Franciscan Media: The Franciscan Friar Who Taught Me to Read
There’s a line from the poet Robert Lax that would always make my dear friend, Fr. Dan Riley, choke up. That line was this: “We rose and came to the field.”
It was not unlike Fr. Dan to tear up, usually while saying something like, “You know, I’m going to say it again, I just love you so much” for the twelfth time that day.
But why did this line move him so?
We rose and came to the field—I find myself thinking about that line as I write today, on July 25, 2024, just one day after Fr. Dan passed away at the age of 81.
Lax’s line follows a stunning passage in “Circus of the Sun,” which uses poetic images from a traveling circus to describe the beginnings of creation. The passage begins, “We have seen all the days of creation in one day: this is the day of the waking dawn and all over the field the people are moving, they are coming to praise the Lord: and it is now the first day of creation.”
Fr. Dan would’ve invited me to pause right there and maybe reread the sentence. He would’ve looked up from the page with his twinkling eyes, widely grinning, his lips almost quivering, then back down, as he continued to read a passage that, in my opinion, captured his own approach to life—one that invites each of us, whether you knew Fr. Dan or not, into the heart of Franciscan living.
There is a fullness to this passage, what Fr. Dan may have described as the Word being alive and active in our midst, ever-creating, ever-incarnating, rising up for us to read with a newness as if we really are bearing witness to the first day of creation. He called the reading of this fountaining Word “Franciscan Lectio.” Fr. Dan treated life that way. You could see it in his gentle gaze as he really listened to what you were saying. You could hear it in his sudden, booming laugh, which is probably still startling the angels and saints upstairs. You could feel it in his welling tears, his presence. All was new to him, for it was a gift from God. Each day was the first day of creation, as Mystery and Beauty beckoned him to rise and come to the field. Every scene of his life was spinning around the axis mundi, the axle which was Christ.
Our happenstance meeting was a reflection of this. We met in 2017 at a Thomas Merton conference at St. Bonaventure University. Though academic conferences can feel “stuffy,” there Fr. Dan and I were, beaming uncontrollably as we geeked out about Merton on the lawn near Friedsam Memorial Library. It didn’t matter that there were almost five decades between us, that he had pored over works of Merton that I had never heard of, that I didn’t really know at that point in my life what a Franciscan friar even was. He opened his heart to experience the Christ in me that day, something I know thousands of Bonaventure students also experienced in his 50 years of ministry there. It was as if we realized, then and there, we were cosmically linked. We even took a photo together.
Over the years I journeyed up to Mt. Irenaeus, the Franciscan retreat center in the Allegheny hills that Fr. Dan founded in 1984. I was privileged to be there many weekends when “Bonnies” would visit on retreat—either for their deepening faith or from their studies. Fr. Dan would “lead” the retreat, but really he was simply helping young people feel known, loved, accepted. I think that’s one reason he seemed uncomfortable when I called him a “mentor.” That was too hierarchical for his liking. In his mind, there was a mutuality in experiencing the Christ in one another. In his mind, we were each other’s teachers.
This was especially evident as we worked on his book Franciscan Lectio, a book I’d consider to be his own “Itinerarium” for the Franciscan way of life—for what it means to read the Word in the world as St. Francis did. He would thank me profusely for my “help,” but really his wisdom for the Franciscan tradition and his approach to life were balms for my wounded heart.
“Have I ever read to you Lax’s ‘Circus of the Sun’?” he’d ask me.
He knew the answer to the question. We’d read it the day before.
“Yeah,” I’d laugh, “but read it again.”
It was time for this passage to become new to us.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” That quote captures my final year with Fr. Dan.
Last October I was graced with the opportunity to travel with Fr. Dan on a pilgrimage to Assisi. Almost every site, it seemed, we would make eye-contact from across the way, smile, and shake our heads in disbelief, overcome by the wonder of it all: Here we are, together, at the beginning of creation, in the origins of this tradition we love, reading the Word in the world.
At the turn of the year, Fr. Dan and I piled into his Subaru Outback, affectionately named “Fern,” and drove across the country together to New Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur where he was to begin his sabbatical. The trip may as well have been called, “The Great Cross Country Brewery Tour.”
Every evening I noticed how Fr. Dan “read” the brewery just as he had done months before in the Basilica of St. Francis. That was both the contemplative and the artist in him. One evening, struck by the architecture and design of the brewery, its artistic themes (what we may call “branding”), and the taste of the food and drink, he exclaimed, “This is so fun! We should get t-shirts!” We did.
Another night, this time at a hole-in-the-wall barbecue-and-beer joint in Arkansas where the worst karaoke you can imagine was unfolding, I began looking up alternative places to eat when Fr. Dan’s childlike delight for the people around him shook me from my sleep. For him this was all to be read, to be taken in—it was part of the “first day of creation,” and make no mistake, Lax’s circus imagery was apt. Before we left, we took a picture together next to an inflatable pig.
“You know when we took a picture next to that pig?” he reflected later on, “that was its own Sacrament to me.”
That was Fr. Dan. That is the Franciscan way. Sacraments abound as Life reveals itself to us: happenstance encounters, ghastly karaoke, inflatable pigs, and all.
When I lost my mother suddenly in 2021, a grief that Fr. Dan helped me navigate having also lost his own father at a young age, I remembered a story he shared with me while we worked on his book. He wrote that he dreamt his father “emerged with his arms up in the air, with the joy of someone who owned the whole world and wanted to give it away” and exclaimed, “We are all going home together!”
I can almost hear him reading it to me today. It is again the first day of creation. Everyone is coming to praise the Lord. They rose and came to the field.
