This is Stephen Copeland and welcome to Off the Page.
Mother Teresa once said to a reporter, quote, of all the countries I've been to, the poorest
is America, because America suffers most from the poverty of loneliness, end quote.
This landscape of loneliness is one that an estimated four out of ten Americans navigate
regularly is a recent study from Pew Research Center highlights.
In our culture, it is becoming increasingly difficult to cross the spiritual bridge from
loneliness to solitude.
Instead, it seems that we frenetically seek to fill the emptiness at all costs with stuff,
with distractions, with ideology even, or other promises of wholeness and completeness.
The interview you're about to hear is with someone who has learned to find God, or perhaps
better said be found by God, when that sense of aloneness settles in.
Her story is wild as you'll hear and it's inspiring.
It is my pleasure to introduce to you our next guest on Franciscan Media's Off the
Page podcast, Susan St. Singh.
Susan St. Singh, PhD, is the author of God's Love Song with Father Murray Bodo, which was
released this past year.
And she's also the author of Francis and the San Damiano Cross, Meditations on Spiritual
Transformation.
She received her doctorate in sport history and kinesiology from Penn State University,
and she is a secular Franciscan.
She has been a main speaker at national conferences on St. Clair and on spirituality, and she
resides in Stuart, Florida.
I'm so thrilled to share this interview with you, and I want to thank Susan for having
such an honest conversation about her journey and struggles.
It is an honor to present to you my interview with Susan St. Singh, but first, a message
from our sponsor.
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Again, that's theologicalstudies.sandiego.edu.
Susan St. Singh, welcome to the Off the Page podcast.
Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me, Stephen.
So I was wondering, you write beautifully and transparently in your book, God's Love
Long, a book you did with Father Murray Bodo, a big author here at Franciscan Media, about
some vulnerable moments in your life.
And I was wondering if we could start this interview at the very beginning of your journey,
if you don't mind.
What was your childhood like, and when did spirituality enter the picture for you?
Okay.
My childhood, I grew up in Pennsylvania, and I really didn't care much about God or church.
I was much too focused on going skiing or hiking up in the mountains.
But it actually, my spirituality, if you will, started up in the mountains, up in the woods.
Some of the first things I ever wrote were about being up in the mountains, being by
myself, hiking.
I just loved to be near nature, either mountains or oceans or some kind of water.
But I think the spirituality started when I got probably to be more of a young teenager.
I was up one winter night.
My parents stopped asking me where I was going because I was out hiking someplace up on the
mountain in the snow.
And I was sitting up in a field that was cut down, mowed down, I guess.
I was at the edge of a farmer's field right where the forest starts.
And I just sat down, and it was Christmas Eve, stars were out.
It was very clear, clear night, black sky.
And there was a woman in our church, Mrs. Ryovsky, who was singing Ave Maria.
And I could hear it.
I grew up in this little mountain town, basically, where some of my classmates rode their horses
to school.
That's how rural it was.
But I could hear that song drifting through the night sky.
And the houses, the lights down below and smoke coming from chimneys, it was almost
a Norman Rockwell painting of some type or something.
But that's where something touched me that I wasn't alone.
And then I always felt that since then that there was something.
Maybe that was the first time I felt a spiritual world, good and bad, dark and light.
But I knew the light.
I knew I was not alone, if that makes any sense.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I appreciate you walking us through that scene.
How old were you?
Maybe 14, you know, that era.
Yeah.
And what was it about nature that always kind of drew you in?
I don't know.
The beauty of it, the solitude, the quietness, particularly any animal sounds, like to just
be able to sit by a stream.
And like there was one place in this ravine that I used to hike a lot where you could
sit on, it's a very steep, very dangerous place actually to go hiking, but where the
water would be below you, but above you, hawks or eagles, because I lived in the mountains,
could soar down through these, you know, the wind.
And so you were kind of sandwiched in between the fish in the waterfalls below and the birds
above and you were just part of it.
Like I really felt like a creature, like I was one of God's creation.
That's the best way I can explain it.
Yeah, and that feeling you talked about of not being alone.
Did you feel alone before that or can you go a little bit deeper into, it's just, it's
such a touching scene, this young girl out on a hike and something touched you that day,
something ripped your heart that day.
I think I always felt alone as a kid, as a young kid.
My family moved a lot.
I was always in and out of different schools for different reasons and I never really had
any close friends except my animals, my pets, my dogs, cats, guinea pigs.
I felt closest to, I'm not saying my family was weird or anything.
My family was very loving family, but I just never felt connected to anything except that
one night, anything spiritual, anything other.
I mean, I love my brother and my family, but I never felt that inner peace, if you will.
As a kid, I was always awake a lot at night, wondering about things.
I must maybe a strange kid.
I'd sit at night when my sister would be sleeping and just be looking out the window wondering.
I mean, I'm talking about like five-year-olds, you know, wondering what was out there in
the universe and the stars and the darkness.
I'd leave the house at night, even as a small kid and go out in the backyard and just sit
on the swings and look at the sky.
I don't know.
Yeah, it's like you were Franciscan before you even knew what that word was.
Maybe.
Yeah.
When did writing and artistic expression enter the picture for you?
