Phil Rohrer

By Sharon Abercrombie
Staff writer

In his spiritual classic, “The Soul’s Journey to God,” St. Bonaventure proposed a set of solutions for helping to heal the all-too common feelings of human alienation. Now, hundreds of years later, a psychotherapist at Clayton Valley Counseling Center, a service sponsored by St. Bonaventure Parish in Concord, believes that the 13th century saint’s ideas provide good medicine for these contemporary times as well.

Psychotherapist Phil Rohrer points out how well Bonaventure’s ideas carry over into today’s world.

“The kind of complaints that I frequently face in my work can often be boiled down to alienation of one kind or another — alienation in the family between spouses or children, alienation from our body in the form of mood swings, anxiety, depression, sexual acting out, and addictions.” It can spill over in our relations with God, too, — “as a sense of despair, lack of direction, and not knowing who we are.”

Two simple words which apply to all these malaises are “not connected,” explains Rohrer. He blames much of this estrangement on “the triumph of scientific materialism. Since we have achieved so much in controlling our environment there has been a loss of soul and connection.”

Bonaventure received the antidote for the problems of his day during a vision. Rohrer tells how the saint, after becoming the leader of the Franciscan Order, went off to pray at Mount Alverno, the site where his predecessor Francis of Assisi had received a vision.

Philip Rohrer, a psychotherapist at Clayton Valley Counseling Center and a parishioner at St. Bonaventure Parish in Concord, will teach a work-shop on St. Bonaventure’s soul journey at 7 p.m. on Sept. 17 in St. Bonaventure Church, 5562 Clayton Road. The evening will include meditations and a talk based on the saint’s work. Further information: e-mail philiprohrer@gmail.com or call (925) 686-2328, ext. 3.

Like Francis, Bonaventure received a visit from a six-winged angel, who accompanied each of them on a similar meditative journey. Bonaventure had previously known about Francis’ experience, of course, but his own experience of the dream/vision further validated Francis’ spiritual encounter.

In a resulting book, Bonaventure de-scribes his vision as involving a series of steps. The initial step into healing was to see God’s footprints throughout the universe. The saint refers to it as an “ascent of the heart.”

For Rohrer, this ascent is a practice for cultivating a sense of awe around the wonder of creation — “as something produced from nothing — just as we awake in the morning without any effort.”

The next step has to do with developing our senses by contemplating God in all creatures and things. “The Franciscan idea of nature as a sign of God is a balm for the heart and soul,” said Rohrer. “The lesson it teaches is to slow down in order to appreciate and engage with the world around us through our senses.”

After guiding Bonaventure into seeing and appreciating God in all of creation, the angelic being switched gears, urging him to look within to see “how the soul loves itself most fervently.” Rohrer explains that the practical task here is “to see how our intellect works. One can gain some appreciation by sitting in stillness and looking directly at the mind — how it knows, remembers and understands. If we concentrate we can be led to contemplate the Eternal Light and be lifted up in wonder.”

The next step deals with contemplating the image of God within us as transformed by the grace of divine love. Bonaventure himself marveled: “It seems amazing when it has been shown that God is so close to our soul that so few should be aware . . . seeing God in ourselves comes through Christ and is experienced more through feeling than reason.”

It is Rohrer’s belief that unless one slows down to meditate for 20 to 30 minutes every day, “How would you ever know God’s grace?”

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