Mar 11 2019
In Genesis 2, the Lord God declares, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helpmate suited to him” (2:18). Thus man and woman become one flesh by God’s design. The Sacred Scriptures further affirm that the nakedness of the one before the other produces no shame in either. Nevertheless, only a few short verses later, that praiseworthy alliance of two bodies and and two souls will wither under the angry glare of shame and guilt. What happened to the man and the woman that human sexual union — to be numbered among the greater goods that God bestows — should ever after find itself so vulnerable to disgrace and dysfunction? Our speaker, Fr Francisco Nahoe OFMConv, explores the implications of the Genesis narrative for meaningful spiritual and affective growth in the contemporary disciple.
Friar Francisco came to the Franciscans at the age of twenty-two, out of college, where he’d been involved in a campus ministry that provided an exceptionally rich experience of Catholic spirituality and tradition. Since then, he’s served the Church and the Order in California, Costa Rica, Italy, Poland, Massachusetts, Nevada and Vietnam and has ministered in Catholic education, Catholic campus ministry, Franciscan formation, Catholic radio, adult faith formation, parochial ministry, teaching ESL and mission promotion. At present, he preaches mission appeals throughout the western United States. The beauty, dignity and solemnity of the Roman Liturgy well celebrated first led him to join the Order and to seek ordination to the priesthood. Even today he would say that his greatest joy derives from participating in the sacred mysteries. An ethnic Polynesian, Fr Francisco travels frequently to his family’s home on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the South Pacific.