Welcome to the Off the Page podcast from Franciscan Media, a podcast that will feature
in-depth conversations with Franciscan authors and artists. My name is Stephen Copeland and I'm
the book editor here at Franciscan Media and today I'll be interviewing Dr. and Reverend
Bruce Eperly, whose new book, Head, Heart and Hands, an introduction to St. Bonaventure,
will be the focus of our conversation. Bruce is widely published within Franciscan Media.
You may recognize his name from Posen Prey, our daily prayers that get emailed to your inbox
every morning, and he is also the author of Walking with Francis of Assisi and Simplicity,
Spirituality and Service. All these books can be purchased in our store at shop.franciscanmedia.org.
A little more about Bruce, he has served as a congregational pastor, university chaplain,
professor and seminary administrator for over 40 years, and he is the author of more than 70 books
on practical theology, ministry and spirituality, healing and wholeness, and process theology.
As you'll hear in our conversation, his own theological diversity, I think, really,
it allows him to make some fascinating connections as he weaves together varying theological voices
and traditions. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation, so without further ado,
here is Bruce Eperly. I thought your introduction to Head, Heart and Hands, your new book, coming
out on May 7th, I thought it was a really wonderful introduction and a great on-ramp to the importance
of theology. And I think it's a really necessary introduction to someone like Bonaventure, who's
extremely complex, at least our modern years. So I figured we'd start off on what is theology
and why is it important to start, that's the title of your introduction.
Well, you know, theology, initially, for me, is just simply loving God with your mind.
You know, that's the, in some sense, the head, and it really can't be disconnected from the
heart and the hands, of course. You know, many people who've become our part of faith traditions,
they don't think of themselves as theologians, but the minute they start thinking about suffering,
or war, or violence, they become theologians. And the job of a theologian is to help people
to try to put their lives in a framework that's going to be healthy for them and the world.
You know, the problem of evil is obviously one of them that is key and people try to figure, well,
where's God in all of this? And of course, the public language is that somehow or other God
caused this, or that you're being punished for your sins, or if you want to move to the new
spiritual movements, you're being punished for your negative thinking. You know, it's always a
danger for a minister or priest to be at a wedding reception. You know, we like everyone else like
to have a drink in an order. And more often than I can imagine, somebody's come up to me at a wedding
reception and begun a discourse about some event that's happened in their lives. Now, I'm just
wanting to have a gin and tonic myself. But when you're a theologian, you're on duty 24 hours a
day. And when you're the person who just performed the wedding, you're on duty until you go home.
And countless times somebody said, now I've had this issue that I'm struggling with a belief in
God. And usually they find out that their their issue is one that I agree with, you know, that God
didn't cause the miscarriage, that God wasn't trying to teach them a lesson. And the theologian
tries to join head and heart in a way that helps us to move on with our lives creatively.
The head isn't everything. And that's one of the keys to Bonaventures and Francis and Claire's
thinking. These people, Francis Bonaventure and Claire, are extremely erudite people with different
kinds of gifts. Bonaventure obviously was the the intellectual in the group. That was how he
he went with things. Francis was much more an ambiance. He was a poet. He was a troubadour.
God's fool. Claire was very incisive. You know, she had a certain sense of let's gaze at the cross.
I mean, let's gaze at the cross. And when you gaze at the cross, the cross is an icon of God's
love for you. I think the theologian has to include all of those. And of course, theology,
as Alfred North Whitehead says, and that all great religions begin with some sort of mystical
experience, you know, whether it be Francis in the chapel, hearing a voice that says, repair my
church, or Alverna experiencing the suffering of God, or himself Bonaventure going to Alverna,
and not experiencing the stigmata, but feeling such an affinity with with Francis that he seems to
be welcomed in to Francis experience. It's a truly, truly mystical experience for Bonaventure.
And, you know, Bonaventure can be read as very dry, but at the same context when you read his
soul's journey to God, or his stories about how to approach the life of Jesus, I mean,
he's he's kin to Ignatius and Loyola. They both, in terms of the life of Jesus, they
they they both want you to be there right watching the scene. They want you to be with the woman who's
who's being accused of adultery. They want you to be among the women at the cross, or if we might
say Mary of Magdalene the garden, because they they saw that theology is not just a
heady experience, but the imaginative experience that you can experience what you're talking about.
