a jubilee of knots
in praise of good shepherds and in memory of the night we met Papa Francesco in St. Peter's Square
This is about Pope Francis—of course—of the first night I met him (although he did not meet me) along with the rest of the church, and how his death, at the end of the celebration of the Paschal Mystery, after renewing our baptismal promises, after two beautiful sermons on peace and hope, in the thick of the Jubilee Year of Mercy, has prompted in me great gratitude for all he has given to us, the Mystical Body of Christ on earth.
A nice woman, over coffee, on Good Friday after Pax Christi’s ecumenical stations of the cross in downtown Harrisburg, was explaining a family problem. James and I began peppering her with clarifying questions: What is your relationship with X? And How does Y interact with Z? and afterward I laughed at us treating a casual conversation like we were either the gentlest CIA interrogators or an overbearing therapist at an intake meeting.
But I think this is a side effect of hospitality. Sometimes, folks knock on our front door carrying a large knot. It is weighing them down, it is driving them crazy—or, more plainly, it’s just making them homeless.
But the presenting problem, as Biblical scholar John Meier would often tell us in class that Jesus “the Great Therapist” knew, is not the underlying problem. So someone comes, sets the knot down in front of you between coffee cups and used sugar packets on the table and you begin, between sips, to tug at each thread, following its strand down to the root. You learn which questions to ask to tease out each thread. You learn which questions to ask because you’ve seen these threads and these knots before.
But stories never have one moment of where it all went wrong. Some of us come from families of loving, stable ancestors, some of us came into divided families, addicted parents, some of us were encouraged to practice piano and complete our homeowrk, some of us were beaten and starved. We enter a world already knotted before we arrived. Our lives are confluences of events, and sometimes, as you follow all the threads, the knot simply becomes more Gordion.
During the stations of cross, I stopped and talked with our friend Jesus, and I stood at his bus stop shelter and held onto each string he was unwinding. There is not a string you can tug at and let it all free. Sometimes, I thought, watching the group walk away from me, carrying the cross, you just have to carry the knot with them. Knowing someone is carrying a knot with you changes the knot—sometimes, it loosens it—so lightly as to be entirely imperceptible.
In our house is a pencil drawing of Our Lady, Undoer of Knots by our friend Gary. I don’t remember when I first began to love Our Lady Undoer of Knots, but it was before I learned that she was a favorite of Pope Francis’ as well. She is a patron of our hospitality, our favorite intercessor for the knots in our own lives, and she embodies what Pope Francis calls for in this Jubilee Year of Mercy.
I thought of this Marian image when, in his papal bull announcing the Jubilee Year of Mercy last May, Pope Francis spoke of a key ingredient for both mercy and hope that has become nearly extinct in the digital age—patience:
Nor is there much place for patience in this age of the Internet, as space and time yield to an ever-present “now”. … A renewed appreciation of the value of patience could only prove beneficial for ourselves and for others.
Creation, Pope Francis said, can teach us, a more natural rhythm of our lives.
Were we still able to contemplate creation with a sense of awe, we might better understand the importance of patience. We could appreciate the changes of the seasons and their harvests, observe the life of animals and their cycles of growth
Hope and patience, Francis said, should remind us that the Christian life is a journey, a pilgrimage. “Setting out on a journey is traditionally associated with our human quest for meaning in life. A pilgrimage on foot is a great aid for rediscovering the value of silence, effort and simplicity of life,” he wrote.
In the internet age, we do not have patience for the knots. Our impatience with knots mean we want those with knotty lives far from us: we keep the poor away from us, we do not want to live among them. We do not want their problems to be ours. We don’t want to carry those knots, because we fear we will get caught in them with them: it seems, so often, like the knots will paralyze us. They are too large, too tangled, too tight.
This is why, Pope Francis has emphasized, the Jubilee Year of Mercy has a theme: hope. We are pilgrims of hope. We have hope that the knots will all one day be undone. Our hope is larger than our own abilities, our own cleverness to get to the end of the firs thread. Our Lady, Undoer of Knots reminds us that their problems, our problems—they all rest in her.
I will admit, I did not pay much attention when Pope Francis’ autobiography Hope came out in January. But our pastor, after we had informed him that Pope Francis had died that morning, preached about Francis’ autobiography in his Easter Monday homily. Pope Francis was a true believer in the Resurrection, he said, because he was an apostle of hope. Francis’ hope is the hope of the Christian: it rests in the fact that the tomb was empty but heaven is not.
Pope Francis had originally intended the book to come out after his death, but had pushed forward publication due to the Jubilee Year and the absolutely hopeless state of the world. We are in desperate need of hope, and Francis, as he so often has, knew how to respond in a way that bolsters our spiritual dignity and promotes our formation as Christians. In some regards, I feel as though he approached the papacy with his best novice master foot forward: he knew how to form disciples and encourage a spiritual maturity and responsibility for our own faith.
I appreciate and support all those who are skeptical of instant efforts to canonize popes instantly. I would not want to be pope—and neither did Pope Francis. "Anyone who wants to be pope doesn't care much for themselves. God doesn't bless them," he said to a group of Jesuit students, according to a 2013 article in the Guardian. "I didn't want to be pope."
That is a screamingly funny line. But it also possesses great insight: to desire the papacy—to see in it only the power and not the responsibility—would indicate a great carelessness about one’s own soul. Bishops are responsible for their flock, they are also responsible for the actions of their presbyters and those who assist them. A passing acquaintance with the state of the Vatican, the state of a hierarchy embroiled in sexual scandals and financial fraud across the world, would cause a mature soul great distress at the thought of taking spiritual headship of such an institution. As Matthew 18 puts it:
Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it is better for him that a heavy millstone be hung around his neck, and that he be drowned in the depths of the sea. […] For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to the person through whom the stumbling block comes!
