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 one of the most prolific writers and poets in the Franciscan
world, Father Murray Bodo.
Father Murray is a Franciscan priest and an award-winning author of numerous books, including
his best-selling, Francis, The Journey and the Dream, Nourishing Love, A Franciscan Celebration
of Mary, and most recently, God's Love Song, The Vision of Francis and Claire, which he
co-authored with Susan St. Singh.
His book, Song of the Sparrow, Four Seasons of Prayer, will be republished in August 2024
as we near the book's 50th anniversary.
It will feature a brand new introduction and several new poems, one of which he reads during
this interview.
All these books can be purchased in our store at shop.franciscanmedia.org.
A little more about Father Murray, he is a founding staff member of Franciscan Pilgrimage
Programs where he led yearly pilgrimages to Assisi, Italy for over 40 years before retiring
in 2020.
He has had poems, stories, and articles published in magazines and literary journals in the
United States, England, and Ireland.
Father Murray resides in the inner city, over-the-rhyne neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, where he
continues to write and minister.
I am really excited to share this interview with you.
As you'll hear, Father Murray is such a kind and present person, someone who is not
only generous with his time, but also with his willingness to share with people very
real and honest moments from his life.
The interview went longer than expected, so we have split it into two episodes.
I hope you enjoy.
Here is Father Murray Bodo.
So I wanted to start Father Murray with God's Love Song, which just came out, and then Song
of the Sparrow, which, you know, nearing the 50-year anniversary of that book, and it's
going to be republished, reprinted this year.
And both of these books really revolve around prayer.
And so I figured I'd give you a softball question to start out, something that's not complex
at all.
What is prayer?
I'm believing.
The eternal question, what is prayer?
You know, as looking at these two books, Song of the Sparrow and God's Love Song, you know,
they're like 50 years apart in the writing.
And I saw, relooking at Song of the Sparrow, almost the first page I was already talking
about prayer and what is prayer.
And practically everything that I have written, except for Francis, The Journey and the Dream,
which is a life of Francis, but there's all kinds of prayer stuff in there as well.
But there was something about this, the whole concept prayer that was with me, has been
with me since I was a kid.
You know, I used to stare at statues when I was 10 years old, wondering why they couldn't
stare back or talk back.
I would talk to them.
I was in church, you know.
And so I was always trying to make this connection with God.
How do we do that?
And in Song of the Sparrow, when I was teaching, I taught at this seminary for 12 years.
I was the English teacher and writing teacher, one of them, we had two, and I was also the
spiritual director.
So prayer had a lot to do with words at that time, because books had influenced me so much.
And I wanted to try to teach my students the craft of writing, for one thing, and then
the love of reading.
And so I was constantly working with words.
And so I gave them a word to help them see what prayer is.
And the word I gave them was sport.
I love that, yeah.
And the S in that word stands for silence.
So this, that whole, for me, prayer involves preparation.
It means hanging around with silence, with learning to be silent, being comfortable with
yourself in silence.
It's a remote preparation, but it is also the territory where God hangs out in silence.
And then the P of that word stood for purification.
Somehow, in the process, I'm trying to clear myself out of distracting things, of all those
things that would take me away from the silence that God dwells in, so that I'm purifying
my intentions, I'm purifying my mind that I can be open, which is the O of the word.
Once I've purified my heart, then I'm open to whatever comes.
And it might be nothing.
It's like writing.
You know, I write every day, just about, and it's Flannery O'Connor said, I write every
morning until noon.
Most, no, she didn't.
She said, I sit at my typewriter until noon.
Most of the time, nothing happens.
But if it does, I'm ready for it.
Yeah.
I think that's prayer right there.
You try to be in that space where you can meet God, where you can be in God's presence.
And that's a whole long process.
You know, I think sometimes when people pray, they like going into the presence of the pope
in Rome and you just start talking.
You don't introduce yourself.
You don't try to see what kind of space you're in.
You don't wait for him to greet you.
You just start talking.
And we wouldn't do something like that.
But we do it in prayer.
Sometimes we have to prepare our hearts for it.
And then there is always the R of the word sport, which is coming out of prayer.
There's always some kind of response.
Even if all I ever learned was silence, I've learned an awful lot.
