During these troubling times, it can sometimes feel like we do not belong. In being disconnected from our communities and the lives we once knew, it is sometimes easy to believe the lie that we are lost or do not have a home. At a time when it is easy to feel separated, may we open our hearts and minds to be found by God and by others.

Pray

Belonging—
my deepest longing,
but who said
the one sheep wanders?
Maybe it’s the ninety-nine
who sought conformity,
idolizing uniformity,
though diversity thrives
in difference
leaving the one
with no choice
but to find a new flock
on the ridge.
Maybe the story ends
just the same
no less,
when I hear my name
called in the dark
by the Beloved
as I’m tangled
to die in vines.
Great Shepherd,
please find me.
Amen.

Act

When you feel separated or alone today, breathe the last lines of today’s prayer: “Great (inhale) Shepherd (exhale), please (inhale) find (exhale) me (inhale), Amen (exhale).”

For 20 years, this global ministry has combined physical labor and spiritual formation to rebuild lives, communities, and the Church itself. 

Mike Johnson had his own law firm. The house, the jacuzzi, the tennis court. He sat on 13 boards and committees. His dream? To become a judge. That was five years before. Now it was his first day inside El Abra—a maximum-security prison tucked into a valley in the Bolivian Andes. The journey of Brother Mike Johnson, OFM, from successful lawyer to Franciscan friar arose from a pattern in his life: his vocation expanding as he ventured outside his comfort zone. But nothing had stretched him like this. 

El Abra was raw, harsh, the kind of place where the weight of despair settles in the air. “The whole place just felt desolate,” he remembers. “Prisoners were wandering around, looking wasted. I’m guessing many of them were. There wasn’t much else to do back then.” Upon first stepping foot inside El Abra, every fiber within Brother Mike hoped it would be a onetime visit. “If I came back, what was I to do?” he reflects on the feeling of helplessness in a place so heavy with despair. 

But not long into that first visit, an inmate approached him. Brother Mike would later learn this man—Ronald—was one of the most notorious murderers in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He would be killed in El Abra eight years later. “You’re a Franciscan?” Ronald asked, nodding toward the brown habit. Then he revealed a Franciscan tau cross around his own neck. Before losing his way, Ronald had once belonged to a Franciscan parish. 

In that moment, a quiet connection passed between them. A thread of shared identity, fragile but real. “That was your ‘leper moment,’” a friend told him later, referring to the pivotal moment when St. Francis embraced a leper in the valley below Assisi. What began as discomfort grew into a deep calling. What began as presence became participation. Brother Mike returned the next day . . . and the next . . . and every day for months after. From the heart of a Bolivian prison came the seeds for a ministry called St. Francis Builds (SFB). 

The Physical and the Spiritual 

“If I came back, what was I to do?” The answer, Brother Mike discovered, was to build. Inmates gravitated toward him—the personable, outgoing, lawyer-turned-friar who poured his heart into his chaplaincy role at El Abra. One unique aspect of El Abra, and many Bolivian prisons, is that the interior is largely self-governed by the inmates. The guards stay along the perimeter. Inside, it is its own society. 

Brother Mike leaned into this system, inviting inmates to share their ideas: What could they build? What could they sell? What trades did they want to learn? What would make their community stronger? With his legal background, he negotiated with government agencies to approve projects. Funding came largely from friends and generous parishioners at St. Camillus Parish in Maryland, where he served part of the year. 

Together, they built a library with classrooms. They built a metalworking shop, a vehicle repair garage. Local universities invested in experimental farming on the fertile valley soil near El Abra. One inmate made false teeth. Another, jewelry. Another, shoes. One group of 50 inmates secured a contract to make soccer balls. The projects came with one condition: Anyone working in a shop had to teach others. And they did. By the time Brother Mike was asked to return full-time to Maryland, more than 75 percent of the prisoners were working on some kind of project or business. The prison became a model of rehabilitation, even recognized by the Cochabamba government. 

This construction wasn’t just about infrastructure. It was about meaning-making. Inmates serving long sentences, haunted by their pasts, began to rediscover purpose, dignity, and creativity. They worked not only for survival, but for community, for their families, and for the possibility of something new. “It was the happiest five years of my life,” Brother Mike says. “It’s the closest I’ve ever been to God. We were building the whole time. By the end, we had 13 different kinds of workshops.” 

