Anthony M. Carrozzo, OFM, "Love Reigns"
It all started with John the Baptist when he preached proclaiming, the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and hear the gospel. We have heard it so often that we pay little attention to it. Considering it, though, we ponder its meaning. Take for example the word gospel. Our first thought would be that we better reach for our New Testaments. But what did John’s listeners hear? At least some must have been puzzled while others may have had some inkling of its meaning: John has some good news to share. And it was not Repent because that was difficult. All conversion is. So that was anything but the good new. So what could he mean when he says The Kingdom of God is at hand?
We are still asking the same question, often settling for an insufficient answer rather than a well thought out one. It is not what we think of when we hear the word word Kingdom is invoked. For us to discover a right response we must pay attention to the Lord’s Prayer: thy kingdom come, thy will be done. The kingdom is intrinsically related to the will of God. The Father did not send His Son to establish another earthly kingdom. Jesus Himself tells us my Kingdom is not of this world. It is significantly different even though we as Church often make it of this world.
I remember in 1969, only three years after I was ordained, reading Richard McBrien’s revolutionary book Do We Need the Church? A no brainer! Of course we need the church. By the end of my reading, however, I agreed with his conclusion: No, we do not need the church suggesting that it is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Its purpose is to prepare for the fullness of the Kingdom. As church we are often in self-preservation mode so we do all we can to preserve it because church and kingdom were seen to be identical. They are not. The church exists to lead us to the fullness of the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus.
Franciscans are not called to be servants of the church though we often serve it so that it will lead us to the Kingdom. We are called, as our Rule tells us, to live the holy gospel. The good news that Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of God which is here but not yet in its fullness. But if it is here where will we find it?
It was then that I discovered When We Talk to God by the poet Sharla Stevens. She is a black woman writing for black women. This did not deter me because she has much to say to me and all Franciscans about our inheritance of the kingdom of God.
She observes:
Being a sheep under the care of fear meant knowing, always, that I am prey. Step out of line and be devoured. I didn’t want to talk much to this God I feared, though I wanted God’s mercy. I devoted myself to rule-following and staying in line—being “good.”
At first glance it is difficult to grasp her phrase the care of fear. To be cared for is opposed to fear but the poet is expressing her experience of being placed in foster care only to discover it is a place filled with fear. It may occasionally happen to us when we find ourselves safe only to discover that we should be afraid. We may find ourselves occasionally in such experiences, whether in school or in a work environment or in a hospital. It happens. Initially, we are relieved to find ourselves in a hopeful situation only to find that it did not relieve us rather it led to deeper fear. Prior to our experience with Pope Francis, this may often have even happened to us in our God encounters. We thought we were being cared for by God, but we were also afraid of him. Now we understand the mercy of God and so we sense a relief being in His presence. Before we discover that, however, we may have had the experience of being prey no matter the color of our skin. The kingdoms of this world are filled with such contradictory experiences. We can easily name them.
There is however God’s kingdom breaking into this earthly world. The kingdom is a place of flourishing, healing, worship, joy ... And the Spirit’s activity looked like: good news for the poor, freedom for prisoners, sight for the blind freedom for the oppressed and the year of the Lord’s favor. As Stevens describes those who belong to this Kingdom, she no longer fears God but embraces the Divine by embracing those whom Jesus embraced when He walked among us namely the blind, the deaf, the outcasts, the forgotten, the outsiders, and certainly at this moment in our history dominated by ICE, the immigrants whose experience is so stunningly captured by the poet Susann Donnelly in her poem The Holy Family Meets The Cardinal:
No Angel directed the Haitian Joseph here
Who looks too weary to respond
Even if one had, Mary too is distracted,
Holding a feeding spoon, child on her lap
The tall brown robed man stands over them.
It must be a blessing, so they lower their eyes.
Maybe he can get them an apartment.
Jesus seems the only cheerful one
Seeming with Infant interest and intent
To seize the Cardinal’s big cross.
The poet readily captures today’s events uniting them with evangelical reality. This family on the run is so reminiscent of the holy family, both families experience alienation, and care for one another at the same time. Jesus’s Kingdom, then, is countercultural which is very appealing to Franciscans who also are countercultural by their way of life. Stevens makes yet another challenging observation:
Love is as horrifying as a crucifixion.
Again, a seeming contradiction in terms. Love should neither be horrifying nor reminiscent of the crucifixion It should be a healing experience because love is more than a moral imperative. It is the very nature of God: God is love. It is His identity. We are created in His image and likeness so it is our identity too. It follows then that we accept ourselves as lovable, certainly in the mystical body of Christ but even more fundamentally in ourselves, in our humanity. The call to love others is based on the love of self; love others as you love yourself. If we do not love ourselves, how can we love others?
Ilia Delio pursues this in her provocative article “Love and Political Unity: The Evolutionary Path to Unity” in which she argues that
To grasp reality authentically, we must recognize that love is the structure holding everything together, the force that draws fragments toward unity.
Jesus calls us to this Kingdom of love. Very often when we gather for Mass, we sing All are Welcome. Even as we sing, we know we really do not believe it. There are those we exclude. Think of them, they are the ones who are first in this Kingdom. Echoing The Hound of Heaven in her poem Good News, Stevens observes:
Our gospel is the relentless pursuit of us by Jesus, the King; He wants us in His kingdom and Jesus’ love reigns.
In Poem for the Queer Child from Jesus the Lord addresses this:
I make my home with
Those whom the world
Despises and rejects.
I count your wounds as My
Own.
I love you.
I love you.
I Love you.
Not a love that feels like
Disgust and distance.
Not a love that says
“Change first.”
The poet’s repetition of I love you uniting it to Jesus’s questioning of Peter: do you love me, then feed my sheep. Those excluded from the kingdoms of this world are the very ones who are included in the kingdom of God. Having once been excluded from Eden, we now live in the Kingdom of God.
SOURCES
Ilia Delio, “Love and Political Order; the Evolutionary Path to Unity,” https://christogenesis.org/love-and-political-order-the-evolutionary-path-to-unity/.
Susan Donnelly, “The Holy Family Meets the Cardinal,” Commonweal Magazine (November 25, 2025).
Richard McBrien, Do We Need the Church (Harper & Row, 1969).
Sharifa Steven, When We Talk to God: Prayers and Poems for Black Women (Thomas Nelson, 2025).