At a very young age, I wanted to play the guitar.
I recorded for, well, I had a contract with Warner Brothers at one time with Arlo Guthrie.
I started playing the guitar when I was maybe in fifth grade and wrote songs, sang songs.
We had a number of cassette albums with Father Murray with what used to be called St. Anthony
Messenger.
Now it's Franciscan media.
I had a record contract, like I said, with Warner Brothers for a while.
A couple of my songs, Brother Wind, was recorded and it was in that Sunday Missal that they
used to have in churches back in the day.
I started my writing with playing, writing songs.
I just played my own songs usually.
I don't know how to read music, but oddly enough, I can write music.
I don't know why.
They're two different gifts I found out later.
When I started to write, keep a journal, when I was maybe 12, I started writing.
I still have my earliest writing.
It's about from that age.
Yeah.
Well, that doesn't surprise me because your writing in God's Love Song is, it feels very,
the prose is very lyrical.
No.
Thank you.
Yeah.
It has a way of, Father Murray, he's similar in the way he writes.
It has a way of taking you in on a sensory level.
Well, when I would write songs, sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night
and I could just pick up the guitar and an entire song would be there.
The chords, the picking, the words, everything.
All I had to do was keep up with what I was hearing coming and lay it down on the guitar.
That's the way that my writing has always been.
It just comes.
The muse, I think I told you a little bit about that.
Then I'm like a scribe.
That's the way I've always, I don't credit myself really for the inspiration or for what
comes out is just I'm trying to write down what I heard interiorly.
It's always been like that.
That can be frustrating sometimes for a publisher because they want an outline, they want this,
they want... It's like I don't have it yet.
It hasn't been given yet, if that makes any sense.
I don't want to sound too esoteric about it or anything like that, but it's just the way
it is.
No, it makes a lot of sense.
I know in my own work, I've explained it as it's almost as if a story grips me and then
I'm not stuck in a maze.
I'm enjoying being lost in the story and yet I have to write my way out of the story for
myself.
A lot of it's just for myself.
I feel inspired.
I feel that sense of not aloneness that you mentioned and the story has met me where I'm
at and now I have to write my way out of it and I don't know the way out.
I'll figure it out as I write.
Yes, I know exactly what you mean.
I had a contract to write a few books for St. Martin's Press and the one was called
The Wonder Crew and I had a timeline on that book, the New York Publisher and I just couldn't
get, it just didn't come.
Then one day I was at a stoplight and all of a sudden the first line came and so I pulled
over into a police department parking lot and I was grabbing everything in my car, wrapping
Kleenexes, whatever I could find and start scribbling on it.
Once I got that first paragraph, the whole book just came together.
I just didn't ever have the first line.
Yeah, well you're right.
In our age of, our Buzzfeed kind of age of hey, here's the top 12 things, here's the
outline, here's the formulaic kind of breakdown of things, the creativity you're describing
can be uncomfortable to say a marketing team.
However, I think there's something really beautiful about it because the openness, the
fact that you're opening your heart in real time to receiving what the muse is saying
to you, what the muse is giving to you, it's almost like we don't have the answers.
I wish I had the answers.
I don't have the answers.
I need something outside of me to communicate the direction, the trajectory of this thing
and I have to be open to it.
I have to be open to it so I can receive it.
Any thoughts on that?
I think the openness is a big part of it.
I think in our current world, I don't know how it is at your house, but in my world there's
so many distractions.
It's hard to find that quiet time, at least at my age now, it was easy when I was young
obviously, but where you're not distracted with all this inner noise.
I once had somebody ask me because I have to drive to work about an hour each way and
they asked me once, well, what do you listen to?
Do you listen to music, do you listen to podcasts, do you listen to classical music or books
on tape?
I said nothing.
I listened to absolutely nothing.
In the car, I can be open, quiet, but that inner openness is that I think also at a spiritual
level.
There has to be a level of either, I've found either a level of peace or a level of great
upheaval.
Sometimes when my life is really in a bad place, if you want to think of it that way,
a difficult situation, I can sit down and write.
You'll see that in some of the writing when I'm up in the middle of the night.
I think I even talked about that in God's Love Song and I'm writing them too.
Yeah.
No, that's been part of it as well for me is the emotion, good or bad.
It can be this, I don't think there's good or bad is the wrong way.
That's too dualistic of a way to explain it, but the rupture of emotion, whether that's
gratitude like the moment you described as a teenager and you're just in awe feeling
like you're not alone or the chaos within me, the fear, the insecurity, the future tripping,
the replaying my past mistakes, all these different things.
Sometimes frankly, that's the story and I have to write my way out of that thing or
else it's just going to keep having a hold on me.
Yes, I totally agree with that.
It's these intrusive thoughts sometimes at night that you don't want that I'll get up
and start addressing them or I'll just start writing something that's come to me, the questions
of why and try to answer them on the computer screen.
I used to just write longhand.
Most of my writing was done longhand, but now it's hard for me to, it's not hard, but
so time consuming to go transcribe from longhand to the computer.
So now I've gotten used to trained myself, if you will, to just sit at the keyboard.
