Murray Bodo > Quotes

“Pilgrimage, then, is an image of what the journey of life is about. That, I believe, is the reason it endures—not because of relics and shrines, but because we sense intuitively that this holy journey is a rehearsal for death and resurrection. We go on pilgrimage to see our life in miniature, to walk physically and geographically the journey of the soul to God.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“I have a friend who each year on the anniversary of his wife's death, goes to her grave with some friends where they ritually pour Bombay gin on her grave because she liked martinis. As frivolous as that may seem, there is something in libation, a pouring out that symbolizes a pouring out of the soul, a pouring out of love, of remembrance. There is extravagance in my friend's ritual because gin, especially Bombay gin, is expensive; it's not something that one normally pours into the ground. In the annual ritual of spilling gin on the grave there is also the dimension of community. My friend goes with others who knew his wife, who laughed with her, who celebrated with her, who worshiped with her. They together make the pilgrimage. Therefore there is a further sense of community, of bonding among them as they make the annual pilgrimage, perhaps one member less through death, perhaps one member absent because he or she has moved to another place, or is ill. Still they go together, however many they are, to celebrate this person's life, to tell stories, to pour out gin, to pray.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“How powerful, then, for our own pilgrimages are Ishmael's words at the end of his dark journey aboard the whaling vessel, the Pequod. The drama's done. Why then does anyone step forth? Because one did survive the wreck. . . . For almost one whole day and night I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. How poignantly anti-climactic! After the death of Ahab roped to Moby Dick as he plunged into the sea, and after the sinking of the ship and the drowning of the crew, all Ishmael can say with Job is, "And I only am escaped to tell thee," a quote from the book of Job that Melville puts at the beginning of the Epilogue. This makes the book a cautionary tale for any pilgrim who is naive about the dangers and pitfalls of the quest.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“His mother worried for him, his father, angry and disappointed, left more often, it seemed, to attend to matters away from Assisi, and Francis felt worse by the day—until one day when he was praying, as he often did, in the rundown roadside chapel of San Damiano below Assisi’s walls. Yes, he had begun to pray! More accurately, he had begun to listen prayerfully. He was kneeling before the crucifix that hung above the small altar when suddenly it seemed that Christ’s eyes looked upon him…and he heard the voice. “Francis, go and repair my house which, as you see, is falling into ruin.”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“I have always loved the pilgrim narratives of the Bible and of other literature. Exile and wandering, return and setting out again—the heart moving toward its final goal—the heart finding God within, who then sends one forth again. This is the dynamic, not only of the individual pilgrim heart, but of the people of God, all the people who live on this earth as sojourners longing for an eternal home. Pilgrimages are not about one place being more holy than another, for God is everywhere. Making pilgrimages involves a response to something inside us that longs to move toward, that seeks the holy beyond.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“The Pilgrim's Credo I am not in control. I am not in a hurry. I walk in faith and hope. I greet everyone with peace. I bring back only what God gives me.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“This spiritual journey also involves leaving something behind. It involves letting go, trusting that what we love will somehow be okay without our being there. Pilgrimage from the very beginning, and of its very nature, involves surrender—surrender to a power beyond ourselves, a power we trust in, a power we are both leaving behind to care for those we love and that at the same time is drawing us away from them to another place that will help us better relate and love.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“That very night Pope Innocent and Francis had both dreamed the dream that revealed the Lord’s will that made of these brothers standing on the Tiber’s bank more than a band of men united in their love of Christ and his Gospel.”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“Something terrible had happened to him. Or so it seemed then when he thought that was the end of it all, that he would remain in this melancholic state forever. But, as he eventually understood, what was really coming to pass was God’s slow working within him. He was being prepared for that reversal which is in fact a turning toward. Toward what, though? Was it not a turning toward what had been there all along: the Spirit of God within him preparing him for the birth of Jesus Christ in his life,”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“He set off again because of a dream he had in which he saw the great hall of a castle on whose walls hung many shields that a voice assured him were those of Francis and his knights. What other proof had he needed that the cause of his melancholy was the unfulfilled call to knighthood? And so he set off with other Assisi soldiers and knights to Apulia, stopping the first night in Spoleto. O, how fateful was that night on which he dreamed the dream of the castle hall once more! Here they were again, the shields of Francis and his knights. And then, the fateful voice: “Francis, who is it better to serve, the lord or the servant?”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“no mystical writing incarnates the divine power and presence as does the Bible. Within that same tradition, no other book has more often been prostituted for purposes other than those for which it was intended. It has been used as a scientific treatise, a political weapon, a substitute for a liberal education, a justification for anything from an unjust war to the death penalty to the exclusion of those who are of a different point of view or philosophy. God’s word has been used throughout history to confirm and validate human words, becoming a verbal tower of Babel that divides rather than unites us in God. No other Judeo-Christian text demands more of the reader because it demands the humility to listen to God, not our own prejudices. The Bible, in short, demands that we abdicate our need to be gods.”
― Murray Bodo, Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God

