Today is a very special day. July 15 is the feast day that celebrates the life of Saint Bonaventure, the Franciscan theologian and mystic.
I am grateful to Bonaventure for the inspiration his works provided ias I wrote Taming the Wolf. His masterpiece of the mystic path to union with Christ, The Soul’s Journey Into God, lays out a Franciscan foundation for the concept of spiritual transformation that is crucial to achieving true reconciliation. The following are a few of the many passages that continue to inspire me in this work.
In The Tree of Life Bonaventure refers to Christ as a mediator, a foundational concept for Taming the Wolf:
The most characteristic form of Christian spirituality in the West focuses on the mystery of Christ, who is seen as the Mediator between God and man and the Savior freeing man from the burden of sin and leading him to salvation.
In the prologue to The Soul’s Journey Into God, Bonaventure speaks of Francis and the mission that informs every page of Taming:
At the beginning and end of every sermon he announced peace; in every greeting he wished for peace; in every contemplation he sighed for ecstatic peace—
The path St. Bonaventure embarks on in The Soul’s Journey, which runs parallel to path of spiritual transformation suggested in Taming, is a mystical path. The journey, in both cases, calls for us to tend to our inner world:
I propose the following considerations,
suggesting that the mirror presented by the external world
is of little or no value
unless the mirror of our soul
has been cleaned and polished.
When we engage the difficult and daunting task of resolving conflict and seeking reconciliation, we do so in the pursuit of happiness. And that task inevitably takes us beyond ourselves, much as Bonaventure describes the pursuit of union with Christ:
Since happiness is nothing other than
the enjoyment of the highest good
and since the highest good is above,
no one can be made happy unless he rise above himself,
not by an ascent of the body,
but of the heart.
The work of reconciliation in the Taming the Wolf model depends on two vectors: the horizontal relationship with one another and a vertical relationship with God. When we love another we strengthen our love for God, and when we love God we strengthen our love the other person. To accomplish reconciliation we recognize the divine in ourselves and in the other. Bonaventure writes:
We must also enter into our soul, which is God’s image, everlasting, spiritual and within us. This means to enter in the truth of God. We must go beyond to what is eternal, most spiritual and above us, by gazing upon the First Principle.
The journey we take when we follow the legacy of St. Francis calls on us to tap into the divine within through contemplative prayer. The journey demands we touch that which is most simple and yet most profound. St. Bonaventure captures this in the following words:
Therefore that being which is pure being and simple being and absolute being is Primary Being, eternal, utterly simple, most actual, most perfect and supremely one.
Contemplative prayer can bring us in touch with divinity. Bonaventure describes beautifully the goal of the mystic seeking union with Christ. To become a peacemaker in the Franciscan tradition we, too, must seek this most holy experience that Bonaventure describes:
In this consideration is
the perfection of the mind’s illumination
when, as if on the sixth day of creation,
it sees man made to the image of God.
For if an image is an expressed likeness,
when our mind contemplates
in Christ the Son of God,
who is the image of the invisible God by nature,
our humanity
so wonderfully exalted, so ineffably united,
when at the same time it sees united
the first and the last,
the highest and the lowest,
the circumference and the center,
the Alpha and the Omega,
the caused and the cause,
the Creator and the creature,
that is, the book written within and without,
it now reaches something perfect.
May the words of this very special saint guide you and give you inspiration on your gospel journey. May peace and joy and all blessings be with you.
Quotations from the Tree of Life and The Soul’s Journey Into God, translation by Ewert Cousins, Paulist Press.
