15 Jul – My Daily Bread: A Reason2bCatholic blog

For Bonaventure, the human person is a being with deep desires. These desires involve both intelligence and affection seeking out and enjoying the beauty of all things — being drawn towards others because of a desire for harmony. At the same time, Bonaventure sees this desiring person as someone who accepts the demands of the journey because of an intuition that what lies ahead has meaning. The human person knows that underlying the many and various ways by which the world is manifested, there is a unique and constant presence from which everything comes and to which everything returns. For Bonaventure, Jesus Christ represents the center point of the potential union of all things (Christocentrism), because in him everything has its origins and its fulfillment. In Christ, human desire also finds the path to the answers it seeks and longs for. Credit: excerpt from The Order of Friars Minor, a fraternity founded by St. Francis of Assisi; OFM.org. For more about this great saint, please click on the image. Peace be with you!

In today's Office of Readings we encounter a reading from the works of St Bonaventure (1218 - 1274). Bonaventure was born at Bagnoregio in Etruria in about 1218. He became a Franciscan in 1243 and studied philosophy and theology at the University of Paris. He became a famous teacher and philosopher, part of the extraordinary intellectual flowering of the 13th century. He was a friend and colleague of St Thomas Aquinas. Let us pray for the Holy Spirit to inspire us, like St. Bonaventure, to love God with our minds as well as our hearts; and if we come across a fact or a teaching that seems to us to contradict our faith, let us not reject it but investigate it, for the truth that it contains can never contradict the truth of God. For a reflection, "Mystical wisdom is revealed by the Holy Spirit," please click on the image. Peace be with you!