About three years ago my then four-year-old daughter developed a habit during Sunday Mass of needing to go to the bathroom just as the sermon started. I would take her down to the ladies room in the basement of the church and help her get through the very heavy door. There, she would spend a couple of minutes taking care of business and an additionalten orfifteen minutes washing her hands. I couldnt stick my head through the door to yell Hurry UP! because once when I was about to, I opened the door and saw under the stalls the feet of (presumably) teenaged girls who were down there hiding from Mass with their I-Phones.So each Sunday I had this strange block of time on my hands. Near the bathroom door there was a pillar with cork sides that seemed to be used for posting way-out-of-date community notices. Being utterly desperate for something to read while I was waiting for my daughter, my attention was drawn to a yellowed brochure with a hundred thumb-tack holes in it for the local Third Order (Secular) Franciscan group, whose multi-parish community was based in my parish. I had heard of Secular Franciscans and knew that they were probably a cult of hippies who liked to gather together to hold hands and sing Kumbayah.Clearly this was not a group for me.But my daughters tiny bladder kept leading me to the basement and the brochure, Sunday after Sunday. After I had read it abouttwenty times, I made a Firm Commitment to myself to go to one of their meetings (which were held each third Saturday after the morning Mass). I would see what they were really about, if only for some possible entertainment value.Like many of my Firm Commitments, I blew this one off when the time came and then felt guilty about it....In the meantime, the Holy Spirit kept refilling my daughters bladder at the start of every Mass. (Strangely enough, this habit stopped after I finally went to my first Franciscan meeting.)Feeling guilty as I was, like a good Catholic I decided to punish myself, in this case by reading a biography of St. Francis.St. Francis of Assisi was an interesting person by any standard. I read a scholarly biography of him that was as skeptical as I would have been at some of the more popular miracles attributed to him.But in reading about Francis, I realized that I had a spiritual problem (one of many).I was too much head and too little heart. Francis seemed to have somehow been more integrated. Reading more about him and then about his order, I discovered that the Franciscans had a long, rich, and respectable intellectual tradition (as well as a spiritual one). I finally went to my first meeting and discovered that not only didThird Order Franciscansnot sit around and sing Kumbayah, they werent even a cult full of hippies.The members of the Third Order Secular are not religious in the senseof takingthe kind of vows that priests, nuns, and monks do. Instead, they live in the world. They can be married. (They can also be priests if they are not already in a religious order). They make a profession to devote themselves to the Jesus-centered Gospel life more or less in the manner of St. Francis (insofar as they are able). The profession comes after a systematic formation period that takes two or three years, where one learns in some detail about St. Francis and his female counterpart St. Clare; the traditions and rule of the 800-year-old order itself; and, of course, what it means to commit oneself to leading a Gospel life. The people in the Order are from different walks of life. There is no pressure to join. When I attended my first meeting, I was told that if I had a vocation for it, I would find that working toward the day of profession would flow rather easily and naturally.When it came timefor me to profess, I would already have been in the community for quite a while and would know what I was getting into.They were right. I professed a few weeks ago and the profession ceremony was very beautiful.I am going to write someposts over the next few weeks about what it is like to join a secular religious order (there are a number of them, some ancient and some newer, with different traditions, requirements, and spiritual styles.) I will talk about what its like, what its like for ones family, what the specific intellectual attraction of the Franciscans was for me, and why I think that these kinds of orders might be more important today than ever before.Pace e bene,Unagidon S.F.O.