Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Bonaventure had a real talent for organization. He pulled it all together. He wrote the first constitutions in Narbonne in France, and got all the friars on one page. In the meantime, he's writing these beautiful, mystical works about prayer, relationship with Jesus Christ that have withstood the test of time.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: You welcome to the catholic theology show presented by Ave Maria University. This podcast is sponsored in part by Annunciation Circle, a community that supports the mission of Ave Maria University through their monthly donations of $10 or more. If you'd like to support this podcast and the mission of Ave Maria University, I encourage you to visit avemaria.edu join for more information, I'm your host, Michael Doffiney, and today I am pleased to be joined with friend and colleague Father Rick Martinetti, who is a franciscan priest of the Immaculate Conception, province of the orders of Friar Minor. Right. A Franciscan. So happy to have you here, Father.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Thank you. It's great to be here.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: It's great. Now, you studied sacred theology at the Antonianum in Rome.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Yes, I did.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: And you studied franciscan spirituality, right. Sacred theology while you were there. Since then, you've been involved in campus ministry for many years. You were at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, and now you're director of campus ministry at Ave Maria.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: That's right, yeah.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: So thank you for your generous spirit of service to young people. Kind of perhaps like myself, I enjoyed college so much, I decided to stick around, and I love working and getting to know students.
It keeps me young.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Absolutely. It's such a great environment, especially in a university like Ave Maria, where students care about their faith and their relationship with the Lord. And I love that. I can't get enough of that and the conversations that that leads to.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: That's great. And so a lot of your work, right. Is in camp's ministry, accompanying students, putting on retreats, and all this wonderful work that you do to help students grow in their faith, grow closer to Christ. Right. And invite the Holy Spirit into their lives. But today we want to focus on another aspect of your work, which is that you're also an author, right? You're a teacher, a scholar. You've written some books on Bonaventure, and we're going to go through one of these books. This is called perfect love, 40 stories and reflections inspired by St. Bonaventure's de perfectione vite. Right. On the perfection of life. So before we go into the book, which is a book in a way, on Bonaventure's book. And actually it has all the texts of Bonaventure's the perfection of life and kind of stories and commentary that you provide on that. But before we get to that, would you say a little bit about St. Bonaventure and maybe a little bit of his relationship to St. Francis of Assisi? I think many people at least know a little bit about St. Francis, where a lot of people know not much about St. Bonaventure.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: That's right.
So St. Francis of Assisi, 13th century man from that little town of Assisi in Italy, which is so beautiful and worth a visit, fell in love with Jesus Christ, lived very simply serving the poor, especially the individuals covered in the sores of leprosy, and had an amazing prayer life. He would go up mountains and spend weeks at a time just communing with the Lord and come down. And that prayer led him to service of God's little ones. And Francis's love for the Lord and for humanity really attracted other people. And in a short time he had a dozen men and they went to the pope to get approval of their order. And in a few years from that, about ten years from that, he was up to 5000 followers. So this order of Friar's minor, or little brothers, needed a little bit more structure. Along comes this man about 30 years after Francis. His name was originally Giovanni, but he joined this movement and took the name Bonaventure. And he was a brilliant scholar, actually a classmate, literally, of Thomas Aquinas. They studied together at the University of Paris and became doctors of the church and taught at the University of Paris. And Bonaventure was fascinated with St. Francis and just wanted to take Francis's insights and reflect on them theologically and spiritually and philosophically. And so we have a collection of Bonaventure's works, which in the original Latin is ten thick volumes of how he took St. Francis, gave us about 35 little writings, and Bonaventure took those and the stories of Francis's life and expanded on them in a beautiful franciscan theology that would take off and continue for the next 800 years.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Yes. And Bonaventure became, I think, the 7th master general. Right, of the Franciscans.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: That's correct. We say minister general and really helped.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: To, I think my understanding is right to help kind of really solidify and help create the structure that allowed the, I don't know, such a beloved enthusiasm for Francis and for Jesus Christ and for spreading the gospel and for loving poverty, to help really bring it into a certain kind of order. And that created not only a deep theology that would allow it to spread, but also right in his work. He wasn't just a scholar. He was also. He had a job to do to help guide the Franciscans.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. Thomas had the privilege of staying in the university setting, and thus we have the summa theologica and a lot of other works of his. And Bonaventure was pulled into leadership because the Franciscans were kind of a mess and we needed help. Some were following some rules and other rules. And Bonaventure had a real talent, it seems, for organization. He pulled it all together. He wrote the first constitutions in Narbonne, in France, and got all the friars on one page. In the meantime, he's writing these beautiful, mystical works about prayer, relationship with Jesus Christ that have withstood the test of time and still could call anyone, I think, any christian to holiness just by reading what he's written 800 years ago.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. I've taught many times. And the mind's road to God, sometimes in Latin, right. The itinerarium mentis. And that the journey of the mind to God. And it's fascinating when Pontaventure does this by reflecting on the world, the cosmos as created by God, human beings as the image of God, and then, of course, God in his being and goodness as that for which we all seek. And he has this beautiful way where at the beginning of that work, he says, we have to become a man of desires, as he gets from Daniel. And so what helps our mind ascend to God? Love. It's that sense of awakening in the desire. And so at the beginning, in the end, he also says in a Francis, right, we can only go to God through Jesus Christ, but Francis helps us to see Jesus Christ somehow better. Right. And so Francis also becomes like a secondary icon in the way that all the saints are somewhat icons of Jesus Christ. They're witnesses to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the icon of God, the icon of the invisible God. But I think this way of harmonizing a deeply spiritual work, but that's also very much grounded in kind of a philosophical and theological ascent from the world to the human person, to God, and yet also seeing that kind of somehow interwoven with the person of St. Francis and St. Francis's own journey to God that went through the cross.
