Christmas coffee, conversation and confession
US Franciscans take the sacrament into shopping malls.
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Father Anderson, 66, wore the brown habit of the Franciscan friar, its plain humility broken only by a name tag affably identifying him as Dan. The former shoe store that he occupied contained holiday decorations, a brimming coffeepot and a life-size statue of the order’s founder, St. Francis of Assisi. On one table rested a glass fishbowl for prayer requests.
The couple asked Father Anderson if they could confess, and he guided them to a quiet corner. They spoke, he listened, and as the minutes passed, 15 or more, they gathered the courage to ask their question of both the friar and the universe: A relative of theirs had committed suicide. Was he in heaven?
As startling as the encounter may have been, it was also the precise reason Father Anderson and about 25 other friars based nearby in Cincinnati had set up temporary shop at the Northgate Mall. They opened their doors on Black Friday, which they promptly renamed Brown Friday in wry reference to their clothing, and they will remain until the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
“It’s from the basis of Franciscan theology,” Father Anderson said. Referring to St. Francis, he continued, “For him, the ultimate wonder is that God loved us enough to be one of us. And he was one of us in the simplicity and vulnerability of a child.”
The Rev. Jeffrey J. Scheeler, 61, the provincial minister for the Franciscans in a large portion of the Midwest, took his scriptural inspiration from John 1:14. While a central phrase in the verse is commonly translated along the lines of, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” Father Scheeler said he preferred an alternative rendering: “He pitched his tent among us.”
Source: NY Times
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