God's Love Song: The Vision of Francis and Clare

By Murray Bodo and Susan Saint Sing

The Canticle of the Creatures “is Francis’s love song. It is Franciscan wholeness, for in it is contained the depth of his prayer and of his life in Christ. In its singing he was singing his dying and his rising, for his song was a journey of praise and thanksgiving for his place of origin and his destination, the Most High, All-Powerful, Good Lord.”—Murray Bodo
 
Using St. Francis’s canticle as a framework, Murray Bodo, a Franciscan friar, and Susan Saint Sing, a secular Franciscan, reflect on the vision of Francis and Clare as it has played out over the course of their own lives. Susan’s experiences of healing during trips to Assisi and praying in nature and Murray’s deep understanding of Francis and Clare as poets and mystics come together in a duet that brings God’s love song to life.
 
These deeply personal reflections explore the power of prayer and meditation, the sacredness of all creation, and the pull of sacred places. This meditative, reflective reading experience conveys what a lifetime of Franciscan spirituality looks like and will draw you into exploring your own experience of the vision of Francis and Clare.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Franciscan Media
• Release date: Mar 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781632534651

Book preview

introduction

All Creation Sings God’s Song

The Canticle of the Creatures is the great love song of St. Francis of Assisi. It is a beautiful aria, a poem, and a hymn of thanksgiving that praises God and reveals St. Francis’s profound relationship with God and all of God’s creatures. It is a swan song in the tradition of the troubadours before him that puts lyrics to a life of love.

This book attempts to break open the personal implications of the Canticle of the Creatures for Franciscans today. Like St. Francis, we are all immersed in creating our own canticles, whether or not we ever sing or compose them in words. Every life well lived is a love song, and we hope that the pages of this book makes that real, especially for anyone who chooses to follow St. Francis and St. Clare.

There is much about prayer in these pages because both Francis and Clare were persons of deep prayer; also, the bulk of my knowledge of and connection with Francis and Clare has been through prayer as I write my own life’s canticle.

We hope you, the reader, will begin to see how you are composing your own unique love song to God as you try, as did St. Francis and St. Clare, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, whose life sang the first and perfect love song to God.

—Murray

Our understanding of the Franciscan charism through the experience of emulating St. Francis and St. Clare of Assisi is to have a nearly constant conversation with God that becomes your love song when you cast your cares upon the Lord (see 1 Peter 5:7). Your conversation will be unique, as Francis intended it to be. As he was finishing his own earthly task, he directed his sisters and brothers to do what is yours to do. Peace, creaturehood, and humility are defining attributes. The path of poverty, so crucial for followers of the Poverello, is directed by God and thus is different for each person. Some of us may be wealthy and can directly help the poor; others might be literally poor. And poverty in our society is often more than just financial poverty. St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta once visited Cincinnati. She spoke in the garden of the former Franciscan high school seminary, and Fr. Murray and I were there. She commented that in the United States, one of the richest countries in the world, we suffer from extreme emotional poverty in our loneliness and lack of compassion and care for one another.

The Franciscan charism is in a constant state of transition, but we all sing a love song along the way. Like Francis’s Canticle, each individual verse is unique, but the composition that began in a medieval mode now swells to a heavenly symphony. Our orchestrated harmonies will, we hope, make our listeners’ hearts smile and want to sing along.

—Susan

chapter one

Beginnings

I am sitting in a second-floor alcove, near an open window, reading. Maria Ramirez’s small grocery store is on the floor below, and our rented house is across the unpaved street. It is 1951, and I am fourteen years old, living in Gallup, New Mexico, where I was born.

I am now decades older, sitting at my laptop computer in a hermitage in Florida, trying to imagine what that young reader could possibly be understanding of G.K. Chesterton’s Saint Francis of Assisi. And yet, I open the book to the chapter Le Jongleur de Dieu, and reread the words of these two paragraphs, and while it has taken me a lifetime of research and living the Franciscan life to grasp their fullness, I know that my younger self would have understood and identified with these words:

A jongleur was not the same thing as a troubadour, even if the same man were both a troubadour and a jongleur. More often, I believe, they were separate men as well as separate trades. In many cases, apparently the two men would walk the world together like companions in arms, or rather companions in arts.