Yeah, does that sense of, maybe this isn't the correct word, but that feeling of bombardment
where all of a sudden you wake up and the thoughts are just running and the discontent
or whatever it may be within you, does that happen a lot for you at night or when does
that kind of unfold?
It's almost always at night.
Same.
I was always even as a child going back, I never slept well.
I always was awake at, not always, but I don't want to sound sleep deprived, but I was awake
a lot at night just wondering, because I think part of that could have been because we moved
around.
We lived in different houses, different noises, different sounds, wondering where my dad was
sometimes because he would work late and I would just sit at the top of the stairs and
listen to the house and just wonder.
Then I think as you get into your spiritual journey too, I truly believe that the darkness,
if you want to call it that, tries to interrupt and interfere and influence your thinking
and you have to sort that out.
Yeah, that's a perfect way to say it.
You have to sort it out.
The challenge for me, whenever that sense of bombardment of thoughts or inner turmoil
happens in the middle of the night, one, that's always when you're most vulnerable.
You're asleep.
You're doing something that you have to do as a human and then you wake up and you're
like, there it is.
There's the darkness again.
It's been a challenge for me to try to reframe it and say, this is an opportunity for contemplation,
for perhaps resting in a different way through prayer, through creativity, like you mentioned,
that maybe there's something here that's not all bad.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
I'm not sure I'm following what you're saying, but-
We get that a lot on this podcast.
Sorry.
No, I don't think it's all bad.
Sometimes whatever the... I'm going to go back to the word darkness because that's the
only way that... At three o'clock in the morning for me, you were saying that's when
you're the most vulnerable at night.
For me, it's 3 a.m.
I wake for whatever the reason at 3 a.m., probably 75% of the time in my life and I
don't know why, do know why, but that's also now become one of the times when I don't struggle
anymore with the inner thoughts.
I just get up and I will start to either write, make a cup of tea, or just accept the fact
that this is part of the spiritual world.
I'm just going to talk a minute.
You can edit it out if you want later, but when I was, again, maybe 12, 11 years old,
I had a sense one night of something in the room and when I rolled over to see what it
was, I had a pretty startling, I don't want to say a vision because I'm not a saint or
anything like that, but there was a presence in the room.
I knew it.
I could feel it the same way as I knew that night on that snowy night that I wasn't alone.
I also knew I wasn't alone in this evil.
There was a darkness in the room.
I call it unwanted knowledge because I know that that was kind of the moment when I realized
everything in the, it's all true, everything in the Bible, all this stuff that we read
that sometimes it's hard for us to connect to because it happened so many, you know,
the millennia ago, that it's true.
There are two worlds and we're called to walk in the light and we can be afraid, but there's
no harm.
I think St. Teresa said that once.
Yeah, I'd like to go back to that theme of darkness for lack of a better term, if you
don't mind.
You wrote in God's love song about a kind of fragile time in your own life where you
found yourself wrestling with God in a chapel at Penn State.
I found the writing very gripping and the story very relatable.
What was going on at that time in your life and what did the priest in that church say
to you?
Well, you know, if you think of your spiritual life as like rungs on a ladder or something,
that was kind of my trying to climb out at some troubled times.
My father had died.
And I felt really, there was a prayer group at Penn State called Bread of Life.
And I was walking back from a class one evening and I saw these people, there was about 40
or 50 college students in there, a couple of Benedictine monks, and they were singing
and they all looked happy.
And I stopped and I looked in the window and I just watched them and I knew I didn't have
whatever they had, I didn't have inside me.
And I got angry.
I used to go to church a lot in my town in Berwick.
Usually when there was no mass or a priest or anybody, I'd go in and just kind of walk
around the church and pray as you would as a young person or something.
I didn't really kneel down a lot and pray formal prayers.
I was just always kind of wondering, looking at the statues.
And so when I saw that, it was so poignant that they were happy and I was unhappy.
I was pretty much alone at Penn State.
Like I said, my father died, my mother was in a vulnerable position, we were going to
lose the house again.
I didn't have money.
It was awful.
I had a scholarship to be in school, but I was sleeping on a mattress that I had gotten
out of a dumpster behind a McDonald's.
That kind of college life, it was not easy.
And I didn't have my dogs with me.
It's a lot of stuff in the background that made me terribly alone.
And then when I saw them, like I said, and how happy they were, I went in.
There was a small chapel at Penn State.
It's a really cool school there because where they built the university was part of the
original diocese.
And when the diocese gave up the land, they said, we're going to keep this small chapel.
You must keep this small Catholic chapel on campus.
So there's a small Catholic chapel there that's just, it's incredibly precious.
It's about the size of San Damiano's in Assisi.
And so I went in there, no one could see me.
I went in a door in the back of this building and I just sat down.
And I started to try to listen to them in the background and argue with God right in
front of me.
And I just got mad.
And I was like, you know, why am I so, why do you keep me so alone?
Why am I so unhappy?
Why did they have what they have?
And I threw a couple of the missiles on the floor and I went up to the tabernacle.
I didn't hurt it, but I put my hands on the altar.
I was basically arguing with the tabernacle, if you want to think of it that way.
But I guess when I threw some of the prayer books on the floor, it was a stone chapel.
It made enough noise that somebody heard it and they told Father Leopold, he was the priest
who came in.