I have this little trinity of thinking that I've used in some of my other work, and it's implicit
in the Bonaventure book. I'm trying to remember if I stated explicitly that good theology involves
a vision, a promise, and a practice. The vision is how do we look at the world? You know, what kind
of world do you live in? Is it as Howard Thurman says, is it a world ideally a friendly people
in a friendly universe? That's the prelude to the beloved community, by the way. Is it a world in
which we're going to ever, you know, step on a crack, break your mother's back? There's no grace
whatsoever. Is a world of an authoritarian God that influences authoritarian politics and binary
politics? Is it a God of love that encourages us to be relational in our behaviors? Then I think
good theology is, and this is what at least I believe, and I've been fortunate enough to be,
like Bonaventure, an academic who also went to the hospital to visit dying people who comforted
grieving families. I mean, one of the, you know, Bonaventure is not a heady theologian. He was
at the graveside too. You know, he was in the academic room and in a study, but he also had
to manage an organization and do it ethically. And he also comforted the sick. And the promise is
that you can experience the faith you affirm. And then the practice is how you can help yourself
and others experience it. And interesting enough, the soul's journey to God is really,
has all of those. He talks about how you mount from the visible world to the experience of the
divine and then go back down. I mean, it's really an exegesis or an interpretation. I don't want to
use too many fancy words. It's an interpretation of Jacob's dream of the ladder of angels, you know,
which was often misunderstood by preachers. The angels start on earth. That's something that's
not seen by a lot of readers. And it's the same for Bonaventure. You begin with the senses. You
begin with the meal you just shared. And God's in the senses, God's in the meal. God's right here
with us. And then you have a wider and wider vision. He talks about it in terms of an ascent.
But the ascent never forgets where you come from. And the ascent, the angels go up into heaven,
and then they come back down to earth. And so Bonaventure ascends unto heaven, and then he
tries to keep the order together between the traveling monks and the ones that are like himself,
scholastics, teaching, and congregations. So that's maybe a long answer to a short question,
but I think everyone's an implicit theologian. And we need to reflect on what our theology
means and what kind of God. I think it's Terry Thredheim, the biblical scholar that says it's
more important to ask the question, what kind of God do you believe in than do you believe in God?
Because we see the visions of God being worked out in our attitudes toward immigration or politics
or the Middle East, who's in and who's out, who deserves our ethical consideration, who doesn't.
It matters. Yeah, no, there's a lot there. And you mentioned a couple aspects of Bonaventure. I
think I think this goes to the title of your book, you know, head, heart, and hands. Bonaventure,
as you said, was a scholastic. He was of the institution. And in yet he's inviting us in
many passages to experience the divine through our senses, through the heart, through our hands.
So can you talk a little bit about your title and why that is such an appropriate title for a
theologian like Bonaventure? Well, and I think in part it goes back to his attempt to live out
as a theologian, the spirit of Francis. For Bonaventure, Francis is the perfect Christian,
not necessarily to be repeated at home, as they used to say about on those infomercials,
because Bonaventure didn't repeat it. But in Francis, he saw a person who,
who's faith and experience of God drove him out into the world. I don't want to localize mysticism
in any particular part of a person's life, because I think the religious sense is everywhere.
There's no religious organ in our bodies. It's the organ of the whole being.
I think that for, and although Francis didn't ever claim to be a theologian, he was well studied.
He knew what he was talking about. I think you can be somebody who, let's put it in the 21st
century, you can be a Christian, a follower of Jesus, and I'm not excluding Buddhists and Hindus
and Jews and Muslims and Pagans from this, who is as smart as anyone in the room. Too often,
people of faith have been, and some of it's their own fault, have been the people who are most
frightened by new knowledge and new awareness. Bonaventure, even though he lived a thousand years
ago, his theology is a dynamic theology which would have welcomed new insights.
I'm not as well versed with Anne Selma as I am with Bonaventure, but I think if
Bonaventure had become the theologian of the Western Church, we would be in a very different place.
Bonaventure is in his own way, and I am a person identified with process theology,
so I don't want to read into him what isn't there, but in his own way, his theology is very dynamic.
You can't have a fountain flowing that isn't flowing, and it goes back to old Heraclitus
of some 2,500 years ago. Everything flows. If it's flowing, then it's dynamic, and it's changing,
and it's growing. I think that probably Thayard Deschardin, who's another influence on my life,
would have felt quite comfortable with Bonaventure, and he would have felt comfortable with Thayard.
Theory of evolution, even though he lived long before Darwin and held some
traditional doctrines, as he should have done in the 11th century,
theology grows, come out theology with the head means you come out growing.
The heart, though, I mean, you look at Francis, and again, in many ways, Bonaventure knows he's
not Francis, and he doesn't want to be Francis. He knows his gifts are different,
but when he looks at what the person he'd aspire to be in his relationships, he says,
look at Francis. He didn't write the obviously critical comments about his biography of Francis,
but I find it a darned fair biography. Of course, every biographer has a perspective,
and he was an institutionalist, so you can't avoid that. But his Francis is the one who goes out
and embraces the persons with leprosy. His Francis is the person who schools the birds for talking
during his sermon, but also preaches a sermon to the sparrows. His Francis has the heart,
a little evangelism here of going over and crossing boundaries to visit the Sultan.
