In Madagascar, on the high plateau, I saw the friars bent over the red earth. A farm: rice fields, vegetable gardens, a few animals, a small cheese-making facility. The young men in formation worked alongside the older friars, their hands in the soil. They lived partly off the fruits of their work and shared them with the surrounding villages. I saw the same thing in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia: fraternities learning to sustain themselves through their own work, without expecting everything to come from elsewhere.
That scene brought me back to a word from the Testament, which we are rereading in this year of the Transitus: “And I worked with my hands, and I want to work.” Francis does not speak of work as a burden to endure or a punishment to bear, but as a way of being in the world. Bending over the earth, producing bread, sharing it with others: here work becomes grace, a participation in God’s good creation and in the growth of the men and women of our time, especially the smallest and most vulnerable. As I watched those friars, I understood that work keeps us close to the earth and to the real life of people and protects us from the temptation to live above it.
Today, our work is almost always pastoral and educational, and only rarely professional. Yet many friars pursue studies and practice a profession, and small fraternities exist in which some friars work outside the friary, support themselves through their own work, and share the circumstances of ordinary people. This path also has a particular place for the lay brothers. It was a strong impulse in the years around the Second Vatican Council; today it has faded. Perhaps we need to look around us again and ask what this experience still teaches us. Not to set manual or professional work against our pastoral ministry, butwe do not reduce our life to a single model, one that is pastoral and centred on worship.
Minority, a key to our way of living as brothers and of being among people, asks this of us as well: to share in the ordinary struggles of life, to learn from those who work, and to recognise work as a place where God continues to form us. We can share the experiences that already exist in our fraternities, listen to the lay members of our Franciscan Family and to others as well, and find new ways of making work part of our life. Not out of nostalgia for a world that has disappeared, but because work, when lived in this way, evangelises us. It reminds us that bread is earned through effort, and that when we share that effort, it makes us brothers.
I return in my mind to those friars in Madagascar, bent over the red earth. They were doing nothing extraordinary: cultivating, repairing, keeping in order what was needed for daily life. Yet in those simple gestures I recognised something of the Poverello-the Poor Man of Assisi, who wanted to work to the very end and asked the same of his brothers. The work of our hands is not a remnant of a bygone age. It is still an open path for remaining lesser brothers among people, close to that earth which the Canticle calls sister and mother.
Let us learn to work again!