He became the arch abbot at the Trobe Arch Abbey.
And he became my spiritual director.
And I didn't know he was there.
And I continued my rant.
And as I remember, I think I took one of the candles off one of the, and I didn't break
it, but I had it in my hand.
I was just kind of holding it.
And then I laid it down and I turned to leave.
And that's when he was sitting there.
And I had started crying.
And as I went to walk out, I just went over and I sat next to him.
And Leopold was a very large guy, maybe 6'3", big roly poly Benedictine monk in his block.
He had his robes on.
And he just held me and he said, well, you know, he loves you anyway, right?
And then he told me to just go home and be quiet and listen.
He said, God will answer.
That's all he said.
He didn't say a lot, but I think it was the smell of him.
He smelled like aftershave and warmth and just totally trustworthy.
Just could just sit there.
I could have just sat there for hours.
Correct, we didn't.
It was very brief.
But it's just those arms around me just was just, I'll never forget it, sitting in that
poo and just a few words that he said.
And then he got up and left and I got up and went home.
And then I had that experience, I think I wrote about in the book too that night.
So.
Yeah.
Where did your journey go from there, Susan?
You talked about Father Leopold became your spiritual director.
How did this wrestling, this continued wrestling unfold?
And then what guidance was he able to give you as you navigated this really vulnerable
time at a young age too?
I mean, to lose your father as an undergrad, correct?
Right.
I mean, that's a lot.
Yeah.
He got sick when I was in high school.
And well, I went home that night and I remember he said to tell me, he told me to go home
and just sit quietly and God will answer.
Well, that didn't help a lot, but I did go home and I got up and I waited.
I just sat at the table in my apartment and I again went into a bit of a rant and I said,
okay, Lord, God, I'm here.
You want to say anything to me?
I was really pretty outspoken.
If you have anything to say to me, I'll sit here one night.
If you don't talk to me tonight, then it's okay.
I'm out being not very respectful, but that's how I felt.
It was like, I'm here.
You got one night, say something.
If not, I'm not listening.
Because I was in a lot of pain interiorly.
There was some other things to the story, but so I sat there and then I sat there a
long time, a couple of hours just sitting, waiting and around, I don't know, 2.30 in
the morning, all of a sudden I was on the floor and that one brick wall in my apartment
just opened like it wasn't there and I could see all these colors of purple and gold.
I could see into the universe.
It was immense.
It was just immense.
The holiness, it was so holy.
I couldn't get off the floor.
I tried, I tried, but I had to remain prostrate on the floor.
I was face down, but I was completely immersed in whatever this magnificent light, purple
and gold and out into the darkness, into like a million stars.
The only word that came to me was Abba.
I didn't know what that word meant.
Then it was gone.
But I knew that I was different.
I just knew everything changed.
The whole world to me changed.
It was like, so the next morning I went up to the Catholic offices and I found Father
Leopold and I told him a little bit.
I said, I don't know what this word means.
I heard this word and I don't know what it means.
And so I told him what it, I said, I didn't even pronounce it right at first.
And so then he told me to go down to this bookstore and buy a Bible and look it up.
I'm sorry, I don't remember the passage.
It's in Romans, I believe.
And that's where, you know, that you're a child, child of God.
Yeah, yeah.
It's, yeah.
And does Abba mean father as well?
Father.
That's very interesting that at this very dark time in your life where you're grappling
with the loss of your father, this person who raised you and loved you, that's the word
that comes to you in this mystical experience in your apartment.
Yeah.
And I had a very close relationship with someone and that had been lost at the same time when
I went to school, a person that I thought I would be married to forever or be with the
rest of my life, that happened at the same time.
There were a number of things, like I said personally, that were happening and that added
to that level of anger, I think, at my own life that I was so young and everything was
such a disaster already.
Didn't see how I was ever going to get out of it because I was pretty much alone.
And then all of a sudden there was this presence.
And then, so Father Leopold stayed as my spiritual director from then on and he told me to come
to those prayer meetings, if you want to call them that, with bread of life.
And then I moved into one of their households on campus and it was a great group of, I'm
still in contact with many of them and we're a pretty tight group yet.
And my one, that's how I met Father Murray.
I always knew who St. Francis was, just from church.
I mean, I heard his name, but it wasn't like I really knew that much about him.
And in our households, we lived male and female because we were all just college kids, you
know.
And some of us were in houses with five or six bedrooms and we all shared kitchens and
you know, it was very much the 70s kind of feel, Woodstock and all that stuff, you know.
But one of the guys in our house, he just recently died of cancer.
He was in the room next to my room.
Like I said, I was usually restless that night or I'd play the guitar and he's trying to
do his master's work in botany and I was keeping him awake.
And so he came into the doorway of my room and he had a book in his hand called Francis
the Journey and the Dream, right?
And he was way ahead of me on the spiritual, you know, trail.
He was very deep into different saints and stuff.
And he said, you're driving me crazy.
You're always singing in the middle of the night and I can't do my work or you're, you
know, you're up walking around.
He said, you need to talk to somebody.
And he said, he said, so here, talk to this guy.
And on the back of Father Murray's first edition of that book, he's holding a pipe and he's
clean shaven and he had like black glasses and he still had hair at that moment.