Both of them want to convince them, each other, about the rightness of their perspective, I mean,
but Francis keeps in dialogue, and the Sultan, for his, we have to give the Sultan credit to,
welcomes Francis, the heart, the heart. And then, of course, you can't talk about
Francis' confiancy without talking about the hands. After all, even though he may have
over-literalized it, Francis decided he wasn't going to rebuild the chapel at San Damiano and a
couple others. And before he discovered that the chapel he needed to rebuild was the church of
his time. And I believe in the spirit of Pope Francis, it's no longer repair your church,
it's the church of the world we need to repair. Repair the world. That goes, and it's hard not
to connect Francis with the notion of tycoon and Bonaventure as well, that our task is to repair
or heal the earth. And so I think these fit together there holistically. I mean, we all have
our own personalities and things that are our gifts, but the holistic or individuated, to quote
Jung, the whole person theology that has the three food groups or four food groups I grew up in it
with has to have the wisdom to not turn your back on the world. I see Bonaventure
real recognize the ambiguity of science, but he wouldn't be protesting against vaccines.
You know, he might have a word or two to say to Tony Fauci, I live in an NIH neighborhood here and
Potomac and Tony is a saint in our neighborhood, he is a saint to me. He's somebody who's the
product of the best kind of religious education, you know, raised in a Roman Catholic church and
everything he's doing is grounded in his education. That's, you know, the person for others.
I think the hardest that we feel the pain of the world that we don't turn our back on the
the pain of children in Gaza or children in Israel or children in Iran, frankly.
And of course, Bonaventure has the hand of an administrator in trying to resolve differences
in his in the Franciscan order so that it would be around a thousand years later. So there'd be a
Franciscan media. He had no idea that there'd be Franciscan studies in the University of San Diego.
He had no idea of these things would be they'd be publishing books about him. But he knew that
Francis had to be communicated and he needed an institution that was holistic to do so. He didn't
use this language. But when you get the two different groups, the the mendicant priests and this
and the homeward priests, the homebound priests together without or try to unite the western
eastern church, which of course, that's still still a long way to go. And of course, we have,
I'm speaking as a Protestant area, there's more Protestant denomination and sex than you can
shake a stick at. And you know, one, one, one, we decides that April 23rd, we better get to work,
is going to be the next end of the world after after Jesus didn't come on April on April the 8th,
the day of the the eclipse, then there's another 15 days later, Jesus is going to come again.
And of course, Bonaventure would say, Hey, use your minds, people.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I really do think it's a perfect title for him, head, heart and hands,
because he is uniquely integrating all of those and trying to invite readers and people who were,
he was talking to at that time, and sharing theology with into the dynamic aspects of all
three of those aspects of the human person, and what it means to be fully alive in Christ.
Yes. And you mentioned, you mentioned a lot there, but there's one, I want one thing I want you to
go deeper into for the listener. We talked about Bonaventure being a theologian for our time,
and process theology in particular, you brought that up and his met Bonaventure's metaphor of
fountain fullness. Yes, I'd love for you to go deeper into that because for me, at least,
reading him, I mean, that is one of the most dynamic metaphors for God I've ever heard.
And I think I agree with you. I think it does align very much with, even though he wouldn't
have said this, I think it does very much align with process theology and modern discoveries in
science. Yes. And even cross denomination or interreligious, I mean, in some ways, the fountain
is the Dow with an intention. You know, the ever flowing stream of life that has an intention
to it. Or you can see the same and again, I'll point your readers to somebody I just mentioned
to the the movements of evolution toward the what what people like Teyard and Iliadelio would call
the Christ Omega. But the fountain is an interesting image because the fountain is ever flowing.