One afternoon, an inmate said to him: “You know, I’ve always been told I was a rat. My family told me that. My friends did. I started to believe it. But you come here every day. You work with us. You eat with us. You treat us like brothers. I’m starting to think maybe I’m not a rat.” “You’re not a rat,” Brother Mike said gently. “Did you do something wrong? Sure. But that doesn’t define who you are—or who you can become.” These weren’t just surface-level exchanges. They were soul-level conversations that happened while building something real. The physical labor opened space for honesty, healing, and deep spiritual and leadership formation. 

Entering the ‘Risk Zone’ 

When Brother Mike was called home to Maryland in 2005, it was difficult. El Abra had been the great adventure of his life. He had fallen in love with the work, with the dreaming and the building, with the people. 

Wanting to continue that spirit of service in mission, he tried a trip with Habitat for Humanity International. While on a Habitat trip to Guatemala, he noticed something familiar: strangers becoming companions through the act of building. But something was missing. The intentional focus on spiritual depth, on inner formation, on sacred reflection—personal development that had emerged so naturally at El Abra—wasn’t quite present. What if he began leading trips that combined the physical act of building with spiritual formation? What if he took the lessons from El Abra around the world? St. Francis Builds was born. 

Unlike some mission trips that center on preaching with words, SFB (StFrancisBuilds.org) flips the script. It asks participants: How is this local culture transforming you? What can you learn from the people you’re serving or those with whom you are serving? How can your physical act of building make way for spiritual connection and formation? Just like El Abra. 

Each trip is preceded by three potlucks for the participants. These are actually “formation sessions” that use the book St. Francis and the Foolishness of God (Orbis Books) as a model for spiritual discovery. These pre-trip gatherings ground the coming physical work in prayer, reflection, and spiritual intention. In these sessions, the group is asked to reflect on what Francis himself had to strip away—and how that stripping opened him to receive what God most wanted to give him. One thing becomes clear: Spiritual growth on the trip will unfold outside one’s comfort zone. This mirrors Brother Mike’s journey, St. Francis of Assisi’s journey, the apostles’ journeys. 

“One of the first activities we do together as a group is talk about the zones of safety,” says longtime volunteer and leader Beth Hood. “The risk zone is the most important one, as that’s where we all grow.” What will participants have stripped as they put their faith into action? And what will they receive in return, simply because their hands are now open? 

‘Church Outside the Walls’ 

Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2025, SFB has completed nearly 60 trips in 11 countries. Its mission is simple but profound: to incarnate the Gospel through hands-on solidarity—building homes, schools, and hope alongside those in need. But more than that, it’s to build relationships, communities, and a deeper awareness of God’s presence in the margins. 

“It’s Church outside the walls,” says Brother Mike. “It’s Church in mission. The motto on every participant’s shirt reads: ‘Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words only if necessary.’” This “Church in mission” has also helped enhance parish life. Beth Hood’s story is an example of that. 

In college, Hood read the writings of Dorothy Day. She served for a semester at the Catholic Worker in New York City, founded by Day and Peter Maurin. She was so inspired by how faith in action brought healing to the world that she converted to Catholicism. She went all in. But Hood found it difficult to find this same kind of community in parish life as she entered adulthood. She was confronted with the impersonal aspects of American Catholicism. Her spiritual life felt stagnant. 

Then came SFB and the opportunity to go on one of its first trips to Guatemala. “That first trip completely realigned the trajectory of my life,” Hood reflects. “The social action piece is essential for me and a lot of Catholics to feel integrated within ourselves.” After Guatemala, Hood was hooked. Over the next two decades, she would go on over 30 trips with the organization. “That’s 90 potlucks,” she laughs. 

The architecture of SFB serves as a major asset to parishes that can sometimes struggle with equipping their parishioners to both take their faith deeper and become more connected in their parish communities. “These trips are about action, contemplation, and community,” she says. “I think this is a great ministry for a parish because it brings people together: People who they see at Mass all the time but have never really talked to—now they’re spending a week together serving others and sharing personal things about their lives. When you return home . . . you want to stay in relationship with these people, and so [people] often turn to other Church ministries to stay in connection.” SFB has rebuilt homes in US communities affected by poverty and natural disasters, including seven missions to Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria. In the past 18 months alone, it’s built seven schools in Oaxaca, Mexico. 