And so one response was immediately Thanksgiving.
Thank you for this hour you gave me.
Thank you for these 20 minutes, five minutes, whatever it is.
And then the T of the word with the students, I used to say, that's talking.
Now you can talk.
But I think even more importantly, it stands for time.
All of this takes time.
And we know what we love by the amount of time we put in on it.
We have no time for prayer, but we can watch television for three or four hours and not
even notice that the time was passing or we can play a game or whatever it is, because
we love to do that.
And prayer and being in God's presence, because there's so much silence, you have to learn
to love that.
You have to learn to prepare your heart for that sort of thing.
So in a sense, the whole book, Song of the Sparrow, was about how do you do that from
day to day?
I did it through words.
I'm trying to teach my students at that time the craft of writing.
And you just put the words down, if you think of writing a perfect paragraph, you'll never
write one.
But if you just start writing, sooner or later, something will emerge from that, that you
discovered on the page.
My writing teacher at the University of New Hampshire, Donald M. Murray, wonderful teacher.
He used to emphasize the inspiration of the writing pad.
It happens while you're writing.
And you say, oh, that's what I want to say, or that's what I'm talking about.
It might be two or three pages into what you're writing.
So I wanted to show the students that it was a process and that I was putting these things,
these thoughts, scattered thoughts down all the way through the book.
And they end up being a book at the end.
Nobody can write a book.
It's too awesome a thing to even think about.
But you can write a paragraph.
And if you write enough of them and begin to order them and then organize them, something
starts to happen.
So I would emphasize a lot in that book especially, that your prayer life has to be like a good
craft that you learn.
And it takes time.
You have to be an apprentice.
You have to be patient.
You have to have some kind of master, some kind of director, some kind of mentor.
It takes a long time.
And so does writing.
Because I was a writer, I naturally did it by means of words and my field has been English
and American literature.
So I'm like immersed in that world.
But as one of our friars said to us when we were in college, Father Leander, he said,
well, literature won't save your souls, but it'll make your souls maybe worth saving.
And there's something to that.
And all of that takes discipline.
And so discipline is a day to day thing.
You're just not disciplined because you're now in a golf tournament.
We hope you had played a few games before you got to that.
So you learn the discipline of your craft.
Well, prayer is that way.
And sometimes it is merely doing it.
Whether anything happens or not, you pray the way you can pray.
And Donald Murray used to say of writing, you work at your craft and pray for art.
Something else comes later.
So you work at the discipline of prayer, all of its forms, the sacraments, the prayer of
repetition, meditation, contemplation, which are two different things.
But they are parts that you can learn.
I can learn how to be a gentleman.
I can learn how to fence.
I can learn how to dance.
But if I will master that, it's usually a force outside of myself that enables that
inspiration.
The spirit comes to you.
But it comes to you because you're working at whatever you're working at.
So that's kind of what the song of the Sparrow, the first edition, 1976.
I was in my thirties and I didn't notice until we put out an issue, an edition rather in
2008.
I didn't realize that I only had fall, winter and spring because that was the school year.
I would take off for over 40 years.
I would take off soon as school was over and go to Assisi and lead pilgrimages.
So then I'd be thinking Franciscan spirituality, Franciscan this, Franciscan whatever.
And that, of course, led to all of the Franciscan books I've tried to write and publish.
And the latest one being God's Love Song because that is kind of a culmination of that other
journey I made for 43 years going to Assisi.
It's where I've met Susan St. Singh, who wrote a book with me.
And so things kind of tied together in a lifetime.
Now that I'm in my eighties, I can't believe it, but I can't be in denial forever.
I am in my eighties.
And so I see a kind of pattern that so much of my writing life and my life as a poet even
has had to do with prayer and my Franciscan spirituality.
I have in my collected poems, I have a huge section, his poems on Francis and Claire,
that I wrote over all those years.
And so our lives have a coherence.
They have a pattern.
And that's why we have to have some kind of discipline or the life just goes off in all
kinds of directions.
And that's why I was so happy to see that Pope Francis is now going to canonize Carlo
Wacutis, the teenager from Milano, the Italian teenager who died of leukemia at 15 and was
a real computer geek and a real modern teenager and using the internet to evangelize in his
own way as a teenager.