“Things seemed to be falling apart, and the Church was changing the rituals and practices that the boy waiting to board the bus thought were immutable. In fact, when I first stepped onto the Greyhound bus bound for Cincinnati, via Amarillo, St. Louis, and Indianapolis, I believed my own life and the life of the world was experiencing a spiritual rebirth signaled by the popularity of national figures like TV personality Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and social activists like Catholic Worker founder, Dorothy Day.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“And so he persevered: through the fevers, the despondency, the feeling of worthlessness, the darkened room, his mother’s anxiety, his father’s disappointment. Most of all, he persevered through the sense of time wasted, time passing without his life making any difference. No battles won, no orphans and widows protected, no dragons slain. The Round Table had become a rectangle, a bed on which he tossed and turned and feared he would lose sight of the Quest, the call to serve the good pleasure of a lord, or maybe even a King. ...................... A gull screamed where he stood lost in memory on the bank of the darkening Tiber, the brothers around him thinking him lost in prayer. Or was this really prayer, after all, this reverie that led him always to fall on his knees in thanksgiving for the Lord and King whom his longing for knighthood had led him to, this Lord of all, who filled him still with awe and gratitude and love which no earthly lord could possibly have engendered in his heart?”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“Sometimes, of course, the progress of that change is itself more intense and painful than what we thought we were fleeing from. Here, for example, is the beginning of Herman Melville's, Moby Dick. Call me Ishmael. . . . Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“His Holiness told us how he saw the Basilica of St. John Lateran falling, and how a poor beggar had rushed forward to support the falling church with his shoulder. Each of you, my brothers, is that poor beggar. No sword is placed upon your shoulders like a man being knighted, but the pillars of the church itself rest on your shoulders. And that is what we are now sent to do.”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“Now there was only this clammy darkness and despair and the stench of his own beautiful clothes, the finery beneath his armor that he had been so proud of. It became so bad that he had to take off his clothes altogether and fling them into a corner and sit or stand or lie down in his breeches, they, too, becoming fetid as the days and weeks and months of darkness dragged on, his only light being the good cheer he tried to impart to his fellow soldiers as he sought to emulate the courage and cheerfulness he imagined his knight heroes always displayed. And when, after a year, he finally returned to Assisi, he lay in bed for over a year in what seemed now a coma of misery, his mother’s anxious ministrations attending to his every need. Much of the time his father was away, attending to his affairs and properties in the country or on cloth-buying trips to the Champagne in France.”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“Before the Bishop led him out into the courtyard, the Bishop had chalked a cross on the old tunic that had once belonged to one of Bishop Guido’s serfs. He felt close to the serf and to the Bishop who had covered him with his own cloak. How fatherly he had been! He had stood with Francis against his father, he had listened to Francis patiently when he had tried to explain about the dreams, the voices, the cross of San Damiano. He had welcomed Francis into the embrace of the Church.”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“The bus rumbled and loomed above me like an ocean liner as it idled beside the small Greyhound bus depot next to the Elite Laundry where Mother worked. With door open and the driver standing beside it checking tickets, the bus seemed to me then like Alice's "Looking Glass," which, once I passed through it, would open a whole new world to me—a world so fantastic and removed from Gallup, New Mexico, that I would be transformed into one of the saints or heroes of the books that brought me to this moment of departure. It was the end of August, 1951. I was fourteen years old—a boy about to leave home for a Franciscan seminary 1500 miles away in Cincinnati, Ohio.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“THE SECOND TEACHING OF ST. FRANCIS IS that we find God when we become poor enough for God to find us.”
― Murray Bodo, Surrounded by Love: Seven Teachings from Saint Francis

“Toward the end of his life, Saint Francis of Assisi, the gentlest of saints, asked forgiveness of his own Brother Body. As a young man swept up in the enthusiasm of his conversion, he had dubbed it Brother Ass and had required great sacrifices from it. His initial penances were as much to punish himself for his earlier worldly excesses as they were attempts to grow closer to Christ. As he grew closer to Christ, he came to see that it is not self-imposed suffering that matters, but as with Christ himself, it is surrender to God’s will out of love of God, whatever that will asks of us. That surrender brings its own pain and suffering because of our human condition and because of human sin.”
― Murray Bodo, Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God