It doesn't stop. There's no zero sum in the fountain that Bonaventure. There's no God. And
then all of a sudden, God comes to the end of God's work in the universe. The fountain is not
that nobody's going to plug it up. And certainly God isn't going to plug the fountain. And that's
an interesting thing to ponder because many people have the notion that that God has done all
God's going to do, or that God is locked in some primordial vision of how things will be
ever and a non and God can't change the course of it. This fountain is a very intentional
fountain and its aim is to to create the universe out of love. You know, we might,
I haven't done the science here. So we might ponder the fountain flowing into this particular
universe and bringing forth what we call the Big Bang, a little trickle. You know, the Big Bang is
about the size of your your fingernail or smaller, that a little trickle of it comes there. Even though
he was certainly caught in the worldview of his time, he might ponder that God has never not been
a fountain. And initially, the fountain in terms of the way he talked was a fountain of that was
flowing between the persons of the Trinity. That, you know, that you can't separate a drop from the
ocean or a drop from the fountain. So, you know, but each drop is uniquely itself of Father, Son,
Holy Spirit, or as we say more in my denomination, Creator, Christ and and inspire or something like
that. I love that. Yeah. And, you know, and yet the fountain flows into the world. So it's flowing
right through our podcast right now, because if it quit flowing, we'd cease to exist. And yet at
the same time, the fountain is allowing each one of the drops to be a drop of the fountain.
And I don't see any predestination in Bonaventure. I don't see any coercion in terms of this is
determined by God. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I think that he believed in the creativity of the
word, whether it was the word on the page or the word made flesh. And then of course, the fountain
flows through everyone else. You know, this is a fountain that flows everywhere. It is not just,
it's not a canal. It doesn't have a boundary to it. So that fountain is flowing through Gaza,
it's flowing through Jerusalem, it's flowing through Potomac, Maryland, it's flowing through
the inner city, it's flowing through Appalachia, it's flowing through people we love and people we
don't love. And inviting us maybe to realize that the person we don't love is also part of the fountain
as well. And we're connected even if we don't think so. And as dynamic gets forward moving,
again, Bonaventure can't be judged positively or negatively. He's a person of his time in terms
of his cosmology or way of looking at the world. But I do believe that he would feel comfortable
with an evolutionary vision and an evolutionary institution and an evolutionary religion that
that isn't locked into the past. A fountain can't be locked into the past because it's flowing.
I mean, the only fountain that's locked into the past is a fountain that's plugged.
And that doesn't mean that, but all the waters that have flowed through it, which includes the
saints of the church and the good ancestors and the creeds of the past are part of that flow too.
Yeah, that they are not disparaged, nor do they there's an influence cease,
but they are also part of a larger flow. Yeah, I was going to ask you, when we choose to partner
with the flow of the fountain, where would Bonaventure say in your words that it's taking us?
Well, that's a good, you know, what I was thinking. And again, I grew up in the West Coast
and in Santa Cruz area of San Jose, Santa Cruz, California. And of course, I couldn't
help but think of people surfing. But to be honest, you know, I, you know, the surf's up,
so to speak. But I think the flow is to become as large a spirited person as you can be. And the
flow to believe that you are connected. Bill McKibben, the environmentalist makes a, I think,
a very sweet and pithy saying the best thing an individual can do to respond to the global climate
change and environmental crisis is quit being an individual. You cannot be a drop of water by
yourself. You're connected to every other one. And I think that the philosopher Whitehead made
the comment that the religion or the true peace and the true religious sense is to go from self
interest to world loyalty. There's something bigger than us. And we're part of it. And we're
important. I mean, there's no nothing in Bonaventure that would deny the value of the person sitting
in the room and their own uniqueness. But their own uniqueness is connected with every other.
And in a way, he's thinking of, again, of Francis, who struggled obviously with his limitations.
The greatest example was the encounter with the persons with leprosy. That, you know, he,
he like many of us doesn't mind giving them an arm from a distance. Yeah. And he was a very generous
person all his life, even before his revelation at the, you know, and various revelatory experiences.
He was a very generous person. He'd give you that bottle of wine if he had it.
You know, he'd invite you over to the house. He'd give you the tunic off his bath.
But all of a sudden, he realized at the same time he felt a total alienation from the,
from pure persons with leprosy. He was, you know, he's a little bit like the, during the height of
COVID when people were afraid to be walking outside. And, you know, if your neighbor came
out there front stoop, you'd go back in. You know, I remember as just a bit of a side at the time of
of COVID at its height, I was living on Cape Cod. And I'd made that my practice of walking on the
beach almost every morning when rain, rain, shine or snow or ice. And, and, you know, we were so
frightened at first. If I'd see another walker, you know, in the distance, you know, I'd kind of
go over to the other side of the road. I mean, that, you know, breath can kill, breath can kill.
I mean, how much we've learned, but he, God reveals to Francis, that's my child there. And
Francis not only gives him a coin and becomes the saint of persons with leprosy, gives the man a
hug and a kiss. The empathy we are not, umbutu would be a wonderful word here. We are here because
of one another. And the sort of sense that really does matter to me, what happens somewhere else.