So could you say a little bit about how Bonaventure kind of integrates this kind of scholastic philosophy and theology in the person and witness of St. Francis?
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Absolutely.
You laid it out well with the mind or the soul's journey into God. Those six stages know through creation, through the human person, and into God himself in two different aspects. And Francis loved God, and Bonaventure loved Francis's love for God. So he kept looking at Francis as a way to God. And of course, you know, St. Francis was the first person that we know of to receive the gift of the sacred stigmata. So he's been called the most perfect imitator of Christ.
He desired to feel everything in common with the Lord, even the Lord's passion. He even wanted to feel what Jesus Christ felt on the cross and was given the incredible gift in 1224 of the sacred wounds of Christ in his hands, his feet, and his side. Bonaventure says that's the seal, that's the sign from heaven that we need to look at Francis. Let's do what he did to the best we can, because God put his own stamp on Francis as a viable way to achieve holiness, to get to union with Christ.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, you've dedicated much of your scholarly work as a priest to studying Bonaventure.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Would you say just a little bit about how did you. Maybe very briefly, how did you end up becoming a Franciscan, which I know can't be done briefly, but within that call to become a Franciscan, how did you discover that call? To be kind of a bonaventurian?
[00:10:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. A lot of stories there, but I'll try to keep it brief. So I grew up knowing the friars in my hometown of Boston, Massachusetts. They staffed my home parish and my high school, so I knew the friars from a young age, and I loved them. I thought they were down to earth. I thought they were great guys you could talk to. And I liked that a lot. I had a faith awakening, really, around 22, 23 years old. That led me back to taking my faith more seriously. And the friars came back into my life right at that time, certainly led by God, and it just resonated with my heart. I love these guys. I love their joy. I love their simplicity, the way they're available and they're serving the people of God. And when I joined the friars, our minister provincial, who is our boss at the time, right after my ordination, he said, would you like to do further studies and go to Rome and do doctoral work in franciscan spirituality? He knew I loved the stuff, and he wanted me to really dive into it and be able to pass it on to the next generation, the men that would join us. So that led me to actually nine years in Rome, where I did five studying for the doctorate and then four teaching. And when it came time to write my thesis, my question was, how do Franciscans pray? That's what I want to get into. And I thought for a minute, when you start writing a thesis, it can take all different twists and turns. I thought I was going to trace 800 years of franciscan prayer, but I got as far as Bonaventure, and I found his prayer book, and it was a work called the tree of Life, where he takes moments from the origin of Christ and the Passion of Christ and the resurrection or the glorification of Christ, and he reflects on them. So the tree of Life is 48 short meditations where Bonaventure invites us to use our imaginations, to be there, to enter through the scriptures and be like a character in the story. So I loved that, and I threw aside all the other projects I had, and I said, I have to dive into this work, this tree of life. And so I sat with that for four or five years and turned out a theological book on it. And then my first pastoral book is called hidden Beauty. And that's the 48 meditations that Bonaventure presents and my reflections on how to use them for prayer. And I'll just give you a quick example.