Sorry, Murray.
And John said, here, talk to him.
Nice face.
Talk to him.
And so I did.
And I read the Journey and the Dream and that was it.
I just, that's where I first got into St. Francis.
And then probably within just a few weeks of all of that, I fell in gymnastics at Penn
State and I broke my neck and back, which didn't help for matters.
But I knew when that happened too, I told the doctors, because I was in a, I spent 10
years in a pain control center during that whole journey, but I couldn't graduate from
Penn State in my major.
I lost my graduate scholarship to go to grad school because I couldn't write.
I was partially paralyzed.
I don't want to over dramatize that.
I was, it was neuralgia in my right arm, right upper quadrant.
It wasn't probably like someone would think who's in a wheelchair and have some kind of
severe paralysis.
Mine was mainly pain oriented and it was nerve oriented too, but it was more weakness than.
But anyway, I just decided the only person that would possibly understand or could explain
all this to me was St. Francis.
I had to go talk to him.
And I just told Father Leopold that I was going to Assisi and he just said, well, you
know, if you think that that's what you have to do, he said, then go.
And so that's what I did.
I had a hundred dollars in my pocket, you know, stupid college American kid thinking
a hundred dollars in Europe is going to last me, you know, the whole summer.
Of course it didn't be the first day, but I went to Assisi and it was a long, interesting
train ride all through just even when I first landed.
Do you want to hear all this or is it okay?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yep.
Well, I took Air Icelandic because that was the cheapest airline at the time.
And I landed in Belgium, no, Luxembourg.
It landed in Luxembourg.
And as soon as I got off the plane, I realized I'm in trouble because there was a hotel there,
but it was 60 US dollars for the night and I only had a hundred dollars for three months.
I was going to be gone all summer.
And so I picked up the phone and I had a charismatic renewal listing of prayer communities around
the world.
And there was one in Iceland or in Luxembourg, in Luxembourg city.
So I called on the phone and it said Father Smith, because it was printed in English.
I wasn't thinking.
So I asked for Father Smith and they hung up.
And I also didn't have a lot of change to be using these foreign pay phones.
So I tried it again and they hung up again.
And then it dawned on me, oh, they probably don't understand English.
And my parents or my grandparents were German on the one side.
So I knew a little bit of German.
So I just said Herr Schmidtbitter, the best German I could muster.
And then they said Ein Moment, something like that.
And then he comes on the phone and I said, Father, I hope you speak English because I've
just exhausted my German.
And he said that he did.
So he picked me up from the airport.
I told him I was a college student and trying to get to a CZ.
Took me to one of his parishioners' houses to stay for the night.
Picked me up the next morning, put me on the proper train, all of which I had no idea how
to do any of it.
And had the train going down through the Alps and all of this.
So it was another just rainy dark night on a train with a woman sitting across from me
in this little...
We had a room, not like a roomette, but like two benches facing one another.
And she didn't like me.
It was clear that she didn't want me to go in there, but I didn't want to be anyplace
else on the train because I didn't know anybody.
I didn't know the language.
I couldn't understand the announcements.
They were all in Swiss and French.
And I knew I was kind of in trouble here.
But then she fell asleep during the night and it was cold and it was raining.
The train window was full of raindrops just streaming down the window.
And she had a little shawl over her leg and it fell on the floor.
And so I picked it up and I just lightly tried to put it back over her.
And of course she jumped and it woke her up.
But when she realized what I was doing, that seemed to break the ice.
And then she opened up this satchel she had of bread and cheese and all kinds of stuff.
And then she became very friendly.
And that eased the moment a lot.
Because I still had a cast on and my arm was in a sling.
So then she read the tickets because I kept hearing these announcements and I would look
at the tickets and I'd just shake my head.
So then she took the tickets and she read them and she got a conductor to come who spoke
English and they were explaining.
They were talking to themselves.
Anyway I ended up getting to Milan, going through the Alps at night, which was really
cool.
And then I was in Milan and that train station I had to wait.
And it was a very dangerous train station as I found out.
I didn't know it ahead of time.
But I sat with my back against the wall, big open like a World War II train station, probably
20 tracks, a lot of strange people walking around, dark.
And I just kept my...
All I had was a little...
Because I couldn't carry a backpack or a suitcase.
I had just a little fanny pack for the whole summer.
And I just sat there and this guy came up to me and he started speaking to me.
He said, you're an American, aren't you?
I said, yes.
But I was wearing a Canadian flag on my backpack, on my little fanny pack because my father
was Canadian.
And he said, you can't sit here.
He said, this is way too dangerous.
So then he took me to my train and he talked to a conductor and they let me sit on the
train for the last couple of hours and he sat across...
They opened two doors across the train aisle and he sat in the other.
So he wasn't threatening.
He kept his distance.
And then he told me that he had studied in Chicago and he was Italian.
And I told him where I was going.
So then he made sure when the train started, he got off because he wasn't going to Assisi,
but he explained it to the next conductor where I was going.
And when I finally got to Santa Maria del Angle, which is at the base of where Assisi
is, like four or five people by this time got the story that this American college student
doesn't know what she's doing.