So he's a model and how important the Eucharist was to his life.
And so young people, not only young people, I'm inspired by that, but especially young
people see a model who looks like them.
He looks like a teenager because he is a teenager.
But he was also a very disciplined kid when it came to prayer and also his computer work
and all that.
He wanted to be in computers, probably die young and live inside of the computer.
So that was a real, it's a real model.
And therefore, in our life of prayer, in our life of the spirit, whatever our spirituality
is, we need models.
And in the Franciscan tradition, we have had a male, female model from the very beginning,
Francis and Claire.
And Francis sings the canticle of the creatures, calling all creatures male, female, brother,
son, sister, moon, brother, wind, sister, water, brother, fire, sister, earth, our mother,
male, female, male, female.
And when we did our Assisi programs, we tried always to have as guides men and women, a
man and a woman.
So the pilgrim could identify not only with Franciscan spirituality, but with their own
maleness or their own femaleness.
And it's why Susan and I wanted to have two voices in this book.
And she, of course, is a secular Franciscan, which helps a lot because she lived in Assisi
for several years.
So to get the two voices are very, very important, especially in a church, which for centuries
was so male-dominated, where you have women's voices now emerging.
It's a wonderful thing.
And so that, too, was a part of the discipline of Franciscan spirituality to realize that
from the very beginning, there is a male and female very strong voice than Francis and
Claire from the very beginning.
And that's kind of a magnet for people.
What else I would like to say about that, but that's kind of one of the reasons for
this God's love song, the vision of Francis and Claire.
We took the saint off of each one of them.
So to emphasize this man and this woman, their vision, what was it, to hopefully welcome
people who wouldn't be impressed by saints or whatever, but would be impressed by two
voices out of the Middle Ages that were very strong voices.
So that's kind of a summary of the book, Song of the Sparrow, much earlier in first edition
in 76 and God's love song in 2024.
And then in 2008, when we put out a 40th anniversary of Song of the Sparrow, I added a section
summer.
And amazingly, it seems to flow right from whatever the rest of it was.
What was it like for you to write that section?
I'm guessing you wrote it from Assisi as you spent your summers there?
Yeah.
But this one, I didn't write it in Assisi.
I think most of it, I have a little hermitage in Florida in the winter time, in the courses
about summer.
That's a wonderful thing about writing.
You can be wherever you want to be, even though you're in a place totally different.
As Hemingway said, I can write better about Michigan in Paris than I can in Michigan.
You need some longing.
Yeah, you need some longing.
That's exactly the right word.
You need some longing.
So in the first edition, when I started out with autumn, which was always my favorite,
still is, season, I could go down that one, but I don't think I need to say why and everything.
Anyway, I noticed I was going for a walk, I was walking, and then I'm out in the woods
and I'm looking at trees.
Trees are very, very important to me, of all plants.
In the new one, I'm on a train going up the Hudson River.
I don't know where I was headed to.
I think I was headed to, I don't know, but I was going up the Hudson River on an Amtrak
train.
The title of the first piece here for summer is called Journeys.
I think I was beginning to realize how much of my life has been a journey.
My whole life, I went on a Greyhound bus when I was 14 years old from Gallup, New Mexico
to Cincinnati, Ohio, 1500 miles away to become a Franciscan friar in a high school seminary,
which one year after I was ordained, I was back to the same seminary teaching in the
same place, thinking I was going to be a missionary to the Navajos or whatever, especially the
Navajo.
That's what I thought I was being prepared for.
But how journeys are, and then all those years to Assisi, back and forth and back and forth.
The metaphor of journey is very important to me.
It just struck me that in 1972, when I was 35 years old, my first book, entitled Francis,
The Journey and the Dream.
It turns out to be my whole spirituality.
The dream, of course, is prayer, the longing, the desire, all of that.
And then the journey is the pilgrimage.
We're on a pilgrimage in life.
And we know that that metaphor is very strong today for people.
It seems like everybody wants to make the Camino, the journey, the Spanish.
What's the name of the play?
The Camino de Santiago.
Santiago.
Yeah.
That whole idea of walking, of making the journey, how the journey, the outward journey
is an inward journey.