He talks about the nativity and uses the scriptures and then invites us to imagine ourselves like we're one of the shepherds. What would you have been feeling on the hillside that day when the angels appeared and told you about the great news that was happening, where the Lord had come into the world? He says, imagine yourself as a shepherd going to see the holy family, and you walk into the simple stable and you see the infant Jesus, and you go down and kneel and place a kiss on his feet.
It's a very beautiful, imaginative prayer that when I started to pray like that, really changed my life.
I think it's worth anybody doing imaginatively, being before the infant Christ, placing a kiss on his feet. What would that make you feel? What would you think? Would you want to say something to Jesus? Would you want to dress Joseph or Mary? And so he unleashes our imaginations, which he calls one of the faculties of the soul. So imagination, sometimes we think that's for little children, fairy tale stuff. But Bonaventure says imagination is one of the gifts God has given us to help us encounter him. It's a faculty of our souls.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: And in both those ways, it's fascinating, too, that in the way you describe it there, that he's writing about the tree of life right in the nativity, the birth of Jesus, the cross, and he's helping us to dive into it. But his teacher, his founder. Right. And, of course, Francis died a few years after Bonaventure was born, I think five years after 1226. And Bonaventure was born in 1221, but he knew him through everyone else, all the rest of the friars, but Francis himself, right, is the one who recovers, and, I mean, doesn't recover, but he recovers the church's wonder, in a way, at the mystery of the nativity by starting a little nativity scene and also helps to really popularize the way of the cross.
Right. So Francis himself is helping people do these things, and he just does them, right? Yes, he just starts the knit. So can you kind of say a little bit about how Francis does that and then that gets received, in a way, by Bonaventure?
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Sure. I think you're hitting on the key point of who Francis was. A man in love with the humanity of Jesus Christ at a know in church and world history where maybe that had kind of faded to a background. You even look at the icons and the crucifixes, always had a glorified Christ around that time. And Francis falls in love with Jesus and his humanity. So Jesus actually became a baby. What does that mean for us? Jesus died a brutal death on the cross and bled and was in agony. What does that mean when we are in agony and in our suffering? So that's what captured the imagination of all the Franciscans that came after Francis. And, of course, Bonaventure love the humanity of Jesus, and that's going to change your life. It's going to change how you approach suffering and carrying your own cross. And as I said, in the tree of life, the middle section is on the cross, and that's the focus of Bonaventure's works. All his works revolve around the cross. He's got some prayers and meditations that lead us up to it and some that flow out of it. But it's always the cross is the greatest sign of the love of God for us, God emptying himself in Jesus Christ and totally giving up everything, even his life for us. That fascinated Francis and Bonaventure. And Bonaventure has been called a mystic of the cross, the mystic of love, the theologian of prayer. All these ways that he encountered Jesus Christ on the cross and that affected his prayer and changed his life.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Now, in this recent book called Perfect Love, you focus after having written something on the tree of life, now you look at this perfection of life. So can you say a little bit about just what is the nature of the work that Bonaventure wrote. What was Bonaventure trying to do? And then maybe why you thought that would be particularly something that we need to hear today. Right. That the students with whom you're working, maybe other friars, that this particular, like this work written in the 13th century by the minister general of the Franciscans. Right. To sisters. Right. These would be poor Claire's.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Is that correct? So that this is something that particularly speaks to kind of our contemporary experience today.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: Yes. So as I was diving into the tree of know, obviously I had to get familiar with all of Bonaventure's works, and they are vast, but the tree of life I fell in love with. And I guess my second favorite work was a simple letter that he wrote to the poor Claire sisters, spelling out eight steps of holiness. And I'm convinced that they apply today, maybe even more than ever. There are some things he writes that are specifically for religious women living in a cloister. He does a whole bit on silence in the fourth chapter, and that's important for us as well. It was a little bit more the rule of their life, to live good chunks of silent time recollected contemplative silence. But most of what is in that letter, and it's a very short letter, is for anybody. So I could take you through a couple of the stages, if you'd like.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Yeah, let's go through some of those.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So, eight steps to holiness.
He says, the first one is self knowledge, which other saints have certainly said, entering through our own souls into the heart of God, learn who we truly are. Don't have an exaggerated image and think you're God, but also you're not garbage either. And I think we struggle on the journey to go one way or the other, sometimes both. In one day, we can have too high an image of ourselves and think the world revolves around us, or we can think we're worthless and Bonaventure would know, enter into prayer, get to encounter the Lord, ask him who you truly are and what are the gifts he's been given you, and then try to live out of those gifts and offer them back to him. And that's the journey of self knowledge that helps us enter into knowledge of God. When we do encounter our weaknesses and our sins, that's okay. And he says, use that for meditation, but don't stay there. Don't stay thinking, oh, I'm so miserable, the world hates me. Whatever it is, he says, use it as, like a springboard into the mercy of God. Whatever we are discovering about our own weaknesses or wretchedness, to use a good medieval word. We all have that part of us, right, he says, use that as a springboard to appreciate God's mercy. God already knew all those things about you that you're just discovering and died for you anyway.