The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester; sometimes he was what we should call a juggler…. Sometimes he may have been a tumbler, like that acrobat in the beautiful legend who was called The Tumbler of Our Lady, because he turned head over heels and stood on his head before the image of the Blessed Virgin,… In the ordinary way we would imagine, the troubadour would exalt the company with earnest and solemn strains of love and then the jongleur would do his turn as a sort of comic relief…. Somewhere in that transition from the ambition of the troubadour to the antics of the tumbler is hidden, as under a parable, the truth of St. Francis. Of the two minstrels or entertainers, the jester was presumably the servant or at least the secondary figure. St. Francis really meant what he said when he said that he had found the secret of life in being the servant and the secondary figure.¹

That joyful, tumbling man is the image of St. Francis I had as a youth. Whatever else it was that I found in reading Chesterton as a boy, I remember loving the book and just about every other book about St. Francis that I could get my hands on during my early teenage years. And that journey of words brought me to St. Francis High School Seminary in September of 1951 to begin my pilgrimage to the Franciscan priesthood. The journey continued through a lifetime of teaching and writing and trying to understand this Francis who has inspired me along the way. My image of St. Francis has changed over the years, and those changes have happened in what I now call the sacred places and sacred times of my life. Another way of saying this is that Francis now lives in me as I have lived in him through a lifetime of trying to enter his world, his story, his vision—all the while trying to live, albeit imperfectly, his Rule and Life of the Friars Minor.

The first sacred time and sacred place was my year of novitiate at St. Anthony Friary in Cincinnati, as I prepared to make my temporary vows. This whole year, 1955–1956, was pivotal in clarifying my image of St. Francis. The emphasis now was on the historical Francis. Who was he, when and where did he live, and how did the context of his life shape the figure of the man who emerged in the High Middle Ages as an image of the crucified Christ? In the Middle Ages he was, in fact, called the Mirror of Christ.

Our novice master, Fr. Benno Heidlage, emphasized Christ above all else, and how we Franciscans must come to know Christ. Knowing how bookish I was, and how a lot of 1950s piety had rubbed off onto me, Fr. Benno confiscated my little red volume of St. Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion to Mary and strongly advised me to read nothing that year but the New Testament, which is what I did. And that obedience, of course, focused on Christ rather than on St. Francis, whose identity was nothing compared to Christ, whose whole-hearted disciple St. Francis was. The joy and tumbling of Francis was overshadowed by my preoccupation with understanding what it meant to be a Franciscan follower of Christ. It was Christ that Francis had been tumbling for, Christ whom he was singing and preaching for, and Christ who was the loving Lord and brother whom Francis sought to please and delight. And when I made my temporary profession at the end of my novitiate year, it was Christ and his gospel that I vowed to follow according to Francis: The Rule and Life of the Friars Minor is this: to observe the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ through a life in obedience, without anything of their own, and in chastity.

After the novitiate, we entered Duns Scotus College, a Franciscan, liberal arts, four-year college in Southfield, Michigan, just north of Detroit. In our sophomore year, Fr. Mel Brady, our new master of clerics, introduced us to the work of his brother, the distinguished Franciscan scholar Fr. Ignatius Brady. For our spirituality course, Fr. Mel gave us copies of Ignatius Brady’s notes on the writings and early biographies of St. Francis. Thus began an additional image of St. Francis: the founder of the canonical order to which I belonged and the writer of its testament and rule of life, which I would embrace permanently after my junior year when we made our final vows. This image seemed remote and formal to me. Like a medieval icon, it lacked the beauty and vividness that appealed to my poetic sensibility. It may have been that during my college years, Francis became an academic subject, even though the image created by Francis’s first biographer, Brother Thomas of Celano, was indeed alive and full of love and passion and credibility. It was only much later in life that I rediscovered Thomas of Celano and fell in love with his biographies of Francis: the First Life of St. Francis and The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, which at the time was called his Second Life of St. Francis.

After graduating from Duns Scotus College, we moved on to St. Leonard’s, a four-year theological college in Centerville, Ohio, to prepare us for ordination to the priesthood. During those four years, the image of St. Francis faded and became lifeless, a vague and shapeless abstraction that seemed at times to be almost invisible. As I read of Francis’s reverence and near-adoration for priests, I seemed to be pursuing a goal that would make me a person removed and distant from the singing, tumbling, little poor man of Assisi. Francis was not a priest, although his companion Br. Leo was. But Leo was in a class by himself, remembered not for his priestly vocation but as an