And they just started yelling at me when we pulled into Santa Maria del Angle because
I'm thinking I'm going to Assisi.
And then they just started pointing.
So that's where I jumped off.
And as soon as I got off the train, I took off my collar and I took my arm out of the
sling.
I put it in a waist basket right there.
Like I said, it wasn't the smartest thing to do, but that's what I did.
Why?
Why did I do it?
I just knew I would be somehow healed.
I was never healed physically, really.
I still have pain.
Matter of fact, I have a pain appointment this Wednesday coming up.
But emotionally, interiorly, I was healed.
I don't know if that makes any sense.
I never had to wear a sling anymore.
I would say yes, I was mostly healed physically, but I was more healed in myself.
My peeves.
When I got to Assisi, I knew where I was.
I never needed a street map.
I just kind of knew the town.
I was working in a bed and breakfast, if you want to think of it that way.
But I couldn't really work because of my arm.
And so the people, I don't want to name who they were, they were a little disappointed
in this summer help that they were supposed to be getting from America.
And I really couldn't do.
They wanted me to peel potatoes and stuff like that.
Well, I couldn't use my right hand.
So they made me the porter when the nuns would eat.
Then I was to answer the door at the guest house because I spoke English and a lot of
the guests were Americans and they didn't speak English that well.
So in that way it worked out.
And that's when I met Father Murray.
I was there answering the door one day and I opened the door and there's Murray.
And I said, hey, I know you, you're Murray Bodo.
And he said, well, how do you know me?
And I said, I read your book.
And I had written a couple of songs for that book and things like that.
And we just became fast friends.
And he was there with a group of Franciscans who were leading a pilgrimage.
I was a Damien, Father Aaron and Father Murray had other, some of them were priests, some
of them were friars and there were a few other, there was a small group, maybe eight or nine
people and they could see that I was pretty sick.
I was getting physically sick there.
I wasn't allowed out of the guest house except to go to mass at five o'clock at night, run
down to the cathedral, which was all the way across, a seizing comeback.
And so they sort of adopted me into their pilgrimage group and they started to take
me with them when they traveled.
Oh, and you know, just all around, they took me to San Damiano's, they took me up to La
Verna.
They, to the cartery, places I would have never been able to get to or get into, Cella
dei Cortona, which was interesting because they started calling me Brother Susie.
And when we went to Cella dei Cortona, Father Damien, who was the leader of the group, Damien
Isabella, he's in the Congo now.
He could speak, I don't know how many languages.
I never heard anyone converse at a table in Swahili, French, Italian, English, all at
one conversation.
He was, he is an amazing, amazing man.
But when we got to Cella dei Cortona, he just told me to be quiet and stand close to him.
So he put his hand on my shoulder and I was standing close to him.
And he had his habit on, and he got in an argument with the, I guess, deporter there
because they were a little bit of a heated exchange.
And Damien kept saying, no, no, you know, Frate Susie, Frate Susie.
And he just kind of kept pushing me and walking me with him.
And all of a sudden I was in Francis' cell, which I'm sure no woman had been in in seven,
eight hundred years, you know.
And those kind of experiences, you know, started to happen.
And then.
Yeah.
Can we go back real quick?
For a lot of people listening, they're going to be wondering why in the world would a college
student who's in the middle of healing from a really serious injury, who just lost her
father not long before, who just picked up this book, Journey in the Dream, not too long
before as well.
Why in the world would she try to even try to go to a CC with a hundred dollars in her
pocket?
Like what was it about that book or the call of the Franciscan message?
Or maybe it's maybe it's some other kind of gravitational pull.
Like what was it that got you on that very what most people would consider a crazy journey?
It was crazy.
All right.
And I was called crazy many times.
But I didn't know that Francis had been kept in a subterranean cell and that there was
a part of his life where he kind of lost it too, and his parents were upset with him and
he had struggled with all that.
You know, you always see St. Francis with the birds on his shoulder and he's out in
a garden.
And you know, I didn't know that he had gone through all of that personal struggle inside.
And I thought, I can talk to him.
No, I want to I can talk to him.
I know I will get some answers.
I had to know why.
I just had to get some answers and I knew somehow I just knew.
And in Murray's book was where I read those first stories.
You know, that whole Francis the journey and the dream is all about that the journey and
then the dream, you know.
And so I was like, OK, I'm going on that journey and I need the answers for my dream because
I the turmoil inside of me had to be home.
And it was when I was in Assisi.
Yeah, that's what I was wondering.
Do you feel like you got your answer or what was it that you received in Assisi on that
first pilgrimage there that kind of propelled you forward in your life with everything that
you were dealing with at that time?
Validation, if that makes any sense.
I suddenly felt when I was there that it was I was OK.
It was OK to be me.
It was.
I was it was all right to be able to talk to Francis in the way I was.
I would go to San Damiano's and I would just sit there in silence.
And but I felt completely joyful and peaceful.
I'd look at the Sunday on San Damiano crucifix and it.
I just felt like I.
I was all right.
I wasn't some mixed up troubled nutty college student.
It was OK to have all these issues.
And of course, I wrote a lot when I was there.
I kept a journal.
I just melded into that whole Franciscan journey.
