscan sources provide the grounding for a new way of viewing ourselves, God and relationship. I’m very excited about the book and, from the lectures and retreats I’ve given on themes from the book in recent months, people – especially young people – are very interested in the ideas, which means the story, life and lessons of the Franciscan tradition still speak to the hearts of today’s spiritual seekers.
JAR: Tell us something odd and/or unusual about yourself that we would never know if you hadn’t told us.
DH: Well, that is a fantastic question and one that I don’t think I have ever been asked before. I suppose there are two things that I can think of that people might find interesting or unusual that most people probably don’t know about me. First of all, I am a HUGE fan of the musician and songwriter Jason Mraz. I’ve seen him live in concert nine times over the last 5 years! He is great on CD, but even better live – something you don’t find often with performers today. My friend Jay in college introduced me to his music long before he became more mainstream and popular. Then, as now, I really liked his ability to be creative with language and his (and his band’s) musical talent. In age when most of what is broadcast over the radio is vapid and musically inept (more electronic than instrumental), Mraz is a refreshing artist. I recommend that people who have never heard him check out his performance of his song “Beautiful Mess” with the Oslo Symphony Orchestra for the Nobel Peace Prize Concert some years back, it’s on YouTube.
The other thing all but a few friends of mine don’t know is that I have a real strong, if amateur, interest in science, particularly modern physics (this will come as a shock to my science colleagues in higher education that I often like to tease in asserting the humanities’ superiority over the sciences). I’m not so interested in biology or chemistry. One of my favorite radio programs is NPR’s Science Friday and I have for years read books on quantum mechanics; specifically, texts on entanglement theory and string theory. I am fascinated by the work of scientists today and I really admire what theoretical physicists, in particular, are working on.
If I could go back to college and pursue another field of study, I think I might like to explore physics and its related field of mathematics. I’m not sure that I would be good at it, but I love learning about and studying that field. I suppose that the reason I am so fascinated with physics, especially as it relates to quanta, is the immense potential for interdisciplinary study with theology that exists with such science. The possibilities are incredible, yet only a handful of scholars seem to be taking note (one of which was my master’s thesis director, Ilia Delio, OSF, who earned doctorates in both theology and pharmacology). Who knows, maybe someday I might have an opportunity to explore that area more formally, for now I’m content to be an “armchair physicist.”
JAR: Thanks Dan. Peace & all good!
[...] Previous Post – Dating God [...]
[...] just because Arpin-Ricci so kindly interviewed me on his excellent blog last year, see his “Dating God – Dan P. Horan, OFM” post of last January). It is an unusually creative, insightful and challenging book that [...]