And the inward journey leads to an outward journey.
And that was what I saw in St. Francis's life when I was a boy.
That was drawn to him because, excuse me, at that time, our whole town, Gallup, New
Mexico, the bishop was a Franciscan.
The priests were Franciscan.
The brothers were Franciscan.
The sisters were Franciscan.
So all of my connection with church and being a Catholic and all of that was through the
lens of Franciscan spirituality, Franciscan way of looking at the world.
And so it drew me so powerfully that I ended up having to go on that journey as a 14-year-old
boy.
And it was the draw of Francis, not so much Claire in those years.
We didn't know much about her in the 50s.
There was a book here and there on St. Claire, but she hadn't really emerged as she did when
women's studies became a huge part of academia.
And so powerful women across the whole world of all religions and all beliefs and non-beliefs
were beginning to emerge and show how strong their voice is and how essential it is.
And so then Claire, although everybody's writing about Claire because there were so many women
scholars, but men too started to dig into her writings.
It's amazing how writing is.
And writing her sisters, writing their own rule, having to fight with five popes over
the privilege of poverty and having an order that is with us today, like the ill dimension
of the order, it's with us today.
So it's not just dependent on some superheroes somewhere and when they die it ends, but they
founded something that was of God and was a need in the human heart.
Yeah.
It was its own journey.
It was its own journey for her and her sisters too.
I think one of, I know we keep coming back to that theme a little bit, journeying.
One of my favorite things about Song of the Star of Father Murray is you really feel the
movement in it.
Oh, do you?
Yeah.
I mean, you feel the interior aspects of your journey.
I mean, so many of the poems and reflections are raw and honest, but very grounded.
And you're very honest about times when you're waiting or you're a little bit uncomfortable
or whatever it may be.
All these things that are part of the journey.
And I was wondering if you could maybe provide some commentary on that, the journey of prayer,
because it entails emptiness, does it not?
And waiting and discomfort.
And at the same time, it's play too.
It's sport.
You can be yourself.
So yeah, I'd love to hear some commentary on that from you.
Well, I was surprised at a certain period in my life.
I think it was when I wrote the Song of the Sparrow of how many poems are sprinkled through
there are not sprinkled.
They are integral to the text.
The prose leads to the poem.
And well, I was looking at the book this morning.
And in this first section in autumn, I have this, I'm talking about prayer, but then this
poem appears on the page, which I had forgotten about.
That's years ago when I wrote that.
But I had a letter from a nun who is very, she can't leave the house.
She's in a nursing home and this is alone a lot.
And she asked me if I had a holy card of this prayer.
And so she sent the prayer.
It is a poem.
And I said, I wonder where that is.
I was going through the book.
I did find it.
But here is the thing that had lasting meaning for her because she said she's prayed it for
years.
This is the poem, in the night alone with my thoughts, I remember you, O God.
And my empty room and empty your thoughts are filled with your love, your watchful care.
And loneliness is changed to praise, to gratitude that empty hearts are lodges for your loving
presence.
Well, that's just packed because it's a poem and a poem is a condensation of a lot of things.
And so it's just, I thought, did I write that?
It resonates with me, of course, today.
And then I was looking at something else and that's in that first edition.
And in the new edition.
Could I keep you at that poem real quick for one second?
Would you mind commenting on, because when it comes to prayer or any certainly contemplation,
meditation, it can be a lonely, almost terrifying experience at times.
Can you, I don't know if you remember where that poem arose from within you or the time
and place you're kind of navigating at that time in your life.
But I'd really be curious for you to talk about loneliness and how prayer can be a service
to us.
Yeah, well, I'll try.
So there's a big difference, we started talking about loneliness and being alone.
Being alone can be very comfortable, silence or being alone can be loneliness.
And that's what this alone is.
So for some reason, I'm trying to think what I would, well, it's night and I'm alone at
night.
I want to be with somebody.
I need somebody with me.
I need the touch of another human being.
I need the conversation.
I need to feel less alone than I was feeling.
So in the night alone with my thoughts, you know that that's not Einstein, he would love
his thoughts.
But this is a heart poem.
In the night alone with my thoughts.
And I don't say I think of you, God.