“Second, I love him because by means of love and ascetic discipline his soul conquered reality—hunger, cold, disease, scorn, injustice, ugliness (what men without wings call reality)—and succeeded in transubstantiating this reality into a joyous, palpable dream truer than truth itself. He discovered the secret so sought after by medieval alchemists: how to transubstantiate even the basest metal into pure gold…. [Through] the miracle of mystical alchemy, he subdued reality, delivered mankind from necessity, and inwardly transformed all his flesh into spirit….”
― Murray Bodo, Enter Assisi: An Invitation to Franciscan Spirituality

“When I look back now, after nearly fifty years, at the young boy riding the Greyhound bus from Gallup to Cincinnati, I see how individualistic my pilgrimage was then. I was going to the seminary; I was going to be a missionary and saint. I was aware of and interested in Pete and other people on the bus, in my teachers and fellow seminarians, and later in my confreres in the novitiate and clericate; but it was only gradually, through a long period of humbling spiritual aridity, that the I lost its self-preoccupation and moved toward an I-thou that led to a we. I gradually began to see that all of us on the bus, we, were on the same journey. We were one body on that bus, and at the seminary, so that by the time of ordination, we had replaced I as my dominant vision; we were all on the same pilgrimage.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“He sold the cloth and horse almost immediately, and taking the money, walked, skipped rather, back to San Damiano where he offered the money to the astonished impoverished priest who lived there, eagerly telling him that the money was for the repair of San Damiano. But the priest refused the money. “Francis, are you mad? I know your father; you know your father. When he returns, he will come after both of us for this money. And he will punish me for catering to this whim of yours.” “But, father, Christ told me to do this.” “Oh, did he? Well, he told me just the opposite, namely, that this money belongs to your father and must be returned to him. Now run along and don’t come back and disturb my peace with your games, Francesco di Bernardone.” But he was undaunted. He threw the money onto the chapel’s window sill and ran toward the city, calling back to the frightened priest, “Then I will beg stones and rebuild the church myself.”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“Today, as I drive slowly, meditatively on Route 666, looking at Shiprock, I realize my whole life has been a movement away from and, paradoxically, toward this rock that rises out of the desert like the ship that it’s named for. It sails fixed in place and time, the water now turned to desert sand. It endures, anchored where I find it over and again on the interminable voyages I take to and from the mother ship. Our origins are like that. We leave them and travel in ever-widening circles away from them. They continue to hold us in their circumference like the hub of the wheel we spin circles around. We break the circle from time to time and turn, return, to the hub that is there unchanged though we have changed and continue to change.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“In his “Canticle of the Creatures,” Saint Francis says, “Blessed are those whom death will find in your most holy will, for the second death shall do them no harm.”
― Murray Bodo, Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God

“the pilgrim way only focuses and intensifies our experience, which, when we were home, was diffused by distraction, responsibility, and busyness. Unless we are persons of prayer and uncommon contemplation, our daily lives routinely detour deeper thoughts and a quiet looking at the world around us.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“The final mountain is Subasio, the spiritual mountain I’ve been traveling toward since I was thirteen years old: Mount Subasio on whose spur lies Assisi where Saint Francis was born and where he is buried.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“He did not know then what he learned later: God works in silence, God works in a darkness in which we think he has abandoned us, that he is no longer there. Back then he thought only of his misery and discouragement which, he was convinced, came from not being able to continue the pursuit of knighthood.”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus

“Mainly it's the stories we carry with us, the tales of those who've gone before, those who've made their own map, as we will make ours. The stories and rituals passed down from generation to generation. They will help us make our map. The stories, rituals, the Spirit of God. Of these shall we be created anew. Of these three is pilgrimage: story, ritual, Spirit. How we listen and do and pray becomes the map we make.”
― Murray Bodo, The Road to Mount Subasio

“Bellowing Francis’s name, he demanded that Francis return all his goods and the sooner the better. Then, losing all control, he jumped from his horse and screamed at his son, demanding further that Francis appear before the mayor of Assisi for the redress of the injustice he had done to his father. How surprised his father was and how even more surprised was Francis that he had refused. He stood up to his father—the dark closet had become light. He stood before his father and said he would not go before the civil magistrate because he was now under the jurisdiction of the bishop. His father lifted his arm as if to strike him, but seeing the determination in his son’s eyes, or remembering he was his son, or simply out of a fear of the mad rage that would have killed his son had he started to strike him, he dropped his arm instead and said with a cold, almost eerie calm, “Fine, then I will see you in the Bishop’s court, that useless pawn of the Pope.” And he turned and mounted his horse and rode pell-mell into the city. How could his father have known that Francis had been discussing God’s words to him with Bishop Guido, who had been sympathetic, interested.”
― Murray Bodo, Francis and Jesus