So that's the way that knowledge of our sins and weaknesses help us appreciate the beauty of God. We know. We start to learn we didn't earn any of this. All the gifts of God are freely given. What Jesus did on the cross was a free act of love, not because I've earned it, but even because he loves me. So self knowledge is the first step of the journey. And the second one, which you can kind of imagine where that goes. The second one is humility.
Once we start to get a true view of who we are, it's going to humble us. So humility is the next call, the next step on the journey. After that, he talks about poverty and the Franciscans. We take a vow of poverty, the poor Claire sisters, that he was writing to live it as a vow. But poverty is for everybody. It's a way of being poor in spirit, being stripped of whatever needs to go. It's always been said, right? The spiritual life is more about detachment than addition, letting go, subtraction more than addition, letting go of false images of ourselves, or the need to be in control or have it done my way. So chapter three is an elaborate reflection on how poverty is important for every believer.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, in your book, you include about maybe like a two to three paragraph excerpt from each of Bonaventure's eight chapters. I think you take five excerpts for each chapter. You get 40, and then you write a little reflection on each of the little sections. So if somebody could just read your book and they could skip your parts and just read Bonaventure, I suppose skip Bonaventure and just read you. Obviously, they want to read both, but. So what are some of the stories maybe that you tell to help somebody?
Would you maybe want to pick out one or two that moved to that sincere humility or that perfect poverty?
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Okay, so I tried to include a lot of stories from St. Francis and St. Clair and their early followers, and then felt myself called also to just share some personal stories. So there's some stories of my life in there, of my ordination, of my time in Rome, and I also use a couple of movies and some contemporary literature.
Just add a little color to what Bonaventure is saying as we get to humility and poverty, I could share the story of St. Francis and his first two followers were a man named Bernardo and another one named Peter, who they wanted to do what Francis was doing. And so Bernardo had a lot of money. So Francis said, okay, you want to join us?
Sell what you have and let's give it all to the poor.
So these three men sold their property and their wealth, and they were in the piazza in Assisi with bags of coins, giving them out and throwing them to people. And, of course, you can imagine the scene where just people gather all around and they free coins, free money. And a priest happens along a man named Father Sylvester, who Francis had had an encounter with earlier.
Francis was begging for stones to rebuild the church of San Damiano. And Father Sylvester had a quarry and other things, and he went and he bought some stones from Father Sylvester. Well, when Sylvester comes on the scene and sees Francis and his companions with bags of gold and money, he runs up to Francis and says, you didn't pay me enough for the stones.
What's this deal? You're trying to rob me? And Francis responds, want you want more money? He reaches into the sacks that Bernardo's holding. He takes out a handful of coins and dumps them in Father Sylvester's hands. He said, is that enough? No. How about some more? He does it a second time, and he just gives Sylvester tons of money. Sylvester runs off to his rectory, and he's thrilled, but he can't sleep that night. He's looking at his bureau. He's got all the coins on them. And he's thinking about that encounter, and he says, what happened to me? I used to be like these guys, on fire for the Lord and wanting nothing. And what happened to me? All I care about is money. Now, how did that happen? And he couldn't sleep that night. He had a powerful conversion. He ran to Francis the next day and said, can I join your brotherhood?
