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    Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from St. Francis
    Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from St. Francis
    Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from St. Francis
    Ebook143 pages2 hours

    Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from St. Francis

    By Murray Bodo

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    About this ebook

    In his newest book, Fr. Murray Bodo, OFM, brings to life seven teachings from the life and writings of St. Francis of Assisi in the prayerful, lyrical style his readers will recognize. These seven teachings are both a way and a destination, the way being transformation and the destination being the love of God. St Francis invites us to go on a journey from love through love into love.

    The seven teachings outlined here—plus an eighth teaching on love, the teaching behind all teachings—define a spirituality for our own time that anyone can learn to practice in his or her own life, anyone who has an attitude of reverence for others and for the earth and all of nature, and who acknowledges the existence of a higher power that is beyond what one can perceive with the senses. 

    St. Francis was not a medieval theologian but a teacher of wisdom who used sayings, stories, and rituals to show us how we can allow God to transform our lives. In this, as in everything else, he was following in the footsteps of Jesus, who is the mystery of the fullness of God among us. You, too, can follow in Jesus’ footsteps with these teachings:
    • The First Teaching: The Wonder of the Incarnation
    • The Second Teaching: The Paradox of Evangelical Poverty
    • The Third Teaching: Live the Gospel
    • The Fourth Teaching: Go and Repair God’s House
    • The Fifth Teaching: Making Peace
    • The Sixth Teaching: All Creatures Are Our Brothers and Sisters
    • The Seventh Teaching: The Joy of Humble Praise and Service of God
    • The Teaching of Teachings: Love
    This simple map for living is why St. Francis is still admired today in our fractious and divided world. What he teaches, if lived, brings joy, which is the result of union with God, who lives with us and within all of creation.

    Meditating on these teachings from St. Francis will give you hope; for hope is the grace to imagine a future more positive, more loving, and more joyful than the world we now find ourselves in. As St. Francis used to say to his brothers, “Let us begin to do good, for up to now we have done nothing.” 
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFranciscan Media
    Release dateJul 26, 2019
    ISBN9781632532381
    Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from St. Francis

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      Book preview

      Surrounded by Love - Murray Bodo

      PREFACE

      ONCE, NEARLY EIGHT DECADES AGO NOW, WHEN I felt lost and confused in my burgeoning adolescence, Jesus gave me St. Francis as my brother and friend, and I began to trade my own self-absorption for the adventure of the Holy Quest: the ascent of Mount Subasio on whose eastern side Francis was born and lived his youth in the armed and walled city of Assisi. What I mistook for an immediate ascent of that holy mountain began first with a descent from the high city of Assisi to the plain below where the lepers lived. That metaphor meant that I had to learn the hard way that we have to live in the real world among those who, at times, are not easy to live with at first, but who teach us what loving is really about.

      We have to learn that living on the mountain top of spiritual experiences is an ideal, a dream, and only by first learning to live in peace with those who don’t have the same ideals or who differ from us in other ways, can we hope to ascend the mountain of union with God. That’s what Francis had to do before he could ascend the mystical mountain of La Verna in a wooded area of Tuscany where he received the sacred stigmata of Christ. And that’s what Jesus did when he first descended from heaven to live among us and then ascended into heaven from the Mount of Olives. That going down in order to ascend is what I have learned from St. Francis from the time I left home at an early age to follow in the footsteps of this extraordinary man who walked in the footsteps of Jesus until now so many years after. I put this journey with Francis into a poem, years after I began the journey into God with him.

      FRANCIS SHOWS HOW WE OPEN HEAVEN

      When I was a boy, I thought that heaven

      Must start behind the stars, their lights

      Holes in night that covered God like curtains.

      There had to be a secret cord that drew them,

      Revealing God’s apartments. Saint Francis

      Said an enemy’s hand was creased with

      Codes that told the merest boy how to

      Open God’s bright heaven. The hidden

      Handle was the enemy’s very hand, and

      Hateful eyes were openings to glory. But

      How was I to know what lightless labyrinths

      Those creases trace, how long it takes to

      Travel easy there before the handle turns?¹

      And now, almost seventy years after I began this Quest to rise by going down, I have come to a further understanding of what I have learned from Francis. And as I began to write, his teachings naturally emerged as seven in number, a mystical number of perfection, having all the religious resonance of the seven days of creation and the seven days of re-creation as when Noah sends out a dove from the ark, but it returns having found no dry land to rest upon. He then sends the dove out again; and after seven days the dove returns with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak, a sign that the waters that had covered the earth had receded, and the earth will be renewed.

      In the medieval times of St. Francis, the number seven held a sacred, mystical power, as in the seven cardinal virtues, the seven deadly sins, and, most importantly, the seven sacraments. And in the high point of medieval literature, Dante’s Divine Comedy, there is the seven-storey mountain of purgatory which the imperfect must climb to be purified of the effects of sin and guilt before they can enter paradise. Dante himself could not make that ascent until he had first descended into hell.