The fountain is not zero sum. That the more I go with the flow of God's grace, the more grace
there is for others. And even though Bonaventure wouldn't explicitly say this, someone like Francis
and us adds to the value of life and what God can do in the world
by our own alignment with God's vision. Yeah, I think it's such a profound quote. The fountain is
not zero sum. And I think it's important to consider that today, because so much of the world's games,
especially, you know, moving into an election year, and so much is zero sum, and it's either or.
And it's, you know, you, it's like we are blind in many ways to the fountain that's flowing in our
midst. Yes. Yes. When we slip into those kinds of games, would you agree? Yeah. We want to have the
extra gulp for ourselves when we don't need to worry about it going dry. There's no drought of
God's love. There's no drought of God's love, which, which very well then reminds us that, that
we don't have to be self interested in the small sense. But we can be self interested in the sense
that our self interest expands to include others. It really does matter whether a child coming up
from Central America, it really does matter to us. You know, Jesus, Maria and Jose are always
coming up from the border. The Holy Family is coming up daily. It does matter whether they
are treated as human beings, apart from immigration policy, apart from that, it matters that they
see treat them as human beings. It does matter to our own souls that we not get caught up in,
in, in hatred of those policies that of the persons who have the policies that we disagree with.
It really does matter to the quality of the whole nation and whole planet.
Yeah, well, that's the, that's a real challenging and integrative move in partnering with the
fountain, I think, is to curious if you agree, but to awaken to the reality that that fountain's
flowing in places that I don't expect in places that I've already made judgments about.
Is the fountain still flowing there? And I can still experience God's grace and beauty in depth
through the places and the people I've already written off.
Well, yes, and, and that's one of the hardest things, but probably one of the necessary things
that we, it's in another text I wrote a while ago on Howard Thurman, I entitled the,
the text of prophetic healing that the prophet and Lord knows they, they're pretty scathing,
prophets are pretty scathing and their critique of the institutions were part of,
but they do it as members of the community. Amos or Amos or Jose or Micah or Isaiah or
Jeremiah don't act as if they're above it all. They, they assume they look in the mirror too and
see something of themselves and what they criticize. And their criticism of the, and it's pretty harsh
sometimes of the order in which they live is motivated by healing and not hate.
It's motivated by the hope that the persons that we most disparage find wholeness
in the way that God intends for them and, and letting go of what that should be.
A letting, just as, at some level, I can't control my own process of wholeness. I have to
render to a deeper and greater power and wisdom in my life to, and then, and of course that power
and wisdom is delighted when I take some agency in the process. I don't think, I don't think
Francis was a very agential person. Francis took a lot of initiatives. He wasn't waiting for God
to do, to do what he could do himself. I mean, everything's the grace of God, but you know,
you think of, of Teresa of Avila, that wonderful saying that God has no hands but ours and we
are the eyes through which God sees the world. On the one hand, it says that God experiences the
world of pain that we do and that God is the one who invites us to make a difference. There's nothing
in the Gospels and I'm, I'm a regular every week Bible study teacher. I've been doing it for ages.
Nothing in the Gospels say, wait for God to do it. Nothing in the Prophet says, wait for God to
do it. It's about how we reach out to another in a way that preserves their, their wholeness and
humanity and, and the non-human world as well. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think listeners tuning into
this can see and hear what we at Franciscan media feel about you is that you are so good, Bruce,
at weaving in your own personal stories and your own personal experiences with, in this case, Bonaventure's
theology. And I think listeners can tell right now that, you know, this is, this is incarnational,
the Richard Rohr word, you know, is it should be as you outlined at the beginning is why,
why theology is important. But I'm curious in that same vein, what kind of impact has Bonaventure had
on your own life? Is it theologian? Well, and this is, this is an interesting thing. And I,
you know, I often, at times apologize in advance when I'm working on a project, and it's not really
the apology of I've done something wrong here, but a apology in the Platonic sense of a word from,
this is what I, you know, when I'm working on something, I usually don't work at it at arm's
length. When I set out on this book, you know, and I probably was at some sense when the, the
Franciscan me when Kelly McCracken asked me to write this, I really was not prepared to do so.
I'm not a initially wasn't a Bonaventure scholar. Maybe that made me the perfect person to
write an introduction because I was introducing myself in the process. And I did what I did with
all three of the Franciscan books. You know, it's interesting, you may not know this. I never submitted
a request to write any of those books. You may know, because I may have mentioned it in the first
book, walking with Francis CeCe, Kelly McCracken had seen a little religion page 800 word document.
I, I wrote for the Cape Cod Times and she saw it and wrote me a note and said,
would you think of doing something longer? And I had other things I was doing. I was pastor of a
church up there and, and busy about that was still teaching at Wesley Theological and in
Washington DC part time. And I did what I always do. And I did from this book, I, I prayed about it.