And he became the first priest to join the order of Friar's minor. And I love that story because of the power of poverty and detachment, simplicity. Francis, Bernardo and Peter, who cared nothing for the values of the world, witnessed to this priest and called him back to conversion, to his roots. And this was part of Francis'call at the beginning to rebuild the church. This was how he was going to do it, by reminding the clergy who they really are. And Sylvester became one of my heroes who had mystical visions and led the early Franciscans in a beautiful way when he himself became a friar miner.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: Wow, that is quite a story there. You got me choked up on that one. Yeah. I mean, that's just amazing. Yeah. The power and the witness of that sense of, and that humility and poverty that come from really recognizing, right. That God is God. God is in control, God is ordering providence. Right. Our providence is so. Not that we shouldn't exercise it, we should exercise the duty and the work of the day, but, boy, it is limited. And we can make an idol out of our own resources, our own ingenuity, our own ability to handle things. And it really can eclipse the great love of God as the creator and, of course, the great love that he showed on the cross. So we're going to take a little break now, and then we're going to come back and we're going to kind of dive through a little bit more of these eight steps and hopefully hear some great stories. So thank you, Father.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:27:43] Speaker C: You're listening to the catholic theology show presented by Ave Maria University and sponsored in part by Annunciation Circle. Through their generous donations of $10 or more per month, Annunciation circle members directly support the mission of AMU to be a fountainhead of renewal for the church through our faculty, staff, students, and alumni. To learn more, visit avemaria.edu slash join. Thank you for your continued support. And now let's get back to the show.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Catholic Theology show. I'm your host, Michael Doffinate. And today we are joined by Father Rick Martinetti, Franciscan, who's a director of campus ministry at Ave Mar University and the author of perfect Love, 40 stories and reflections inspired by St. Bonaventure's de perfectione vite on the perfection of life. So thanks again, Father, for being on the show.
[00:28:38] Speaker A: Thank you very much. Love being here.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Right. And so we've been looking through the work that Bonaventure wrote this letter to sisters, and he wrote eight chapters, right. Kind of eight steps on growing closer to God, growing closer to Jesus Christ, and growing closer to Jesus Christ. Somehow, through and with the help of the image of St. Francis'life, and story, we've spoken a little bit about some of these first steps. True knowledge, sincere humility, perfect poverty. Recollected silence. You mentioned a little bit that silence is particularly, was actually like a vowel for the poor Claire's. But I think so much in our own day, there are so many studies right now that show that people cannot, people hear very little silence. They're in a sea of distractions.
You see this especially through the phone. But this goes back, this is an older problem than the phone. Right. Pascal in the 17th century said that all the problems of the world stem from our inability to sit by ourselves alone in a room. So what would you say? Maybe, why is silence the fourth step? And maybe could you share a story or two that help us to understand what Bonaventure is teaching about? Maybe what silence is and why it's necessary and how I might practice it today?
[00:30:22] Speaker A: I think you're so right that I'd recommend that chapter for everyone, especially today, because there's such a lack of silence in our world. So I do a lot of work with the college students, as you know, trying to help them discern and hear the voice of God in their lives. And there are just so many other voices out there and so much noise. We usually, in the spring at Ave Maria, we usually have a silent retreat weekend and take students away. And whenever they hear that, there's a little bit of a panic. They're like, I can't be silent for a whole weekend.
And we tell them that, of course, it's not complete wordlessness.
There'll be mass and prayer time and then meeting one on one with a spiritual companion to help you unpack what's happening. But the important part of those retreats are your time before the Lord in silence. And I found that I think sometimes when we do take some quiet time, maybe the first thing that comes to the surface of our souls when we do some quiet prayer time are the mistakes we've made.
I try to pray every morning in silence. And I'll usually think of the night before and the stupid things I said or did and say, oh, why did I do that? And it's like you kind of relive the sins or the mistakes, and they come to the surface of your soul. But at that point, that's what we need to give them over to the Lord, invite him to use them for good, if he can, for my own knowledge. And can I learn from these? And I think that's the first step of prayer, is that looking at kind of the dark sides of our souls. My own theory is that's why most people don't stick with prayer. I think people run away. You put some headphones in so you don't have to listen to that or get distracted or leave chapel, whatever it is. And I've battled that myself. But what I found is if you stick with it, then you pass on into the heart of God. As we were saying in the first chapters, self knowledge leads to knowledge of God. Then you can sit with an all merciful God who does not run from you in your sin. And weakness. So silence is such a tool and a gift, but we've learned to be afraid of it. And it's like the desert, right? You have to step into the desert and be a little hungry and thirsty until you encounter the Lord in a new way. And so I think a little silent time is like an encouragement for every person today to enter into the desert, at least for a little time, and see what the Lord wants to say to you in the desert.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: That is really fascinating to hear that sense of that. Often it is the beginning of silence is often we hear a lot of chatter in our heads, and often it's not good. And so therefore, it's the desire to flee from that. But ironically, if we can kind of let that be truthful, let that be said, because maybe we did do those things and maybe our heart's trying to tell us, but use that as the mode for conversation, right. To go back to. Well, that's true humility, that's poverty, recognizing that blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who mourn all these different elements that by allowing ourselves to see genuinely the regrets we have and admitting them is the first step in a way, to putting them in God's hands.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Right. We can't kind of turn them over to God and genuinely get rid of them. I remember there was a theologian, I think it was Sebastian Moore, who would often say that we live in an amorphous world of guilt and shame and regret, and it was actually Christ and the church who take that amorphous guilt and concretize it into the cross. And so we can name it as sin. And when we do that, actually, we then allow it to pass through the heart of Christ and therefore be forgiven. When we can name our sins, it's not as though we're focusing on guilt. We're actually, that's the only way to get rid of the guilt.