      It is not surprising then, that these teachings of St. Francis are seven in number and flow one from another, and all together they outline a spirituality for our own time that anyone can learn to practice in his or her own life, anyone who has an attitude of reverence for others and for Earth and all of nature, and who acknowledges the existence of a higher power that is beyond what one can perceive with the senses. These seven teachings are both a way and a destination, the way being transformation and the destination being the love of God. It is a drama that ends up being a comedy in the sense that The Divine Comedy is a comedy, namely, a story with a happy ending that is union with God for those who make the journey that God has mapped out for us in our creation and transformation into the redeemed child of God we were created to become. It is a journey from love through love into love.

      INTRODUCTION

      IT WAS THE VERY CLOSENESS OF GOD that moved him to the depths of his being. He was no longer alone. God was with him and with the whole world. God was in him and God was in every creature, and all was blessing.

      His name was Francis, the son of Pietro Bernardone, a cloth-merchant, and Lady Pica, his mother, who was of French origin, and they lived in Assisi, Italy in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. He was a man born of wealth, a leader who dreamed of knighthood and who went to war on a high steed only to be brought low to the earth in defeat and imprisonment that marked him with what has been the fate of countless soldiers and prisoners of war throughout the centuries. Some say that mark was what today we call post-traumatic stress, an experience that affected Francis his whole life long until, singing Bring me out of prison, the words of Psalm 142, David’s prayer in a cave, he entered eternity on the high steed of evangelical poverty and intimate union with Jesus Christ, his Lord and Savior.

      It was that very Jesus who became for him, and all his followers, the closeness of God. For Jesus was and is the closeness of God. He is God become one of us, like us in everything but sin. He is the mystery of the incarnation of God, and that mystery was deepened for Francis with the knowledge that this Incarnate God can become present in us through the sacramental grace of the mystery of the Holy Eucharist wherein we eat the body and drink the blood of Christ whose effect is to intensify the indwelling of God in us.

      St. Francis was not a medieval theologian, but a wisdom figure, a teacher of wisdom who used sayings, stories, and rituals to show us how we can allow God to transform our lives. In this, as in everything else, he was following in the footsteps of Jesus, who is the mystery of the fullness of God among us.

      The Wonder of the Incarnation is the first and central teaching that St. Francis left us. And from that core teaching six other teachings cascade: The Paradox of Evangelical Poverty and how it unites us to God and leads to Living the Gospel in our time and place. This living the Gospel leads to how we are to Go and Repair God’s House, and we repair God’s house by Making Peace. Peacemaking leads to the realization that God’s House is All of Creation. These first six teachings all involve a going down in order to rise. Then, in the fullness of time, our living of these teachings are brought to completion in The Joy of Humble Praise and Service of God by embracing and serving all of God’s creatures. This joy, then, accompanies our final rising in a symbolic return to paradise. All seven teachings are rooted in the love of God, and so I have added an eighth chapter, entitled The Teaching of Teachings: Love.

      This simple map for living is why St. Francis is still listened to and followed today in our fractious and divided world. What he teaches, if lived out, brings joy, which is the result of union with God who lives with us and within all of creation. God lives in creation but is also apart from creation as its Creator who existed before the existence of the universe.

      St. Francis’s teachings, then, become both a theology and a way of living. They are a theology that emerges from the concrete, practical choices he made in the effort to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who is the teacher and the embodiment of what it means to live and love in God.

      As St. John says in his First Letter, As for you, the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and so you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, abide in him. (1 John 2:27).

      This Christ, this anointing, is what the teaching of St. Francis is about. Christ is the revelation of God. In a sermon on the Feast of St. Francis in 1255 St. Bonaventure said of his holy father Francis that he was a true teacher because he learned the truth of God’s revelation, gave his whole heart to what was being taught by Christ, and did not forget what he’d been taught because he put what he learned into practice. So, in the end, Francis’s teachings are concretized and made visible in his choices and in his practices, which are the result of hearing and living the truth given him by Christ.

      This book attempts to explore these experiences and these choices of St. Francis and show how they resulted in lessons that when we act upon them today, continue to unfold as counter valences to the negative, immature acting out that has led and continues to lead to the divisions and hatreds that split us apart. The teachings of St. Francis enable us to imagine another future that gives us hope; for hope is the grace to imagine a future more positive, more loving, and more joyful than the world we now find ourselves in. As St. Francis used to say to his brothers, Let us begin to do good, for up to now we have done nothing.

      CHAPTER | one

      FIRST TEACHING

      Jesus Christ is the Fullness of the Incarnation of God

      HIS FATHER PIETRO WAS AWAY FOR MANY months at a time when Francis was a boy. He would be in France buying cloth, and Francis would wait. He would go out to the city gate of San Giacomo and play with his friends there. But that was only a ruse. He was really there in that quarter of the city hoping he would see his father and his retinue riding toward Assisi, the mules loaded down with bolts of cloth. The waiting was long but he had learned to wait because his father would always return.

      But this was different. He was in

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