Francis: The Journey and the Dream

By Murray Bodo

In 1972, a young Franciscan friar named Murray Bodo wrote a unique book about the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Francis: The Journey and the Dream offered readers a unique combination of lyrical prose and brief, absorbing vignettes that inspired hundreds of thousands of people all over the world to contemplate the life of the famous saint and see him in a new way.
 
Fifty years and over 200,000 copies later, this book still captivates people everywhere, and Fr. Bodo is still writing about St. Francis and the Franciscan way of life. His poetic style continues to draw readers in, and he himself continues to gaze in wonder at the saint who worked nearly his entire life to rebuild the church. 
 
This special anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Fr. Bodo reflects on a half century spent immersed in the Franciscan way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Franciscan Media
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781632534088

Book preview

Preface to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

I AM STANDING AT MY NONNA’S TABLE CELEBRATING MASS. AT THE consecration I ask everyone to bow their heads and when they do, I drop a single piece of Red Hots candy into the cup to make it change into the blood of Christ. I am five or six years old, and my nonna, my grandmother, is banging the bottom of a pan with a polenta stick as I elevate bread and wine like the priest at church. I’m still doing that, only it’s the real thing at a real altar, and I’ve been a real priest for almost sixty years.

Why I wanted to be a priest so early in my life…why I discovered St. Francis at age thirteen…why I left New Mexico at fourteen to study for the Franciscan priesthood some fifteen hundred miles away in Cincinnati, Ohio…why I persevered in the vocation all these years…why at age thirty-five I was sent to Assisi to write a book about our holy founder, St. Francis of Assisi…why that book is still in print fifty years later…is a mystery and wondrous grace for which I am and will always be grateful. May God’s beautiful names be praised.

When I reread the book to write this preface, I was struck by how consistent has been my vision of St. Francis. The voice I chose to tell the story clarified for me who the Francis I was writing about really was. From 1972 until now, I see Francis as I saw him then, except for the ongoing refinements of the image of Francis that are found in subsequent books, especially in Francis and Jesus and Surrounded by Love.

The source of that consistent vision is simply that, as I wrote, Francis became real for me and not just a heroic, mythical, historical character created by the early brothers and later writers. As I began writing the first chapters, I realized Francis was coming to life on the page. I could see him and hear him as he led me through his story. Nor was this a so-called mystical encounter. It was simply a character on the page coming to life and seeming to have a life of his own apart from me and leading me where I didn’t know he would take me. What I had begun to imagine, suddenly began to move beyond my imagining into someone with his own voice, his own journey, his own dream.

There remain now only a few more words about how profoundly grateful I am for all my readers, not only of this, my first book, but also of all the books God has inspired me to write. I thank God for all of you who have discovered St. Francis and/or Jesus through the Word God has spoken in my simple words, making my poor words rich in God’s Spirit, to the greater glory of God. Amen.

Introducion

The Writing of Francis: The Journey and the Dream

THE WRITING OF FRANCIS: THE JOURNEY AND THE DREAM began with Father Jeremy Harrington, OFM, when he was editor of St. Anthony Messenger. He asked me if I would be willing to write a short life of Saint Francis whose publication would coincide with the American release of the Franco Zeffirelli film, Brother Sun, Sister Moon.

At that time I was teaching English and serving as co-spiritual director with another friar at St. Francis High School Seminary in Cincinnati. I was thirty-five years old and going through a difficult time of burnout, experiencing fainting spells at Mass, finding it difficult to speak in public, and in general feeling my life was unraveling. So I was hesitant to say yes to Father Jeremy’s request, not knowing how I could possibly add one more thing to my schedule of five classes a day, three hours a day of spiritual direction, and helping out on weekends at various parishes.

Father Jeremy sweetened the request by assuring me that I would be released from classes and other responsibilities from March to June, and I would then also have the three summer months to continue writing. It sounded so good that I couldn’t resist, but I needed some assurance that I wouldn’t be at the seminary where the pressure of things to be done, even if I was released from teaching, would inevitably crowd out the writing. So I asked if I could go away to the University of New Hampshire to write in proximity to one of my writing mentors, Donald M. Murray.

Oh, no, Father Jeremy said, you’ll be living in Assisi! Nothing could have been more of a surprise, especially in the early ’70s when going to Assisi was something extraordinary, something you might be allowed to do when you celebrated your twenty-fifth or fiftieth anniversary as a friar. That promise of Assisi sealed the deal for me, and I asked to write a trial chapter to see if it was the kind of thing St. Anthony Messenger Press had in mind.

I vividly remember leaving the seminary on a Saturday morning, the one free morning of the week, and going to Carter’s Restaurant on Winton Road in Cincinnati with fear and trepidation because I didn’t consider myself a prose writer but a poet. Could I do something like this? But, mercifully, as I sat staring at a blank piece of paper, I looked up and saw a young couple in the booth in front of me. I could see the back of the man’s head and the woman’s face. She seemed troubled, and an image came into my mind. I wrote about what I saw, and it became the first chapter I wrote, which is now the chapter entitled, Of Loneliness. Father Jeremy liked it; and before I knew it, I was on a plane crossing the Atlantic asking myself, What were you thinking? You can hardly stand up, you’re emotionally exhausted, and now you’re audaciously thinking you can come back from Assisi with a book about Saint Francis?

But when I arrived in Rome and started traveling by train to Assisi, something happened that made me feel that, as we moved geographically to Umbria, we were also moving chronologically back in time to the Middle Ages. When the train pulled into the new town of St. Mary of the Angels below Assisi and I looked up toward the medieval hill town of Assisi spread out on the side of Mount Subasio, I knew that I had arrived. Where, I wasn’t sure, but it was good.