And it is fascinating. So I love that idea of just be patient with the silence. The silence at first may be hard, but at time, that's the key to getting to peace, to serenity, to the really letting go of maybe that sense of shame that we carry around with us, that sense of regret that God wants to take away from us, but we never spend enough time with him to hear it, to kind of get to experience that sense of that blessing. So it's natural then, I think, steps five and six, prayer and remembering the passion of Christ. So again, maybe in a couple words, what does Bonaventure say? Or at least one or two points that you find helpful. And then what's a story or two about prayer and the passion of Christ?
[00:35:42] Speaker A: Right? So that recollected silence is going to be entering the desert. And the Israelites had to pass through the desert to get to the promised land.
Jesus went into the desert and was tempted and had to face temptation.
So that's the silence. It's going to lead us into prayer, and that's bonaventure's. As I say in an earlier work, if he had to pass on one word to this generation, it would be prayer. He talks about prayer so much, he starts all his works with a prayer or inviting the reader before you pick this up, stop and pray. Ask the Lord to kind of work in your heart so that it's fertile ground for the seeds that he wants to plant. So he's all about prayer. And the highlight of prayer for him is meditating on the passion, because it's on the cross that we see the love of God more than anywhere else. And when you first sit before an image of the crucified one, it's horrible. You're before a man bleeding to death, dying. It's capital punishment, right? We're before a horrible image of torture. Yet that's where the saints went. They stood before the cross or they knelt before the cross and they looked up and let the Lord transform it. You get to see, as Bonaventure says, see through his wounds into his sacred heart. So you stay before the crucifix until you start to appreciate that this is a love story. And that's where he tries to get his reader in all his works. He tries to get us before the cross, appreciating the wounded Christ and his passion as the greatest love story ever told. So silence is going to be the first step into prayer, and prayer is going to peak when we are before Christ crucified anyway.
[00:37:47] Speaker B: So well put. I have nothing to add to that. That's beautiful. So what's a story or two that you tell in the book that helps us to see into that better?
[00:38:03] Speaker A: Well, from there, the final two chapters are the perfect love of God and final perseverance. And in perfect love of God, he reflects on what does it mean to love God with your mind, your soul and your heart, as the Lord asks us. And he concludes or reflects that loving the Lord with all our heart kind of obvious. We just need to love Jesus first, do everything for God, love other people in view of getting them closer to God. And then he says, how do you love God with your mind, he says, you remember. You just remember. Use your mind. Remember what God has done. You didn't get to this moment in time in a vacuum. The Lord has led you up to this and has answered all your prayers up until this point and will continue to do that. So loving the Lord with all our minds means remembering what he's done for us. And then he reflects on what might it mean to love the Lord with all your soul? And he concludes, that means to think of yourself as belonging to the Lord. You are his and he is yours. And so one of the stories I tell in my book at that point is about my ordination weekend, which I always look back fondly as the most beautiful weekend of my life.
And it was a long journey to get to ordination. And I had some ups and downs, including maybe about four months before time thinking I couldn't do it.
And I really had to do some spiritual direction and kind of look at more of my weakness.
I just thought, I can't be a priest. That's crazy.
Who earns something like that and who is worthy of something like that? And my prayer and Bonaventure's works helped get me to look at it at a completely different way. Yes, I was full of sin and mistakes and garbage, but the Lord calls me anyway.
And despite all that and through it all, and it's not about me earning ordination or being worthy of it. It's about the Lord's desire. The Lord looks at me and says, that's my priest and he wants that. So I tell a little bit of the story of that amazing, the ordination mass. If you've ever been to one, I recommend everyone go to an ordination. At one point I'm lying on the ground prostrate, and a priest friend had said, what are you going to ask for at that moment? That's a beautiful moment. You have the saints in heaven praying for you. We're doing a litany of the saints. The church militant and triumphant are all there. Praying for the new priest who's being stripped and being lying on the ground is such a sign of humility and emptying and giving it all to the Lord. And I said, I don't know what I'm going to pray for at that moment. But when I was lying prostrate on the ground, a word came to me and the word was everything.