I say, I remember you.
I'm longing for something.
I'm longing for someone.
And I remember you, Lord, because somehow God, well, you can see it in the other pages,
has touched my life, has been there for me, has been someone that I could lean on, someone
I can love, someone I can touch.
I remember you, O God, and my empty room and emptier thoughts are filled with your love.
When I think of God, I don't remember any dogma, that's for sure.
When I remember your love, your watchful care, and you see already the loneliness is turning
to companionship with God's spirit within me.
And loneliness is changed to praise.
When I think of you, I'm lonely and I think of you and everything changes because I know
you love me, I know you've cared for me.
And I just have to praise you for that.
How could you do that?
Notice me, care about me.
So it's changed to praise, to gratitude.
And what am I grateful for?
I say it's turned to praise, to gratitude that empty hearts like mine here are really
lodges, little lodgings.
I love that line.
For your loving presence.
And so that's the thing about poetry.
It's so packed that you have to kind of open it up.
And sometimes the backstory, which I can't remember for this, but would make it even
more something that can open up because I'm talking about something that probably everybody
has had this feeling.
And that's one of my favorite things about the way you write Father Murray and it really
comes out in your poetry is your ability to go so deep into your own heart, just as it
is in that moment.
And in that, you really end up somewhere that's universal a lot of times where it's like,
oh, I've felt that.
I felt like I'm trying to listen to God and seek God and where is God?
God's not showing up.
But that longing in the middle of the night where the thoughts are just racing, racing,
racing, and you're like, I want to get back to God, I don't know how to get there.
We've all felt that poem that you just read.
I don't know if I have a copy here.
I should, of course, but of the journey and the dream, but it just struck me that the
book opens with Francis unable to sleep, tossing and turning and thinking.
The very thing that we're talking about.
Maybe if we pause.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so here is the already on the second page of the journey and the dream, which was
written in 1972 and the down this barrel in 76.
There's four years in between there.
But this is what is already and then the title of it is the dream.
That chapter, Francis tossed in his bed, straining his mind, begging it to relax, asking it to
sleep, coaxing his body gently, then violently to drop off into slumber.
Quit thinking.
Please sleep, mind.
I have to rest to sleep or I'll never recover from this madness.
This despair that's clutching at me here in the dark.
He got up and paced the room, his hands ruffling, his tangled black hair.
What's the matter with me?
This is so crazy.
How can I be afraid and upset when there's nothing to be afraid of?
It's so silly.
Get back into bed, Francis.
Relax.
He dove into bed and lay face down trying to feel exhausted, but he couldn't sleep.
All night he tossed and sweated and asked himself why sleep never came easily anymore.
Okay, so it was on.
There's a whole chapter like that.
But obviously I was somehow preoccupied with this part.
I knew of course that Francis probably had post-traumatic stress and coming back from
the war and all of that.
How could he not have these kinds of experiences and have them frequently?
How could he not jump if he heard a horse neighing too heavily or something like a war
horse?
That kind of experience in a poem becomes a very condensed experience.
At that time I didn't know I could write prose.
I wrote that book out of obedience that I was sent by the friars to Assisi to write
it.
I saw myself and I had for years as a poet, mainly a poet.
It's ironic that later in life when I was in my fifties I had a fellowship and a scholarship
from the University of Cincinnati to get a doctorate in English that would involve a
creative writing dissertation, either a book of poems or a book of short stories.
So for four years I was pursuing from the year of 50 till I was 54, 55 to get this doctorate.
I was like a grandfather with all the other graduate students there.
But anyway, when I got out it was quite a while before I could write a poem or a real
story because I'd used four years exercising my left brain and I was critiquing every word
I wrote.
I couldn't write anything because I became too self-critical until my right brain started
to take over again and I could get in touch with my own art on the page and start to write
again.
Again, that was Father Murray Bodo.
I hope you tune into the second half of the interview, which really revolves around this
theme of the heart and how it applies to creativity in the formation of our own souls.
I personally found part two to be really special.
He reads several writings of his own and delves into where they came from and why he wrote
them.
And as you'll hear our conversation even gets quite emotional at the end.
But for now, here is Father Cyprian Consiglio taking us out.
Peace and all good.