From the very beginning of the project, the writing started happening every morning as I sat at my desk in St. Anthony Guest House. I felt day after day that someone else was writing what I was in too bad a shape to write. And yet I knew it was my pen scratching across the paper.

To make a long story short, when I finished the book five months later, I didn’t know if it was any good or not, but I knew I was well again, that I had made some kind of inner journey with Francis that had brought me to wholeness. The entire writing process had been a joy, even though, or perhaps because I knew then about half of what I know now about the medieval world. Francis: The Journey and the Dream was written in the humility of sitting patiently at my desk every day and waiting for the words to come.

In the spring of the year that I was writing in Assisi, the Italian version of Franco Zeffirelli’s film premiered in Assisi, and I foolishly went into the Teatro Metastasio, thinking I could just walk in because I was a Franciscan friar. My habit, I thought, was the ticket, which, of course, it was not. The screening of Brother Sun, Sister Moon was by invitation only. But no one asked me to leave, thinking, I’m sure, that I was some kind of Franciscan big shot. Such big shots were there, no doubt, as was the bishop of Assisi and counts and countesses and the usual high society crowd—and Franco Zeffirelli himself and the two main actors, Graham Faulkner and Judi Bowker.

Before the film began, Zeffirelli gave a brief introduction, assuring the bishop of Assisi that he knew that Bishop Guido in the time of Saint Francis was not an obscenely fat prelate who was gnawing on a greasy bone when Francis called and promptly went out and railed against being disturbed at the bishop’s Vespers.

But, Zeffirelli continued, he was not there to try to move the bishop of Assisi and the good friars and others who were there. He was trying to show young people, notably in America, who thought there was only one kind of tripping out, that there are other kinds of trips, especially this incredibly spiritual trip that the young Francis set out upon. The director mentioned further that the opening of the film, at least the Italian version we were to watch, with the towers of San Geminiano seen through the mist, was intended to be a subliminal shot of the New York City skyline.

Zeffirelli must have succeeded because when the film was released, I received a phone call from Linda Goodman, author of Sun Signs, telling me that young people were pouring out of the theaters in Greenwich Village totally turned on to Saint Francis. Would St. Anthony Messenger Press be willing to send her, gratis, five thousand copies of my book to be handed out in the Village when people came out of the theater? St. Anthony Messenger Press would not, but Father Jeremy’s intention of having a book come out around the time of the release of the film had certainly succeeded!

After the screening of the film, the actors came up and took a bow, including Graham Faulkner, a strikingly handsome young man in a velvet suit, who was painfully shy, so much so that when I went to congratulate Zeffirelli, the director asked me if I wouldn’t mind whisking Faulkner out of the theater and staying with him a bit. Zeffirelli worried Faulkner might faint from embarrassment or claustrophobia, brought on by all of the young women surrounding him. In doing so, something must have gotten lost in translation when Zeffirelli talked about the premiere to a radio interviewer, because when I returned to the United States, I had somehow been incorrectly associated with the film itself as a writer-consultant. It provided lots of laughs and theater for about a year afterward.

It was with Francis: The Journey and the Dream that I began to learn the craft of writing long, sustained prose which I came to see was simply writing a number of words a day. No one can write a book at one clip. It’s too daunting. But one can write two or three pages a day. Eventually, if what one is writing is actually working on the page, it becomes a book. I also learned that the process is more satisfying than the product itself is; I delighted in getting up in the morning, and after Mass and breakfast, reading what I had written the day before, then waiting to see what words would flow from the pen (I have always written the first draft of a book with a pen, usually a fountain pen). And I came to love Assisi, a love that has endured for fifty years now, as has the love of writing.

—Murray Bodo, OFM

A Journey of Dreams

HE LAY IN THE GRIP OF HIS LAST FEVER, THE BRIGHT POINTS of pain stabbing into his back, and he knew that this was the beginning of what he had dreamed of so long: Lord, lead my soul out of prison.

Earlier that day his brothers had carried him here to this chapel of Our Lady of the Angels, on the plain below the city. As they made the steep descent from Assisi, Francis had asked them to stop at the leper colony, so that from there he could bless his town for the last time. He was almost blind, but he thought he could see the city stretched out before him like a wide, multicolored tapestry. Perhaps he saw it only with his spirit.

How different the town looked today from what it was that day years before when he had risen from his long illness and staggered about the green hills and found that they no longer lifted his heart. He was only twenty-two years old then. It had been a bright day, and he remembered the roofs catching the sun like quilts of red and pink and white. But their beauty had only depressed him. The heavy spirit of melancholy had him in her grip, and he didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand why.

People who passed the young Francis as he trudged up the long hill had recognized him and congratulated him that he was well again. And he remembered thinking cynically: They are saying to themselves, There’s Pietro’s worthless son. He looks pretty pale, shaky on his feet, too. But why should we worry about it? He’s better off than we’ll ever be. At least he has a future.

If only they had known the emptiness and despair he suffered precisely because he was Pietro Bernardone’s son, precisely because he was rich and famous and well-liked. How terribly boring it all seemed then. And yet somehow when he looked back at the city from the top of Mount Subasio, he was still young enough at twenty-two to believe that some destiny was waiting for him that would make that lovely city proud of him. Where and when the call to destiny waited for him, he did not know, but his deepest suspicion was that he would finally respond to the call of chivalry that plagued him night and day, and become a knight. That had to be where his future

Reviews for Francis

[b22johansen · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book on Francis, although good, was quite predictable. His life was presented in very flowery language that is typical of books written about him. I would consider it a great introduction to the Saint, but for anyone searching to learn something new about Francis, you might want to search elsewhere.