Finding My ‘Little Portion’

Last year, during a Secular Franciscan formation gathering, participants reflected on what we would call our Portiuncula—our own “Little Portion”. The exercise was creative, especially given our awareness of the Portiuncula being a physical structure from a bygone time although a living symbol of Franciscan history and devotion.

The Portiuncula is one of the three dilapidated chapels that Saint Francis of Assisi repaired in response to Jesus’ voice speaking to him from the San Damiano Cross asking him to “rebuild” His Church which was “falling into ruin.”

The Portiuncula, meaning the “Little Portion”, is dedicated to Our Lady of the Angels and was a gift from the Benedictines to Saint Francis to be used as the motherhouse of the Franciscans. Today, this little chapel stands enclosed within the much larger Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels in Assisi.

Being Led to My Personal Portiuncula

Most formation participants had visited the Portiuncula during their Franciscan pilgrimages, a blessing I sadly do not recall from my own visit to Assisi years ago. I was hoping to come up with something simple to share. However, as I reflected, I was unexpectedly drawn into prayer where I experienced a deep sense of gratitude and Divine intimacy.

I recalled my very stressful days in India when I struggled, in the midst of bad health, to keep up with housework and attend to my autistic son’s schooling, therapy and social needs. When we went to Mass, I would pay more attention to my “motor-operated” son than to the Sacrifice taking place at the altar. I yearned to go for Adoration but although my husband and I would take turns to adore so the other could be with the child, I was unable to fully present myself to the Lord. In those year-round summer days, I would run errands in chaotic traffic on a light scooter, wearing a fully enclosed helmet, which seemed to burden my already overwhelmed existence.

Once, at a veritable crossroad of life, I found myself held up for over ten minutes at a traffic intersection. My little son was on the seat behind me, his arms wrapped around me, his sweaty head resting on my back. With the engines of stopped vehicles growling round about, the air hanging heavy with the smell and smog of gasoline, and my heart laden with my many cares, I burst into tears inside my little helmet. I was uncontrollably crying out to Jesus, demanding to know why He had abandoned me.

Suddenly, it was as if I had entered the Tabernacle of the Lord. He was very present to me and I to Him. He turned my claustrophobic conditions into a soothing cloister; I was a hermit in a helmet. I had no idea about Portiuncula at the time, but I had been graced with my own “little portion” of grace.

The Little Poor Man’s Great Attachment

Francis of Assisi, the “Little Poor Man”, is known for his utter detachment to all things worldly. What degree of detachment would cause a man to strip himself naked before his townsfolk and its Bishop and declare before his earthly father and the rest of the town that the Heavenly Father alone was henceforth his father?

Yet, when it came to the Portiuncula, Francis would admonish his friars:

Take care, O sons, that you never leave this place. If they put you out on one side return by the other; for this place is holy, wherein dwell Christ and His Blessed Mother. Here, when we were but few, did the Most High increase our number; here the light of His wisdom illumines the souls of His poor ones.

Was Francis attached to the structure of his favorite chapel? It is erroneous to think that material things per se are evil. For instance, Saint Paul teaches that “the love of money is the root of all evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). Material resources must be used as a means to love people in a manner pleasing to God.

When we take a second look at Francis’ admonition to his friars concerning Portiuncula, we cannot help but notice that the Chapel possessed more than mere sentimental value for Francis. It was the holy ground where the Franciscan Order was founded, where God Himself met with Francis and his brothers, guiding and leading them.

“Detachment is an overwhelming attachment to God,” Mother Angelica once observed, and this was fully true of Saint Francis. He had built himself a hut of straw near the Portiuncula. Similarly, the numerous brothers who joined him, in whichever province they were, stayed in a single poor thatched cell.

The Portiuncula Chapel was their Mother House, the place where the General Chapter of the Franciscans was held. Before one such General Chapter, when Francis was away, the people of Assisi, considering the growth of the Order and the significance of the place that Portiuncula was, erected a large building of stone and mortar for the comfort of the friars.

However, Francis upon his return, got upset with the erection of a new building. He feared his present and future friars would take it as a model for their dwelling instead of the thatched straw hut. He went to the roof, ordering a few friars to join him, and began to tear down the roof. He stopped only when the Commune of Assisi asked him to desist, calling the property theirs. Clearly, Francis’ attachment was not to the Chapel but to the Presence of God there, and he guarded it against anything that would turn it into anything else.

A Step Closer to My “Little Portion”

After unexpectedly meeting the Lord inside my helmet, wearing the protective headgear became akin to entering the “Tent of Meeting” (Exodus 33:7-11) with the Lord. My time on the scooter had become a “hiding place” or a “shelter” (Psalm 31:21), a time for intimacy with Jesus.

