Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations
Week Forty: Franciscan Witness and Practice
Thursday, October 2, 2025
Gospel to Life and Life to Gospel
Michele Dunne is the Executive Director of the Franciscan Action Network, an organization that seeks to embody Franciscan values in their work for justice for the earth and the poor. [1] In a recent issue of CAC’s the Mendicant donor newsletter, Dunne describes her deepening understanding of Franciscan witness:
“From gospel to life and life to gospel” is a phrase from the Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order that puzzled me when I first read it. I felt called to join the Order in 2013, at a time of failure and crisis in my life. [2] As I studied the Rule, I thought I understood “from gospel to life.” I was to read the gospel of Jesus and apply what I found there to how I lived my life. But “life to gospel”? What might that mean?
As I worked on those words from the Rule, those words worked on me over several years. Through his writings and example, St. Francis taught me about living in kinship with all humanity and all creation. My new spiritual path urged me to make time to study more deeply and practice contemplative prayer more consistently.
My new Franciscan path also seemed to break open my heart. Hearing the growing calls for racial and economic justice, care for the earth, and many other issues during 2017–2021, I could no longer ignore them or believe they didn’t concern me. As I stepped out of my comfort zone to show solidarity—sometimes accepting legal or safety risks in doing so—certain scriptural passages glowed for me in a new way, resonating with my real-life experiences of activism and advocacy.
For example, while I had always understood Jesus’s teaching to “take up your cross and follow me” simply as a call to bear patiently with the suffering inherent in daily life, I came to a totally different understanding after a long, frigid day spent at a climate protest in December 2019. Rereading the story (in Mark 8, Matthew 16, and Luke 9) at the urging of my friend and teacher the Rev. John Dear, I suddenly understood that Jesus was not speaking about patience with everyday suffering. As he faced escalating pressure—including from his friends—to stop speaking out against injustice, Jesus made it crystal clear that following him would require self-sacrifice, inconvenience, and possibly danger. How could I have missed that before? Maybe this new way of hearing was what “life to gospel” meant.
The Franciscan path keeps the challenges coming but also supplies companions for the way. In 2021, I left a longtime career to join the Franciscan Action Network, where we are building an intergenerational movement for justice, peace, and creation rooted in the gospel and the examples of St. Francis and St. Clare. Our dozens of Franciscan Justice Circles across the country meet monthly in small groups, where we pray and take action together, discovering over and over again what it means to go from gospel to life and life to gospel.
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