It was like every step of the way, I started to realize that I was meeting these angels,
this people from the people from the other side.
I don't mean it like that, but.
I was not alone.
Someone was always like the woman on the train, the priest in Luxembourg.
Father Murray saw Father Damien that all along the journey, there were people that I didn't
even know coming in to.
Be with me and walk with me and let me know that it was all OK.
If that makes any sense.
And of course, Francis, I would just sit at his house.
I would usually go in the evening down by where he his childhood home was.
And I'd go to the Basilica and sit down by his tomb.
And Lady Jacobos tomb.
I was just being in a seedy.
And then I left the guest house where I was.
And I was the Francis.
Father Damien and Father Murray moved me over, got me into another situation where I was
part of this fully Italian house where the Bishop of Assisi lived and Donaldo Brunacci,
who was in the Assisi Underground, the movie, the Assisi Underground.
He was one of the people that helped during the Nazi occupation.
Very famous man.
But anyway, then again, I was in a situation where they just accepted me into their family
and I ate.
I didn't know half of what they were saying, but none of them spoke English, but they'd
play cards with me at night and they'd all laugh.
It was just a joyous time.
And Donaldo would take me up on the mountain with his dog and he took me to some of Francis's
other caves other than up at the Carthaginian.
And the Bishop would ask me the same question you asked me, what on earth are you doing?
No, he did.
Why are you here?
What are you looking for?
Yeah, it's very interesting to me hearing your journey, Susan, and thank you again for
sharing it.
I think it's going to be very relatable to a lot of people listening.
But it's interesting to me how many moments on the spiritual journey you were searching
for that feeling that you explained at the very beginning.
You just didn't want to feel alone anymore.
And time and time again, someone shows up, like the person on the train, Father Murray.
I mean, that in itself is crazy.
You read this book that has a huge impact on your life.
And then you go halfway around the world with $100 in your pocket.
And a kind person tells you in the train station, you can't be here.
This is too dangerous.
You end up in a CC meeting Father Murray, this person who's impacted you through his
words on a page.
And I mean, it's just like time and time again, you're reminded that however often you may
feel alone, you're not alone.
Yes.
Now I'm not...
I think when you're younger, that fearlessness, and as a new Christian, if you want to think
of it that way, as you get older and life kind of piles more things on, I'm probably
not as brave, but I still have that sense that I'm not alone.
I get more afraid now, I think just because I'm older, more vulnerable, and I still try
to...
That's what I always hold on to, that I'm not alone.
All I have to do is wait and someone or something will help me.
I got lost once in Bath, England.
I wanted to go to the Roman bath and I was walking back and I got incredibly lost and
no one was around.
And I really didn't know how to get back to where I was staying.
And I don't know why I was in a section where there were no people, there was no one on
the streets, none of...
And all of a sudden around the corner just comes this woman and she asked me, are you
lost?
She didn't know I was lost.
And then she walked me a couple blocks and got me on the right path.
And the same thing happened when I spoke at the Vatican.
I was lost in a different way.
Of course, it's very intimidating to speak at the Vatican.
And I didn't know what to talk about.
I had two different presentations.
One was more academic because by this point I had gotten my doctorate and the other one
was more personal.
And I was coming down and I did not know which one I was going to say or present.
And until I'm coming down the steps to this room, there was a hundred people from all
over the world in this lecture hall.
And I still don't know what I'm going to say.
And this man, this priest just came over to me and there's all kinds of people swarming
around and I don't know who he was.
I never saw him before.
I never saw him since.
He just walked up to me, gave me a big hug and said, give them the one of your personal
journey.
That's the one they need to hear.
And he just kind of put me back straight in my eyes, smiled and walked into the crowd.
I mean, I don't know.
So that's the one I gave.
Yeah.
What would you say to someone listening?
I think a lot of people feel alone today.
What would you say to them?
You've kind of relived this really important part of your own spiritual journey in this
conversation.
What kind of, I'm not a fan of the word advice, but what would you, if they were open to hearing
what you have to say, what would you say?
That's a tough one because I think there are a lot of people alone today.
I know when Mother Teresa came to Cincinnati, one of the friars there asked her to come
and she did come and I was there taking pictures because I used to work as a photo journalist.
She said that she had, of all the countries of the world, the country she felt the most
loneliness in was the United States.
And that really struck me because I think there are so many people, including myself,
you end up alone or they end up in hospice.
I'm talking now, I'll go straight to the elderly because I just took care of my mom for the
last seven years of her life.
And she kept asking this question, where is everybody?
And it haunted me too because is that what she kept experiencing in her mind?
Where is everybody?
She was one of 10 children and even she felt that way.
But I would hope that people who feel alone can find some kind of spiritual solace and
if that's not enough, and it isn't for some people, I don't think they need the physical
solace too.
Only if I don't have an animal around me, I feel even more alone.
It's not like I feel incredibly fine.
I'm not alone.
It's more like I know there's something there.
I never feel like that is absent, but I don't always feel totally attached, if you know
what I mean.
And trying on a daily basis to keep that attachment is something we can all do if we meditate.
But joining a group, a prayer group, I don't know.
It's a great question.
I don't think I've answered it very well.
It's an answer that I still search for sometimes.