And, and you know, I assume that prayer doesn't force the hand of God in any way. And, but I listened
for what response I would get. And in terms of the first book, I was walking on the beach and,
and Cape Cod and I heard the voice that said, and then not here talking about the heavens didn't
open up, but an inclination, you might say, my heart was strangely warmed. I said, you can write
this book. I wasn't a Franciscan scholar. I loved Francis, but I, but that wasn't the reason Kelly
asked me to write the book. She thought I could say something, something new. This, and I got the
wisdom to write the book by the time I walked back to the home, I had the, in my mind, all the chapters.
The same thing, interesting thing enough happened with the Bonaventure book. I, you know, I couldn't
claim to be an Iliadelio in that area. And I think she's just the best thing since sliced bread. And
that is, that's a fifth 1950s saying as a, you know, wonder bread, sliced bread, because she's
written really a tremendous book, simply benefit Bonaventure. I was praying about it and re reading
her book. I said, could I say something that, that Iliad didn't say it or say it in my own way.
And I was again walking along in the, my, in this case, in my Potomac, Maryland, a little suburb outside
Washington DC neighborhood. I heard the birds singing. And I don't know if the birds intended to
tell me what they did, but they're, a word kind of occurred. You should do this. You should do this.
It was a little bit like St. Augustine, you know, saying, take this book, you know, as,
you know, I haven't put it in my confessions yet, but the, but there was a sense you should do this.
And the, and I assumed it was coming out of the depths of my, my psyche to do this or spirit.
I don't claim that when I have an idea, it comes from God, it comes through me. So it has my own,
own stamp on it. But so the book became very personal. And, and as, as you know, as an editor,
and he reminded me about this a few times, there was a, there was sometimes very little light
between me and Bonaventure in the book. And it was hard to figure out which one was which.
And that's the way I work at these things, you know, if it's worth studying, it's worth becoming
a partner with this, this person. For him, I think the key notion was really the fountain,
the fountain that, you know, I have to keep reminding myself that I'm connected.
And, and I think the notion of spiritual growth is something we have to, to do every moment of the
day. The notion the fountain occurred to me a couple weeks ago in a, in a, in a sort of annoying
situation. And it's just, you know, we had come back from holiday and we had left our, our golden
doodle is 85, he was 95 pound dog at the time, he lost 10 pounds at a, at a, at a kennel. And
it's pretty good kennel. I won't fault them, but apparently he picked up, I had an infection.
And the day we came home, he just quit moving. So I, we had, there was Saturday night, of course,
so we took him to the dog emergency hospital. And, you know, after waiting four hours and nothing
happening, it's like going to the emergency room at the hospital, you know, I was starting to feel
a little perturbed and I remembered, I'm connected with all these people here today. I'm connected
with the overly busy tech and the veterinarian on duty and the people who've brought their, their
companion animals with them. And my, my way of looking at the whole situation immediately changed
that, that this was all my internal dialogue externally. I was, you know, a civil person.
You know, we all know how to, to, to have a public face that's different than how we feel.
But when I began to invoke that sort of notion of the fountain flowing through all of us that
we're connected here, there's no other. And when I use the term, there's no other. I'm not talking
about atheism. I'm just saying there's no wall between me and the person who's brought their
dog in who's stepped on some barbed wire and may have to lose a leg or something. There's no
difference between me and the, the harried person who's seven people have just asked, when are you
going to treat my, my, my dog or cat? We're, and my, my spiritual state immediately changed.
And so for me, this is very real. And sometimes it's, it inspires me and sometimes it, at the, at the
same time, serves as a way of saying, hey, go back to where you should be. Get, go back to
the person you believe you, you are, or want to be and not somebody who's coveching about this
one thing or another. Remind yourself of the flow. Remind yourself of the bigger picture.
Remind yourself. And again, each one of us is a quote that Bonaventure has and it, it, nobody
knows the first person who said this God is a circle who's or infinite sphere. Bonaventure adds
the infinite sphere to it. That's, that's sort of his, his twist who said, or is everywhere in
his conferences, nowhere. Nobody exactly knows it's probably property of the human race,
property of some mystic on a hill. I, I've even been looking for it. Somebody one place said it
came was from Impedri, he's a pre-socratic philosopher. I've been looking for, for, at all
the fragments to figure out whether it's there or not. I haven't found it yet. But I am connected
with every other center. The center of the universe is right where we're sitting. This is the
ladder of the angels. This is the, the, the God is in this place and I did not know what God is in
this place and now I do. But everyone else is at the center. So the center is also in a courtroom
in New York city. The center is also with the, with the fellows working on, on, on our home. And the
center is also with me, me trying to figure out, well, how, how am I going to pay for another
5,000 on this? And of course I'm a privileged person who can do that. But the center is me
fretting about those things. The circumference is nowhere, which means there's no place outside
of God's care. I mean, and I actually think if we were to add to, to Bonaventure and, and Nicholas
of Cusa and others who've invoked this, that we'd call it a spiral at the end of the day, because
there is no circumference. The circumference is really a flexible circumference. It's, it's, it's
got holes in it. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like a net and the sense that it's not going to stop
flowing. It keeps getting larger and larger all the time, all the time. And no one's outside of it,
nor is any moment outside of it. And then keep reminding myself of that. Yeah. Yeah. And that
quote you're referring to from Bonaventure is, I've got it written down right here. God is an
intelligible sphere. Yeah. Center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. So I think to some,
that's terrifying. What? You know, we, we, we like our control. We like to go through our to-do list.
