Here’s a question: Where in Post Modern America would a group of men from completely different backgrounds, of varying race and education, eat, work, laugh, cry and pray together, and, on a daily basis, try to make a life for themselves?
The answer: in a religious community.
Little Portion Friary is one of those anomalies of life in America:
Here in the wealthiest part of Long Island, we’ve taken vows of poverty.
In a culture that is obsessed with sex and sexuality, we’ve taken vows of celibacy;.
In the bastion of individualism that is the United States, we are vowed to obedience.
We are Franciscan Brothers in the Episcopal Church—not Roman Catholics—but part of the World-wide Anglican Communion. We are members of a world-wide religious order, The Society of St. Francis.
Little Portion Friary is where we live and work, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s a place YOU can visit and be who YOU are.
We’re a religious house of Christians, but we welcome all people of faith and those who are questioning or simply don’t believe.
We are committed to Christ’s command to love God and our neighbor—this means that if your gay, straight, married, single or divorced, you’re welcome here with the blessing of God.
We follow our Lord Jesus in the way of Saint Francis, the Poor Man of Assisi, so we care for the sixty acres of woodland on which we live, and we freely offer hospitality, regular times of prayer and spiritual direction.
That’s what Little Portion is: It’s a big place for people to gather.
It’s a place where people meet people just like them, or not like them—strangers--and do things like pray, walk, sit, sing, drum and eat. We bring people to community and we give ourselves—our own community--as a model of how it’s done. Sometimes we do it well and sometimes we do it badly, but we always do it.
This is our mission—it says so right in our Rule. We do it because the invisible ties that bind us, those charged force-fields of empathy and love which grow as we’re together—it’s there that God loves us. |