Hard question.
As you were talking, I thought of one of my favorite philosophers, a guy named Peter Rollins,
Irish guy.
He does kind of a play on words with the words all one.
He says you can't spell all one without alone.
You could interpret that all kinds of different ways.
But for me personally, it makes me think about how it's almost as if emptiness and oneness
both collide somewhere.
You know, like it is terrifying and is out of control or disoriented or dizzy as I sometimes
feel when I'm overwhelmed with that feeling of aloneness that maybe if I'm open to it,
there's an all oneness there as well.
You know what I'm saying?
I think I do.
I do.
I mean, I can understand what you're saying.
And I love the phrase.
I'll have to think about that one myself.
But I know that the darkness wants us to feel alone.
They want us to feel isolated.
That's kind of their goal.
And so we have to try to stay connected to friends, to people, to animals, to I'm not
sure if you know, whatever is happening in people's churches, but I'm not necessarily
going down that route, but make the effort.
I text people my friends all the time.
I'm always saying, Hi, how are you?
And I've had some members of my family or friends.
I take a lot of pictures at the beach in the morning of whatever I see and then I'll send
them to different friends.
And then I get a response from them.
And I just know it's a way that they appreciate the picture.
I appreciate hearing from them.
It's a great way to start the day.
And they don't feel alone.
I'm usually sending them to other friends who I know live alone.
There's a lot of women who live alone, but I also have some male friends who are, they
have all the money they could ever want, but they're alone.
They never ended up getting married or having families.
And then I know some people who have had families who still feel alone sometimes because the
families get fragmented.
I think there has to be an effort from your side to connect and wait and hope.
Like I said about the woman who just walked around the corner, knowing that there will
be that touch somehow, you have to have that faith that it's there.
You haven't gotten to it yet, maybe, but it's there.
I also try to segment my life into a day.
It's just today I have to live through.
Somewhere today, I will feel that touch.
I know it.
I have to wait for it.
Yeah, that's beautiful, Susan.
Thank you.
Thanks for sharing your story.
I find, and I found your writing to be really beautiful and inspiring, but just hearing
your story, I mean, such a, your courage to go on that journey.
And it's what you just said, your openness to waiting through the discomfort, through
these times where people or forces or experiences showed up for you in a unique way.
Yeah, I find all of that really inspiring.
So I have one question left if you don't mind.
You just shared with us your journey to meeting Father Murray for the first time and everything
that took you to Assisi for the first time.
Here's your book that you did decades later with Father Murray.
What's it like for you to reflect upon that?
This man who welcomed you in at this very interesting time in your life, to say the
least, now you're doing a book with him.
What's that like for you?
What kind of stirs within your heart as I say that?
Well, I always tell people that you can't, you might not be able to see your guardian
angel, but I can see mine.
I know it's Murray Bodo.
I believe, I believe that we've been friends since the moment we met.
He lives in Cincinnati.
I'm in Florida, but we've always been close in a spiritual sense.
He has a beautiful voice.
I didn't know if you've ever heard him sing, but when I first was recording songs, we made
those cassette tapes together and he would sing some of the songs on the cassette tapes.
To look back on the life that we had together, if you want to think of it that way, spiritually
and as writers, I mean, he has a PhD in comparative literature.
Mine is in kinesiology and sport history.
Very different paths, but I look at sport history and the beauty of the body as creaturehood.
It always goes back to my association with being a creature and that Franciscan charism
of Francis and the handedness and footedness and being part of God's creation.
Murray and I have always related on, and when I would have a question about Francis, I would
go to Father Murray and ask him, he's a walking encyclopedia.
To look back on writing the book, he wanted to look back on his journey over his lifetime.
He's 87 now.
He asked me if I would look back because he knows the steps in my journey.
Would you look back, he asked me over 47 years when you first met Francis as a college student.
I said, sure, are you kidding?
I'd be happy to.
It's an honor to ever be able to do anything with Murray.
He's like pure water.
I don't know if that makes you look in his eyes and his eyes are clear.
He's just so wise and funny.
I felt like clear water is the best description for Father Murray.
I think he-
That really is.
That's the best description I've heard too.
That's great.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Susan.
Yeah, this has been a real joy.
I wanted to ask you about sport and spirituality, but maybe we'll save that for another podcast.
I think this was hearing about your own journey into Franciscan spirituality and through all
these different moments in your life where the aloneness, your openness in the aloneness
to being comforted in some way, I think it's going to be really relatable and inspiring
to people listening.
So thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thank you, Stephen.
Once again, that was Susan Saint Singh.
Susan's new book, God's Love Song with Father Murray Bodo is available in the Franciscan
media store at shop.franciscanmedia.org.
Huge thanks to our sponsor, the Franciscan School of Theology, and to Susan for joining
us on Off the Page.
Hearing her story and wisdom is truly such a gift to me, and I hope it was to you as
well.
Thank you as always to you, our listeners, for tuning in and supporting this podcast.
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review or sharing it with your friends
or family.
And lastly, thanks to Cyprian Concilio for providing the music for this episode.
This is Stephen Copeland signing off.
Peace and all good.
I will lead you into the desert with me and tenderly speak to your heart.