Home / News & Publications / Michigan Catholic News / 2008 / Fr. Bodo: Mystics 'prove that God continues ... to cherish us'
Fr. Bodo: Mystics 'prove that God continues ... to cherish us'
by Marylynn G. Hewitt, SFO of The Michigan Catholic
Published March 28, 2008
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Fr. Jack Wintz, OFM
The latest book by Franciscan Fr. Murray Bodo, shown in front of St. Francis Basilica in Assisi in 2006, is titled "Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God." |
Detroit – Franciscan Fr. Murray Bodo admits he's been interested in the mystics since he was about 14 years old and was in seminary high school. "Now I sound like a little geek," he quips.
He read about them throughout his years in seminary and through what he says was his own eight-year "dark night of the soul" starting "on the day I put on the Franciscan habit until almost the day I was ordained. I had to live purely on faith" through those times, he recalls. Reading of the mystics at that time, "made them very compatible. I always loved to read them — but I was very afraid of them."
Mystics, which is not a title given by the Church in the same way saints or doctors are, "have been given a voice or vision from God in a very special way," Fr. Bodo, 70, says. "A mystic is one who experiences, in an extraordinary way, the love of God. It's not something you can merit. It's something that God chooses completely, gratuitously."
His latest book, "Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God," explores the lives of those such as St. Francis of Assisi, St. John of the Cross and St. Therese of Lisieux as well as others who are less-known such as: Jacopone da Todi, "very well known among Franciscans as our greatest poet"; Fr. Gerald Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit poet who died in 1889; and Simone Weil, whom Fr. Bodo calls, "an agnostic Jewish intellectual, a real know it all." He delves into the impact this gift from God had on five men and five women, starting with St. Mary, whom he calls "the mother of mystics," through poet Robert Lax, who died in 2000 and was a friend of Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton.
The mystics "were always, for me, a little proof that God still intervenes in peoples' lives in a very intimate way. That God breaks through special people of His choice and they have an intimacy with God. It's the same one we all have but don't see," says the author of a number of books — including the well-known "Francis: The Journey and the Dream."
His appreciation for mystics grew in a new way after being asked by St. Anthony Messenger Press to write a book on mystics.
"It was a great joy for me to read these people and explore them and become acquainted with them on a different level than I had before," he says. "Writing always forces you to become more engaged in the people … Even St. Francis! I thought I could never write one more word about him after writing about him for 32 years. But when I looked at him from this perspective, things came out that I hadn't realized before."
Of those included, he maintains that Julian of Norwich is his favorite. During a five-hour span on May 8, 1373, the 31-year-old woman received 15 revelations. Another one followed the next evening. Julian became an anchoress, what would now be considered a hermit, and lived in a small cell next to a church. Following either a Requiem Mass or Mass of the Holy Spirit, she went through the ceremony for "entombment," much like a burial service, and spent 20 years in the cell where she wrote, could look through a small window in the church to hear and see Mass, and gave spiritual instruction.
Fr. Bodo's introduction to her came while he was at the airport in Rome on Dec. 27, 1985, when there was a terrorist attack on TWA. "It was pandemonium with people running screaming and mayhem. I saw a lady sitting on her suitcase reading. I went over and asked, 'What are you reading?' She was a British woman and she said, 'I'm reading of Lady Julian of course. Whatever would you read in these circumstances?'" He knew then that he had to check her out.
Not all the mystics included are saints – or even on their way to sainthood. Weil is a case in point. She's included because "I wanted to pick someone atypical. She has everything wrong with her. She's a complete psychotic, anorexic and every other thing. But God doesn't choose perfect people. God chooses people who love. She had a tremendous capacity to love the poor. She was a hard nut to crack."
Weil, though never baptized Catholic, "had a longing her whole life. She suffered so much with terrific migraine headaches. She saw affliction and suffering as God's entrance into our lives." And her compassion showed at an early age when she refused offerings of sugar because the soldiers didn't have access to it.
One may be appropriately concerned learning that someone has heard voices and has had visions. Fr. Bodo says "there's a very fine line between psychosis and the mystical experience. That's the trouble with mysticism and why the Church urges most of us caution." The difference, he says, is that the psychotic is "debilitated by their vision, turned inward and suffering enormously. A mystic's experience liberates them." Many have gone on to found religious orders such as St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila who together founded the Discalced Carmelites and St. Francis, who founded the Franciscans.
Mystics are as relevant today as they ever were, he insists. "For one thing, they show us that our lives as Christians are basically living out of the baptism and divine mysteries of our lives — even though we don't see into the depth of those mysteries.
"They give birth to Christ in the actions of their lives, in charity and in love.
"They prove that God continues to communicate with us in our own time, to love us, to cherish us."
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