We like to make our life and our world and our reality about us revolving around us.
Talk a little bit about why that's actually a liberating notion that Bonaventure is inviting
us into. Well, I think the first and most liberating part of it for me is that I am at the center of
God's care. And so is everyone else. As a pastor, as a pastor as well as a theologian, I oftentimes,
in my congregation, I last pastored on Cape Cod, would tell the children, so give them a little,
little motto, you know, that if they got this, I thought that they would be in great shape the rest
of their lives. God loves you. We love you. You matter and you can do something great with your life.
The center always matters and so does everyone else. You can advocate for yourself and you should,
you know, as Rabbi Hillel says, if I'm not for myself, who will be? But if I'm only for myself,
what am I? So those other centers matter. So it, even when I'm provoked by those other centers,
that I have to remind myself on a daily basis when I take my dose of the news, try to take it in a
homeopathic way, not too much, you know, but that those people who show up on my news feed,
or when I'm looking at Facebook or something and all these things come up, you know, that
are intended to hook me and they're not intended to be neutral. They have a purpose. They have a
purpose of getting me sucked into something that, so I'll be really motivated not to like something.
Now, you cannot like something and still love. And you can expand your circle of love. And this
is where the question of polarization, which is the hardest thing these days, because we're, we're,
we begin to emulate those we accuse of misbehavior. I mean, I do believe that there's a certain type
of authoritarian Christianity that, that revels in the binary, that revels in the, as David Fitch
says, the church of us versus them, that revels in it. They have to have an enemy. They have to
have an enemy. But it's just as easy when I turn on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, or, you know,
MSNBC to discover that they want an enemy too. You know, somebody's out to get you. Well, they may
be out to get you, but you don't have to play their game. Yeah. And I think that's another reason,
Bruce, and you mentioned it a little bit earlier, why Bonaventure truly is a theologian for our
time is that he was a peacemaker, you know, just like Francis. And yet he was called to really, he
had, I'd love for you to go deeper into the tasks he had before him in his peacekeeping missions,
because he had his hands full, did he not? Yes. And I think again,
you know, he he he walked a thin line. He was the student of a prophet. I mean, you can call
Francis a mystic, but he was also a prophet. He was a very well behaved prophet in many ways,
but he was he was a thorn in the flesh of the church, because he was so different. And yet he
was one of the most respectful children of the church. He never criticized the church, but his
very being was critical of the church. You know, you can't throw away all your riches and and the
pope and silk doesn't notice it. Or the bishop and silk. And that's no critique that the popes
are the bishops, but there was a difference. And Francis lived out of doors, trusting only God and
the omens of others. And a couple, you know, generations later, here we have Bonaventure
having to make sure the lights are on, so to speak, having to make sure that the university stays
in business. Being the parent of the organization, the great father of the organization, which was a
diverse organization. Again, the one of his mediating tasks was to to affirm both the traveling
monks who had nothing and the ones who lived monastic lives but had something. Yeah. And the
ones that live monastic lives and had something, you know, didn't probably all live with the
simplicity of Francis. I mean, I have been in Franciscan orders and monasteries and I've always
been fed well there. You know, I worked at Georgetown and I knew if I wanted a better bottle
of Scotch than what I got at home, I'd go into the George to the Jesuit community.
They didn't own anything, but they were fed well and how the sense of remembering that we have
different callings. And certainly he, he dies while he's trying to negotiate a certain type of peace
between the Eastern and Western church that that almost was to say that the diversity didn't need
to be divisive. And again, you have from, you know, both Thomas of Saleno and Bonaventure,
you know, say that Francis begins his sermon with peace be with you. And that was kind of the code
word of the Franciscans as they were walking down the road. I mean, even though, even though
it's probably clear that Francis did not write the prayer of St. Francis and I, I felt bad in, in
a disabusing somewhat of that notion accidentally in a study group I was leading. But I quickly
recovered because I'm a pastor as well as an academic that this is the spirit of Francis.