So with caveat that one can be holy while also not being above critique, I find that the general outpouring of commemorations of Francis throughout the world reminds me of our natural response to holiness: love.
I felt that same surge of love in response to Francis that first night in St. Peter’s Square. The first “act of journalism” I ever committed was attending Pope Benedict’s resignation at the end of February, 2013 and then the subsequent conclave in mid-March. I reported on the activities for a Catholic newspaper in Minneapolis and for our Notre Dame student magazine the Scholastic.
Being in that square was exciting, alive, full of meaning and excitement, as Papa Francesco introduced himself to the world with his emblematic and meme-abile small wave. “Pray for me,” he said. And who wouldn’t? "Thank you so much for your welcome," he said.
As I remember these moments—resignation, sede vacante, conclave, welcome—I also remember the question they raised: what was this all for? As I wrote at the time, I had the distinct impression that these events in Rome only mattered because of the wider church out there. This leader—the servant of the servants of God—mattered because of those Christians on the peripheries, far away, who might never come to Rome. It mattered, not for the sake of perpetuating Rome’s own wealth or grandeur or glory, but because woman wanted to be baptized in the Amazon and children needed the Eucharist in Iowa.
Already, I think, in that square, I felt the spirit of synodality that became the consistent theme of Pope Francis’ pontificate. Perhaps, even from those first moments, Pope Francis was communicating what he embodied: a desire for a church that was field hospital, that was “out in the streets,” that was personalist, that was listening, that was accompanying the people suffering from the very large knots that they carried. That was with them on the journey, on the pilgrimage to the Father.
Catholics love to call priests “father,” but I am wary of titles beyond the canonical title of ordination: reverend. Father is more than a title, it is a word that means something. Spiritual fatherhood and motherhood are also precious and they mean something. Spiritual fatherhood is something that one must live up to by seeking one’s own holiness and facilitating the spiritual responsibility of those under your care. Much like Francis’ fear of the papacy, I would think most priests would shudder at the thought of being called father: are they living up to that great call to become holy as the heavenly father is holy? Are they living up to the responsibility of fostering the growth in holiness of those they are leading?
Education, Emmanuel Mounier says in A Personalist Manifesto, “like every influence in the life of the adult, comes from the guiding inspiration of some authority whose teaching is progressively interiorized by the subject who receives it.”
We have many bad, malformed teachers, many authorities who we would be wise to not interiorize. We have many instructors who, if we emulate, we will not find ourselves formed into the image of Christ, but, as C.S. Lewis calls it, crooked, misshapen.
Someone like Francis is worthy of that title of father: he is a papa, a pope, a shepherd who smells like his sheep and whose life is about guiding them to the greener pastures; someone whose holiness and goodness has been a guide to me and many others from the moment he stepped out onto that balcony.
How rare, how precious are those teachers like Francis who we can rely on to lead us to Christ, who tirelessly practice conversion, turning from their own sins, their own small way of seeing things, to see with the eyes of love that are God’s, and to live with the love that is Christ’s.
At the passing of great teachers like Francis I always think of the words of Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) at the funeral of Von Balthasar: we shall miss him. We shall be in need of him and seek for him, but he will not be there. The passing of great minds and great hearts is a great loss to those of us still here on the long pilgrimage of hope. Our consolation is, of course, that Francis has left behind so much goodness, so much teaching, so much wisdom for us to read, to learn from, to lean on, to continue to dwell with, even as he has returned to God. By their fruits ye shall know them, and may we become that good fruit.
Sweet Unrest in the Streets
Giving Up Screens for Lent - Iowa Catholic Radio
For my monthly segment on Bo Bonner’s morning show, I spoke with two Catholics who gave up social media for Lent—and how their fasts went a little bit better than mine!
Remembering Pope Francis - Catholic Artist Connection
I wrote more about Pope Francis for Catholic Artist Connection. Catholic Artist Connection has taken Pope Francis’ call in Joy of the Gospel seriously to build upon “the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new ‘language of parables,’” as he wrote in §167. “We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty which may mean little to the evangelizers, yet prove particularly attractive for others.” The Art and Synodality project which we launched with Discerning Deacons in the summer of 2023 encapsulates these new signs, new symbols, and new flesh. In meditating on Pope Francis’ death in the first moments, I thought of so many of the beautiful words of Resurrection we had read during the Triduum:
Paul’s electric words to the Romans, which we read at the Easter Vigil just two nights before, sprang to my mind:
“If, then, we have died with Christ,
we believe that we shall also live with him.”What words could better encapsulate the mystery of the death of a servant of the servants of God, shepherd to the Risen Body of Christ on earth than the words we have been passing down for the two millennia years since Paul wrote his letter?
Catholic Workers Remember Pope Francis - Roundtable
Jerry Windley-Daoust and I found what Catholic Workers were saying in response to Pope Francis’ death and compiled it all for you here at Roundtable’s CW Reads newsletter (you can subscribe to the newsletter here):
Many Catholic Workers who often—literally—smell like the sheep, admired this pope of the ecclesial field hospital before he named Dorothy Day as one of the four Americans to emulate in his address to Congress in 2015. And after that exhilarating moment, many saw in him an ally in making a people of God that embraced Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s personalism, hospitality, pacificism, and poverty.