Hood has no shortage of stories. She has witnessed celebrations in small Mexican villages after SFB completed the building of a school. She has been on Native American reservations and seen an 88-year-old SFB volunteer connect with a tribal leader and learn that they fought in the same battle in the Korean War. She has seen young people enter the trip self-conscious and insecure and emerge as leaders. She has seen volunteers awaken to how their gifts and talents can be used in practical ways, like hydroponic gardening being established at worksites in Puerto Rico and Jamaica. 

Over the past 10 years, lay leaders like Hood have taken on key roles in shaping and sustaining the ministry. The ministry has welcomed over 1,000 volunteers and is now led by multiple teams of lay leaders. “Every group we take is multigenerational and multicultural,” Brother Mike shares. 

“It’s a beautiful thing to witness—people stepping outside their comfort zones, encountering those who are different, and forming real community. Everyone has a ‘leper’—someone or something they struggle to approach. These trips give people the chance to name that, face it, and maybe even embrace it.” 

Full Circle 

When SFB launched 20 years ago, Brother Mike returned to El Abra with one of the first groups. It would be eight more years before his pastoral duties would allow another visit. He worried the work they had done might have faded. But when he arrived, nearly everything was still running. 

Only the farm had changed—replaced by an evangelical church. But the rest? Still alive. Still functioning. In fact, 100 percent of the inmates were either studying or working. They had built on what they started. “The guys there were so proud to show the group everything they had built,” he says. “It still represented who their community could be.” 

Brother Mike can trace the arc of his faith and vocation through a series of yeses that pulled him outside his comfort zone. His first ministry was an AIDS outreach program he reluctantly joined just to get a priest off his back. But there, he experienced the quiet holiness of simply being with people in their pain. From there came retreats. Then pastoral planning, parish council, and eventually, religious life. 

He hadn’t wanted to go to Bolivia either. “I was hoping for somewhere they spoke English, and maybe near Cancun!” he laughs. Instead, he landed in the last place he wanted to be. And it changed his life. “The older I get,” he reflects, “I realize there is nothing that is random.” Now, two decades later, he sees what God was doing all along. Every block laid, every community formed, every hand extended across cultures and comfort zones—it was never just about buildings. It was about becoming. About building the Church not only with stone, but with people who are awake to grace. 

“God builds on the lessons learned in our earlier stages—and invites us to keep building,” Brother Mike says. “In the trenches of life, on the edges of comfort, with mortar in our hands and hope in our hearts, we’re always becoming.” 

In Ephesians 2:19-22, the Apostle Paul wrote, “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” In these bizarre times where the pandemic has forced most churches to limit their congregations to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, may we remember that we are still the Church—mystically connected to God and to one another—not dependent upon a building to meet on Sundays. Of course, we miss gathering together, but maybe this is an opportunity to awaken to who we are, and who we’ve always been, as the Body of Christ.

Pray

The Bride of Christ—
forced to close its doors
to serve in days
of isolation,
a reminder to us
that the Church
was never a building
to begin with—
residing instead
within ourselves,
the fullness
of divine expression,
in the temple
that is our souls.
Help us become
who we are—
even without homilies
and incense,
stained glass
and Sunday greetings,
and cultivate communion still:
to humbly break bread
and receive,
to drink the same cup
and believe we are one,
despite our differences
in an age
where division defines—
but not with us,
your Church,
your bride.
We are one.
We are yours.
We gather
at your table.

Act

What can you do today to cultivate your connectedness with other members of the Body of Christ? Pray a line or two that resonated for you from this prayer every time you begin to feel isolated and disconnected.

—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Contemplating the Nature of the Universe“
by Stephen Copeland

Let yourself pray without asking God for “something that I want.” As the Father told Jesus in John 17:10: “Everything of mine is yours and everything of yours is mine.” Might this also be true of us, whom Christ lives within? 

—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “Let Us Pray: Presence and Surrender“
by Stephen Copeland

Between the 12th and 14th centuries, the Christian heresy of Catharism gained momentum in northern Italy and southern France. Like the heresy of gnosticism in the first few centuries, Cathars were dualists who believed reality consisted of two opposing cosmic forces. The spiritual realm (like the soul and the heavens) was good while the material realm (like the body and world) was corrupt and inherently evil.