And I felt like the Holy Spirit was just inviting me to say and to pray. Everything I give you, everything, all that I have, is yours. My past, my future, my present, this ordination is yours. It wasn't my idea, I did not earn it, and I never will. But I give you everything.
And I was ordained in Waterbury, Connecticut, at St. Michael the Archangel parish in 1997. And there was a local reporter that came to do a story on it, and he chose the next day to put my picture and a picture of the ordination on this local newspaper. And he wrote, up top, the heading was, he belongs to God.
And I put that in the story, in that chapter, because that's what Bonaventure calls us to. To love the Lord with all your soul is to see yourself as belonging to God and giving God everything and letting him use it freely as he chooses.
[00:42:33] Speaker B: So when we complete these eight chapters, these 40 reflections, obviously, in some ways, this makes a great book for Lent. I guess it's a great gift for you can give this really to anyone, I suppose, during that time. But you also teach a course on bonaventure and franciscan spirituality to students here at Ave Maria, and I know you've taught this course many other instances. What are some things that you, when I'm teaching teachers to teach or doctoral students to teach, you can get so focused on? Well, I need to cover this content. I need to cover this stuff, and all that is important. You do need to do that, and you want to make sure what are the particular things you're going to examine them on? But I always also try to step back and what are the things that you want the students to remember five years from?
So what are some things that you would want your students five years after the class to remember about your class and about St. Bonaventure and Francis?
[00:43:43] Speaker A: Well, if you look at the prologue of any of his works, as I mentioned, he says it. He calls us to prayer.
I would like the men and women that take my class.
I would like to see their prayer life deepen and maybe change their lives and hopefully some techniques that they can stick with for the rest of their lives. In the final chapter of perfect love, it's all about final perseverance. And he paints a beautiful picture of heaven. It's wonderful. Talks about the banquet and the friends we're going to meet in heaven. Everybody's at their best. There's no more sin. There's no more selfishness. It's a party up in heaven. And I like to present that to the students and say, that's the goal. That's where we're heading. And then you keep that in mind. And prayer is the way to get there, to become, belong more to the Lord and one day experience the joy of heaven. So I would hope that they try some of his meditations, that they spend a little more time before Christ crucified and keep their eyes fixed on the kingdom of heaven. Hopefully. I think Bonaventure would say, and certainly I will say in class, this course should change your prayer life for the better, hopefully. And if that's the case, then it's a successful course.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: It's interesting that human beings are so kind of goal oriented beings. We see things. Once you see something where you want to go without even thinking about it, you already are thinking about how to get there in so many ways. The problem is we have the wrong goals, right? Or we have goals that either we have goals that are both wrong, we want to just be famous or have lots of money. But it also turns out those goals are very hard to achieve. It's very hard to be famous, very hard to have a lot of money. So therefore we just end up in despair. So recovering, in a way that great desire of heaven. Once you begin to see heaven, well, you almost immediately recognize that the only way there is Jesus Christ.
And then you immediately kind of almost can recognize that the only way there is just to rest in Jesus Christ. So to be connected with him in prayer. So in a way, once we begin to see Jesus Christ and his promises and what he's revealed, and again see that also through the saints in their teaching and in their lives, then in a way our minds and our souls and our hearts begin to work properly.
[00:46:18] Speaker A: Right.
[00:46:19] Speaker B: I was actually just reading something and it was sharing on this theme of prayer.
There's a philosopher, well, actually a psychologist philosopher who's quite famous, Jordan Peterson, who's many young men and women watch a lot and listen to, and certainly kind of a cultural icon these days, but his wife recently apparently converted. At least there was a story that she had converted to Catholicism, and she was about maybe five years ago. But anyway, she was very sick. She had very bad cancer. She was apparently only going to live for about ten months. And a friend of hers who was a convert visited her in the hospital and gave her a rosary. And she had known the rosary somehow, and so she started praying it, and the friend came and prayed with her every day. But the interesting thing is, again, it's just that sense of prayer. What did they do? They started praying. They started praying the rosary. What's the rosary? Remembering Jesus'birth, remembering Jesus'death, remembering his glory. It's the tree of life by Bonaventure. And it was just that your prayer, often in a way precedes faith. Obviously, you have to have some faith to begin to pray, but it's like you, I don't know, put it. I always try to tell people that prayer is kind of like a gateway drug, you know what I mean? It's like you're not likely to get addicted to Jesus if you never pray. Right. So you have to kind of start somewhere. And I think prayer is one of those things. It's interesting, Pascal, who has that famous argument of the wager for God's existence, or how should we live, and that it would know if we're not sure what's going to happen after life. Well, if you get an infinite reward versus a finite pun, if there's not God, then we should wager on God. We should wager on Christ. But then he says, how do you make the wager? Well, you begin to do the things that holy people do, use holy water, go to mass, pray, and sometimes that sense in which we do want to think about our faith. Absolutely right. And at the same time, we need to act, and the first of act is to pray. So I love that emphasis. So on our show, I usually try to ask new guests three questions, so I'd love to do that now. So what's a book you've been reading?
