🌻 Closing: The Gospel Still Becoming
A Franciscan Clarean Benediction
by Sister Abigail Hester, OFC
💫 The Story That Never Ends
The Gospel of Mark doesn’t close with a period — it ends with a doorway.
It leaves us trembling at the edge of dawn, wondering what to do with the news that Love won’t stay buried.
Every age, every heart, writes its own ending.
Ours is the Franciscan Clarean one — barefoot faith walking through the ruins of empire, singing resurrection songs under a torn-open sky.
Mark began with wilderness and ends with wonder.
In between runs a God who keeps crossing borders: from heaven to earth, clean to unclean, death to life.
That same Spirit now crosses through us — still speaking, still healing, still laughing in holy mischief.
🌿 The Franciscan Clarean Call
We, children of Francis and Clare, take up Mark’s unfinished sentence:
to feed, to forgive, to touch, to tell,
to live as if every person we meet were a gospel yet to be read aloud.
We do not wait for heaven to start;
we plant it in small acts — bread shared, wounds tended, tears honored, laughter redeemed.
The Kingdom of God has no address because it has every address.
🕊 The Final Word Is Love
In Mark’s hurried Greek, the final verb is efobounto — “they were afraid.”
But in Franciscan Clarean grammar, the final verb is agapō — “I love.”
Love stronger than fear.
Love louder than empire.
Love rolling stones, mending nets, scattering seed, and whispering:
“Go back to Galilee. Start again.”
🌞 Benediction
May the Holy Wild lead you into deserts of clarity and gardens of joy.
May you walk with the barefoot Christ who still laughs at death.
May your heart stay soft enough to break and strong enough to heal.
May every breath be your gospel.
And may your life — fragile, fearless, unfinished —
be the continuation of Mark’s good news for the world.
Amen, and amen.
Sister Abigail Hester 
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