I’m grateful to have been raised in a home and church that taught me about Jesus and the importance of his life, both for our world and for our own lives. I learned about a man who was loving, merciful, and radical in how he treated people. That foundation has stayed with me. But as I grew older, I realized that the way I understood my faith also came with some challenges.
I spent much of my life focused on the past and the future. I worried about what I had done wrong, whether I was right with God, and whether I would ultimately be saved. Looking back, I think I became so focused on avoiding hell and securing my place in heaven that I sometimes missed what Jesus was showing us about how to live here and now. That wasn’t a failure of my family or the people who raised me in faith. It was how I came to understand those teachings, shaped by the culture around me and my own fears.
Encountering Franciscan spirituality gradually changed that for me. It didn’t happen overnight. It was more like kindling slowly catching fire, eventually becoming something that shapes my whole life, work, and ministry.
The Christian contemplative tradition helped me become more present to God and the world around me. Instead of constantly looking backward with regret or forward with fear, I began to understand what it means to participate in the kingdom of heaven here and now. Franciscan spirituality didn’t give me a different Jesus. It helped me see more clearly what it means to follow him.
Over time, I began to see that faith isn’t just about what I believe about Jesus, but how his life shapes my own. The stories I read in Scripture began to take on a different meaning. Jesus’s encounters with the marginalized, his willingness to challenge the powerful, and his insistence on loving even our enemies became more than teachings to understand or ideals to admire. They became invitations to see the world differently and to live differently within it.
The Franciscan understanding of the incarnation, particularly John Duns Scotus’s teaching on the primacy of Christ, was especially transformative for me. I began to understand God becoming human not simply as a response to human sinfulness, but as a revelation of the goodness of being human and of all creation. If God created out of love, then that love is woven into everything God made. Every person carries the image of God (Gen 1:26-27). The earth and its creatures are part of that same creation.
In many ways, this felt less like learning something new and more like remembering something I had always known.
I’ve always been drawn to the idea of unconditional love. But what does it mean to actually believe in it? Saint Paul asserts that nothing (no-thing!) can separate us from the love of God (Rom 8:38-39). If I believe that is true for me, I have to believe it for others, too. Not just the people I like or agree with, but also the people I struggle to understand.
Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:29-31). But that love can’t stop with what happens between God and me. If I want to love God, I have to learn to love what God loves (hint: everything!).
That understanding has shaped how I see community, justice, and our relationship with the earth. My desire to serve people experiencing homelessness isn’t simply about charity. It’s about kinship. I don’t want to look away from the suffering of my brothers and sisters, because their lives are connected to mine. Jesus reminds us that what we do for those who are hungry, marginalized, and in need, we do for him (Matt 25:35-40). The same is true of our nonhuman brothers and sisters and the planet we share.
This sense of kinship also shapes my work with the Franciscan Federation, a community-based organization working to bring Franciscans together as one larger community. We recently created The Piazza, an online space for Franciscans and Franciscan-hearted people to connect, share ideas, and build relationships across the country. I see this as an extension of the same belief that informs my spirituality: we aren’t meant to live out our faith in isolation. We need one another. Creating spaces where people can find connection, learn from one another, and put our shared values into practice is one small way of building the community we hope to see in the world.
This also shapes my work in peacebuilding. Through Braver Angels, we try to build relationships across political differences at a time when it’s easy to see one another as enemies. Loving someone doesn’t mean agreeing with them or excusing harm. It means refusing to reduce them to their beliefs or their worst actions. It means listening, being willing to question my own assumptions, and remembering that another person’s dignity isn’t mine to take away.
None of this comes easily or consistently. I still get caught up in my ego, my attachments, and my desire to be right. Franciscan spirituality continually calls me back to simplicity, humility, and the practice of loving others as God loves them.
In the book of Revelation, we find the promise that God will wipe away every tear, and that death, mourning, crying, and pain will be no more (Rev 21:4). I hold on to that hope. But I also believe it has something to say about how we live today. If we long for a world with less suffering and more peace, we have to participate in creating it, even when our efforts seem small.
I’ve spent much of my life wondering, as Francis did, “Who are you, O God, and who am I?” I don’t have answers to every question about God or the world. But my faith has become less about securing my own future and more about how I live in the present.
I can’t transform the world on my own. But I can keep learning to love, to listen, to care for creation, and to recognize the dignity of those around me. And I believe those small acts matter, especially when we practice them together. ♦
Brady Young is the manager of communications and member engagement for the Franciscan Federation.