[00:48:37] Speaker A: I love Father Jacques Philippe's little books. I do like little books, so you can carry them with you. And searching for and maintaining peace, it's really been speaking to my heart. He really sums up the spiritual journey as the Lord's going to work through us smoothly to the extent that we're at peace. So strive for peace and let the Lord flow through you. I love it. Simple message.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: I love that book as well, actually, for a while, write a page a day.
And then when I finished the book, I just went back and did it again for another couple of months. And he has that one line where he says, if you don't have peace about something, it's probably because you haven't surrendered fully to God.
If you're reading the book, you've probably surrendered somewhat to God. But if you've surrendered something, 90, 95%, well, you're still holding on to 5%. So you're not going to have peace. And so just that sense, peace comes through surrender? No. That's a beautiful book. So, second question. Obviously, as a Franciscan, I know you have many daily practices and regular practices of devotion.
What is one practice of daily devotion that you would like to share that helps you find that great peace and.
[00:49:56] Speaker A: Serenity that would have to be eucharistic adoration I do try to start every day with an hour of eucharistic adoration, even before everything else. Of course you're going to have daily mass and divine office and all those prayers that are beautiful. But I think especially for a priest, we need that time when we're not on duty, not facilitating someone else's prayer, but just being before the Lord. And I found adoration just indispensable. And it's by trial and error, too. So I'm a priest about 26 years or so, and I've gone times where I don't make time for that practice, and I can see my life go straight downhill. I get crankier, everything seems like a burden. Why am I doing this? And running to adoration always reminds me of what's most important and fills my soul.
[00:50:58] Speaker B: Thirdly, this podcast is about catholic theology, right? We want to try to understand the faith we've been given and to try to understand it better, to try to let go of false views about God and about ourselves. So is there a particular view or belief you held about God, perhaps when you were growing up, or perhaps before your deeper conversion that you later discovered was untrue and in a way, what was the truer belief about God that you came to rest in and discover?
[00:51:33] Speaker A: I guess what comes to mind is somewhere along the line I heard that God was busy with worldly affairs and not really interested in my little problems. I don't know how I heard that along the line, but that could lead to a thought that I'm not as important as someone else in God's mind or eyes. And boy, I've come to find the exact opposite. God cares about every little thing in my life, everything, and wants to help guide me through the Holy Spirit to good decisions, big and small. What gives me joy gives him joy. What causes me to weep causes him to weep. God is with me in my pain and struggle as well as in the joyful moments. So I've come to meet a very intimate lover in Jesus Christ, who everything in my life is important to him, and he wants to be with me through it all. And then that transforms everything. Everything is a vehicle to encounter him, the good and the bad.
[00:52:45] Speaker B: Well, Father Rick Martin, Yeti, thanks so much for being on the show. The book we've been talking about is perfect love, 40 stories and reflections inspired by St. Bonaventure's de perfectione vite. And if you get the book, not only do you get Father Rick's reflections, you also get all of Bonaventure's letter as well. This book is published by Tal Publishing, and Father was sharing that. That's a christian apostolate, a catholic apostolate. And so if you're interested in the book or in the other book, hidden beauty Reflections on Bonaventure's tree of life, I encourage you to go ahead and buy it directly from Tau Publishing. Keep them afloat, and it's just a great opportunity.
That is Tau. Tau Publishing. Tau's from the is the greek letter t, which was understood in many ways to be one of the early signs of the cross, that the cross may have been a t shape as the crucifix was carried out anyway. So hopefully people will take a look at that and learn a little bit more about the seraphic Doctor Bonaventure and his heart fully on fire, this flaming love of God. So, Father Rick, thank you so much for being on our show.
[00:54:09] Speaker A: Thank you very much. Great to be here.
[00:54:13] Speaker C: Thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. If you like this episode, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app to help others find the show. And if you want to take the next step, please consider joining our Annunciation circle so we can continue to bring you more free content.
We'll see you next time on the catholic theology show.