This Lord make me an instrument of peace. I, I, I invoke that every morning in my morning prayer
and prays that, that my grandchildren growing up in an anxious time experience peace,
that they experience peace. And, and I think it's AJ musty who says there's no way to peace,
but the peace is the way. And we have to garner this piece as the, as the Jewish mystics would say,
one person, and I think they're too generous, one moment at a time, you know, bring peace to this
moment, you know, let go for a moment of how you think things should be one of the as an administrator
and I, and again, actually for Bonaventure wrote one of the first books of management.
I'm not an expert at that book, by the way, but he wanted to, maybe it was his, his version of the
rule of St. Benedict or something, but he, he wanted to use the Franciscan vision to also be a
management style. Maybe he was an inspiration indirectly to one of my mottos as an administrator
of organizations was, and as a pastor of churches where, where you is, you know, are dealing with
diverse groups. I have a vision, but not an agenda. The vision is, this is where we need to go. It's
the beloved community, wherever we show up, it's, you know, it's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness
for everyone around the globe, not just Americans and not just American born people and not just
white Americans. That's my vision. How I get there in that apparently very left-wing vision,
although it in fact is the gospel, may involve me sitting down if I were a person of power with
Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house whose views are entirely different than my own and saying, well,
you know, how do we make sure that people are not going hungry in the United States? And there's some,
there's some examples of this. There are some very enlightened people who are more pro-choice
and people who are more pro-life in this, in the slogans we use. Neither one is quite accurate,
but in the slogans we use, who actually meet together. How do we have a country where
there is both the rights that women should and ought to have of self-determination?
There is also the male responsibility when any woman becomes pregnant.
And also the sense that the fetus is part of this story too. I mean, sadly, the something that is
very good women need to have equality. It's absolutely, I need to have reproductive freedom.
And fetuses need the ability to grow forth in this context without making it a political slogan.
And it really requires meeting with a sultan. It really requires hugging the person with leprosy.
It really requires sitting down and saying that, you know, back to the fountain. Again,
the fountain is flowing and it's bigger than us. Yeah. And the fountain really does
invite us to be curious. Yes. And to be empathetic toward the person who's perhaps most different
than us. Yes. The great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has this wonderful comment and it's my
translation of his English into my English. In his own work, it's not quite exactly what I'm saying,
but I have to be aware of my own limitations, even as I see the truth in the limitations of others.
A lot of the people we oppose deep down are, if we get cut beyond all the layers,
they are motivated by what they believe is a good thing.
And we have to figure out what that good thing is.
Mothers need good diets. Babies need to be fed. There needs to be healthcare for every child born
in this country. And at the same time, fetuses need to be respected in their lives and all these
need to be in a stew. And what is it we're trying to accomplish here? What's the vision? And the
agenda, when I say I don't have an agenda, it simply means that, and I think this is probably
what Bonaventure discovered as an administrator once you're working with people, it doesn't always
work the way you thought it would be. But you still, as the Apostle Paul says, and as Martin
Luther King says, you keep your eyes on the prize. The Bonaventure Franciscan worldview,
when it's put into practice, is never going to be perfect. And sometimes you have to
have penultimate achievements and celebrate them, but you don't forget the horizon.
The horizon is the praised be you, praised be God by all God's creatures is the horizon,
the world of praise. Yeah, it's beautiful, Bruce. And I think it's a great place for us to conclude.
I think English listeners can tell just how truly personal and applicable Bonaventure's
theology is to our lived experience right now and why you are really such a great voice as a
vernacular theologian to bridge Bonaventure to an everyday audience. So yeah, I really enjoyed
this talk. Do you have anything else? I think that that's enough for me. I'll take a vow of
silence at this point and eat lunch maybe. Again, that was Dr. and Reverend Bruce Eperly. His new
book, Head, Heart and Hands, an introduction to St. Bonaventure is available in the Franciscan
Media store at shop.franciscanmedia.org. If you enjoyed this conversation, I think you're really
going to enjoy his book. As you can tell, Bruce has the unique ability to bridge a medieval
theologian like Bonaventure to our everyday lived experience. It's a wonderful introduction to
Bonaventure's work. And I don't think there's another book like it in the market today. So huge
thanks to Bruce for being on the first episode of the off the page podcast from Franciscan Media.
And thanks as well to Father Cyprian Concilio for providing the music for today's episode.
I encourage you to check his music out on Spotify or wherever you listen to your music.
This is Stephen Copeland signing off. Peace and all good.