When the Israelites were in the wilderness after having marched out of slavery in Egypt, Moses would pitch a tent far outside the camp and would go into this “Tent of Meeting” where God would speak to him face to face. When Moses entered the tent, a pillar of cloud marking God’s presence would descend at the door of the tent.

I however forgot about my own “tent of meeting” after moving my home to the United States, where I did not have to wear a helmet. I forgot about it until the Portiuncula exercise during the formation gathering, that is. Having been reminded of the intimate encounter with the Lord I had earlier experienced, I was deeply moved. As I prayed for the grace to be restored to me, I was blessed with the most powerful conviction to practice wearing my chapel veil as a spiritual discipline.

A helmet is not worn inside a church, and a chapel veil is not worn outside. But the chapel veil as the new “hiding place” became for me a symbol of welcome into God’s Real Presence—a step closer to Him, a leap away from the world.

Inside My “Little Portion”

Since August 2^nd of last year (the Feast of Our Lady of the Angels/Our Lady of Portiuncula), when I decisively started wearing the chapel veil, I never once felt the reluctance I earlier had for wearing it. I found myself within my newfound personal Portiuncula again. Although my parish church has nothing to do with Saint Francis (or so I thought), it dawned on me that day that my favorite stained glass of the Sun and the Moon on the East and West sides of my parish church, reminiscent of Saint Francis’ Canticle of the Sun, did make my parish Franciscan in a way.

Over and over since then, I have experienced the presence of God in every wilderness of life. In challenging times, I was reminded of my several encounters where I had the joy of His presence and assistance. I felt secure in my choices and decisions; I was convicted of my inadequacies and sinfulness and the need for conversion and penance. It was not a spiritual mastery or an arrival as much as it was a deeper awareness of Divine Providence and mercy in the face of my fears and misery.

Just as it was not about the helmet, neither was it about the chapel veil. It was a question of being “set apart” to have a foretaste of our eternal Hiding Place, of the joy of waking up and retiring in His presence, being instructed by Him, and recognizing Him in the midst of temptations and traps posed by the broken world around me. No matter what changed or crumbled about me, or crushed me, I was now in His hands and forever safe.

“The world, and the things that are in it, will one day, like an Arab’s tent, be folded away. There is nothing that endures but God!” said Venerable Fulton Sheen

Readied for a Bedouin’s Journey

Like Moses’ Tent of Meeting, the prototype Tabernacle, and the Portiuncula of the Saint of Assisi, which prepared him and his brothers for the journey, I too was given a personal tabernacle as a sign of God’s presence in my life. In my own spiritual journey, God’s presence came to me through my helmet and the chapel veil, apart from the tabernacle near the altar. What divine humor!

Then, a deeper wilderness encounter awaited me in the form of the COVID-19 epidemic when the real tabernacle was locked into church buildings and Christ was forced to living rooms, parking lots and Zoom meetings. Now Christ seemed to reach out to me in a more radical way—through the mask and through tears.

These days, assisting at Mass is not without eyes soaked with grateful tears and a runny nose to accompany, just the right “masked” mix that would banish me from public worship.

More recently, with instructions given to receive Holy Communion only in the hand, I travel far (on Sundays) to receive Him as worthily as I can. He deserves to be welcomed. I make a Spiritual Communion on other days.

Has He abandoned me again? Or has He turned me into a living monstrance carrying Him? Can I ever be worthy of Him? Yet, what can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:35-39)?

Catholics, stripped first of their sacred space, then of the Sacraments, and pushed to remote means of worship, seem to have been turned first into Protestants and then reduced to a Gnostic lot. Will the Tent that roams the wilderness ever be replaced again by the Temple? Will faith survive? Will the priesthood survive? Will the Church survive? I keep my thoughts secret in the deepest recesses of my heart, resting on His promises.

The One Thing Necessary

Even in my powerlessness, my personhood trapped within the “golden calf” called a mask, and my faith halted outside ornate closed doors, Christ pierces through to stand before me announcing, “Peace be with you” (John 20:19). He is the Tent pitched among us. I must sit at His feet and wait to enter into His court.

While the world around me is beset with making history, I whisper to Him, “Within Your wounds, hide me.”

And when He is sacrificed again, my “little portion” shall be in His opened side. There, I shall hide, like Saint Francis would in the crevice in the rocks at La Verna, where he received the wounds of the Lord.

And He assures me, “You have chosen the better portion. It shall not be taken from you” (Luke 10:42).