St. Anthony of Padua faced daily challenges with the Cathars when he was assigned to preach in southern France from 1224-1227, as Father Pat McCloskey, OFM, points out. St. Anthony’s skilled preaching in combatting the Cathar heresy would earn him the nickname “Hammer of the Heretics.” As preachers like St. Anthony demonstrated, heresies like Catharism that demonize material reality simply did not compute with Church teaching or the ethos of the Franciscan movement which invites prayerful gaze upon creation as a source of divine beauty. Creation, as St. Bonaventure would note, contained divine vestiges (or “footprints”) that can lead the soul into contemplation toward union with God.

So, what does any of this have to do with today? The medieval heresy of Catharism may have been buried in the past by, yes, Church-sanctioned military crusades, as well as convincing preachers like St. Anthony, but if I’m honest with myself, this failure to see beauty in the material realm has taken on different forms in my own life.

During my years in conservative evangelicalism there was such an emphasis on salvation and the afterlife that it fostered a certain blindness to how God could be experienced in the here and now: through friends and family, through creation, through work, through play, through music and art and even sports. In this form of spirituality, the body could not be trusted; thus, neither could our hearts and minds, our emotions and our thoughts, all these human aspects that, sure, were not without brokenness but were also fundamental portals to divine beauty. During my years in progressive Christianity, that evangelical emphasis on salvation was simply replaced by “justice”: our material reality was doomed until this politician was in office or this initiative was achieved. In a sense, the material realm of America was portrayed as corrupt and inherently evil. But writing off a person as evil or ignorant who voted differently from me was its own self-centered theological disposition: divine beauty only radiates from an individual if they align with my worldview and politics. That’s a small conception of beauty, of grace, of God.

To be clear, I think that both conservative and progressive camps within the broader Christian church can emphasize important doctrines and actions that add to the beautiful diversity of Christianity. But, like the Cathars, when one believes they have “insider knowledge” to ultimate truth, this can cultivate a dualistic view of people and the world: one of “goodies” and “baddies,” one that blinds us from experiencing divine beauty where we may least expect it. St. Francis of Assisi modeled an openness to divine beauty taking on unexpected forms in his relationships with lepers, with Sultan Malik al-Kamil, and with creation.

Cathar-like dualism can take on its own dimension in my personal life as well. With a 1-year-old and 3-year-old, my wife and I are in the thick of parenting (and exhaustion). Yes, it is beautiful. But it is also maddening. It is the most challenging thing I’ve ever done and, as I’ve told my wife, not a natural skillset for me. There are many days when I find myself coasting to the finish line, self-medicating just to get to bedtime. I should be creating or writing, I think to myself as I explain multiple times in multiple ways to my 3-year-old about why he can’t have ice cream for dinner. As exhaustion settles, all I’m craving is Netflix in bed with a bourbon: get me out of this hell into what I’ve defined as heaven. Human, perhaps. Integrative, no. Not unlike the Cathar heresy, this mode of being can become its own form of escapism where reality is parsed into good and bad. There are tear-filled eyes before me that long to be seen with compassion and grace, even in my umpteenth “no” that he cannot have ice cream.

Many times I’ve seen my creative and professional life take on a similar dimension. It is easy to think to myself: Once there’s clarity, I’ll be at peace. Once I achieve this thing I’ve been working toward, then I’ll be happy. Once this wrong is acknowledged, I’ll forgive. Yeah, maybe. But creativity is inherently messy and anything involving people is inherently complicated. I think of the great quote from Toni Morrison that Murray Bodo, OFM, often references: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That’s how imagination heals.”

Might there still be vestiges of divine beauty in the messiness?

Of course there are aspects of existence and this dark world that are intrinsically evil and should be named as such. But most things in life, I’ve learned as a creative and now as a father, are beautifully messy, where wheat grows among the weeds, where the transforming power of grace never ceases. It may be worth asking oneself: What am consciously (or unconsciously) labeling as heaven or hell? How are my own labels closing off my soul from experiencing beauty in the here and now?

St. Anthony of Padua, that Hammer of Heretics, serves as a model to me that I am to preach against any dualism within myself that blocks an openness to beauty. And I pray he helps me awaken to a deeper understanding of beauty in this divine-saturated, albeit messy, reality.

Questions for Reflection

✦ What in your life are you consciously or unconsciously labeling as heaven or hell? What would it look like to open your heart to divine beauty in the messiness? Maybe things are difficult at work, but can you remind yourself of the co-workers who you love and can support? Maybe you’re navigating an exhausting phase, but can you open your heart to savoring the beautiful moments along the way?

✦ What dualistic tendency within yourself do you need to preach against? What would you say in this sermon to help open your heart to beauty?