Fr. Murray Bodo writes spiritual autobiography
Piecing together the story of a soul
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Fr. Murray Bodo, OFM, jokes about the girth of his new book.
“Once I started I kept going,” he says of writing his 380-page autobiography, Gathering Shards: A Franciscan Life (Tau Publishing). “Now I can hardly lift it.” He’s a bit embarrassed about the literary importance implied by such heft. “Maybe we can use it as a doorstop?”
Asked by Tau to record the story of his life and his spiritual journey, he initially declined. “I thought it would single me out as somebody worthy of writing an autobiography,” says Murray, one of our foremost Franciscan writers of prose and poetry. “I felt my life was too ordinary to warrant something like this” – that it would seem pretentious or self-indulgent.
Then, he says, “I realized no life is ordinary, and when I had the opportunity to look at it, I see how extraordinary my own life has been,” from a halcyon childhood in the Southwest through days of doubt about the path he pursued, from friendships that helped him hone his craft to the inspiration he found in his adopted home, Assisi. He also realized, “I could not have written this book when I was younger. There’s a certain clarity that comes [at age 78] you wouldn’t have at the time you’re passing through it.”
Deeply personal
Shards of Anasazi pottery
More than anything, Murray’s 32nd book is an appreciation of his parents and the friars, the friends and the places that shaped his spirituality and kindled his creativity. “My parents and others who loved me and believed in me and let me go are the real protagonists of these memories,” he writes in a foreward.
And because Shards is so personal, “It’s the hardest book I’ve ever written,” Murray says. “The scariest thing was self-disclosure. How much do you tell? How deeply do you get into it? I had the most anxiety when I sent it in and realized, people are going to be reading this! I have never felt that vulnerable.”
The book’s title comes from the pieces of Anasazi pottery Murray collected as a boy near the Navajo Reservation in Gallup, N.M. “The following pages, fragmented and flawed though they are, attempt to gather the shards of my life into a metaphorical pottery bowl similar to those I tried (and failed) to assemble,” he writes in a Dedication. Some of his published poems are the tissue binding the sections. “Poetry has been a way to process my inner life,” he explains.
An adventure begins
Pleasant Street Friary in Over-the-Rhine is about as far from Gallup as you can get. But it’s obvious that Murray’s office with its Native American rugs, pottery and panoramic paintings is occupied by a child of the Southwest.
Polly and Louie Bodo
During the two years of “immersion” he spent writing Shards, he returned to Colorado and New Mexico, “revisiting the places of my youth. I could feel myself being renewed by the landscape. Someone once said, ‘Every landscape you love is the landscape of your youth.’”
The first segment of Shards, a narrative of childhood, is so vividly drawn it’s like stepping into one of the cowboy movies to which young Murray was addicted. Mom Polly and Dad Louie led quietly remarkable lives, as did many hard-working parents tested and tempered by the Great Depression and World War II. What’s striking and relatable is how lovingly Murray describes their sacrifices – and the guilt and gratitude he still feels so deeply. Imagine letting your only child leave home at the age of 14, watching him board a Greyhound bus bound for a seminary 1,500 miles away.
“I was 14 years old; it was a great adventure,” says Murray. “From the time I was 14 I’ve been a pilgrim, away from my roots. The pilgrim spirit is something very congenial to me. I am truly the itinerant friar.”
Though it’s the story of a soul, Gathering Shards is grounded in relationships. “If I only wrote about mystical experiences, that’s a pretty short book because we live an incarnational life.”
Through darkness
Murray with poet Denise Levertov
He writes candidly of his spiritual isolation as a Franciscan novice: “It was as if Jesus stood for the last time at the door of my soul and left without even saying goodbye. And no amount of prayer or fasting seemed able to bring him back.” Providentially, Novice Master Benno Heidlage came to his rescue. “Fr. Benno intuitively grasped the story of woe I shared with him; and having been there himself as a young friar, he empathized with the depression into which I’d sunk and deftly led me through this dark night of the soul with compassion and prudent counsel.”
As often happens in Murray’s life, the right person was there at the right time. “One of the things that helped me [write the book] was three long sections about the people who influenced me,” he says. Chapters are devoted to “those exceptional others” who were friends and mentors: poets Denise Levertov and Herbert Lomas, and Fr. Francis Harpin, who taught Murray about “authentic prayer” in Assisi.
He dreamed of returning to the Southwest as a missionary, but the Lord had other plans.
Eventually, Murray found himself through teaching. “I realized I had more gift for doing what I was doing than as a missionary.” Ironically, “By doing obedience I found parts of myself. This became my familiar world, but it has never had the emotional or archetypal pull the Southwest has had for me. As a teacher I took the summers ‘off’ to be in Assisi” as a guide for pilgrims. “So in some ways, I was fulfilling my desire to be a missionary.”
Since 1972 when Murray wrote Francis: The Journey and the Dream, the book that made him famous, Assisi has been “a place vital to my spiritual, emotional and creative life….it clings to me the way this Umbrian hill town clings to a spur of Mount Subasio…”
“There is meaning”
While Murray was assembling these shards, “I was learning things about myself in the process. I realized that some of my best writing came out of the times I was broken. I’m not a saint; I’m a writer. It’s writing that helps me grow closer to God.”
After two years of research, recollection and re-writes – “it was fulfilling but draining” – he’s pleased with the way the pieces fit. “Somehow the book seems to cohere. I wanted it to be honest. My prayer and hope for every page was that whatever I was saying about myself would remind readers about their own selves. There is meaning, there is a pattern in our lives. My hope is that especially friars will think of their own lives and how special their lives are because they’re Franciscan.” Being a friar is “an extraordinary life to commit yourself to – full of riches you don’t think of day-to-day. I had the great privilege to have time to do that.”
The result is a substantial book about a substantial life. “I dropped three or four chapters,” says Murray, still mindful of the weight – and the cost – of his autobiography. “How much is this thing? Seventeen dollars? I don’t know anyone who can afford it!”
For those who cannot, here’s a spoiler alert: The book ends happily.
“What can I say of my life,” Murray writes, “except, ‘How blessed I am.’”
Gathering Shards is available from Tau Publishing.
Originally published in the SJB NewsNotes by Toni Cashnelli
Fr. Murray stands outside the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Italy
Posted in: News, Newsletter, Prayer, Saint Clare, Saint Francis
