Working as a friar in Bolivia, we get a three-month vacation every three years. These are the places I visited during my triennial vacation in 2009. I traveled around the Northeast, took trains cross country, visited Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Tucson among other cities, and just generally had fun visiting places and people.

This story "The Language of the Soul's Night" is from Eloi Leclerc's The Canticle of Creatures (now out of print) as quoted in St. Francis and the Foolishness of God by Marie Dennis, Joe Nangle, OFM, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda and Stuart Taylor. I read this story every Oct. 4, the feastday of St. Francis of Assisi, to remind myself that Francis is more than the "saint of the birdbath" and what it means for me to be a Franciscan.

Before I joined the friars, I was a member of the St. Anthony of Nagasaki Secular Franciscan Fraternity in Washington, D.C., and as a member of that Fraternity I learned the story of the 26 catholics martyred in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1597. Twenty-three were Franciscans (six friars and 17 secular Franciscans) and three were Jesuits.

I had the opportunity to visit the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of a nuclear bomb on that city. While there, we visited the site where the martyrs were killed and were able to have a mass in the chapel next to the monument. Just as we began to pray the Agnus Dei, the sirens sounded to mark the exact moment that the bomb had been exploded fifty years before.