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"Nearly fifty years have passed since the dramatic death of Dom Gabriel Sortais during the course of the Second Vatican Council. Much has transpired in the meantime, both inside and outside the Cistercian Order of the strict Observance. As Abbot General, he stamped the Trappist Order in a highly personal way. The form he gave it is still with it today, despite many efforts to modernize further." "Guy Oury has told the story of Dom Gabriel as it unfolds from primary sources, both witnesses and documents. What we have here is certainly the most comprehensive life of Dom Gabriel Sortais available in English."--BOOK JACKET.
Those who knew him, above all monks, will find Dom Anselme Le Bail again in these pages with warm gratitude. Those who have not known him will encounter his vital and original character. Both of these will be surprised and come to admire a man and a monk who has integrated a healthy humanism into a concrete ideal of his religious vocation.
How did Thomas Merton become Thomas Merton? Starting out from any one of his earlier major life moments--wealthy orphan boy, big man on campus, fervent Roman Catholic convert, new and obedient monk--we find ourselves asking how by his life's end he had grown from who he was then into a transcultural and transreligious spiritual teacher read by millions. This book takes another such starting point: his attempt in the mid-1950s to move from his abbey of Gethsemani, in Kentucky--a place that had become, in his view, noisy beyond bearing--to an Italian monastery, Camaldoli, which he idealized as a place of monastic peace. The ultimate irony: Camaldoli at that time, bucolic and peaceful outwardly, was inwardly riven by a pre-Vatican II culture war; whereas Gethsemani, which he tried so hard to leave, became, when he was given his hermitage there in 1965, his place to recover Eden. In walking with Merton on this journey, and reading the letters he wrote and received at the time, we find ourselves asking, as he did, with so much energy and honesty, the deep questions that we may well need to answer in our own lives.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Thomas Merton, a monk of the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky, published a string of books that are among the most influential spiritual books of the twentieth century—including the mega–best seller The Seven-Storey Mountain. He was something of a rock star for a cloistered monk, and from his monastic cell he enjoyed a wide and lively correspondence with people from the worlds of religion, literature, and politics. During that period he also explored and wrote extensively on Buddhism, Sufism, art, and social action. The man to whom he owed obedience in the cloistered life was a much more traditional Catholic, his abbot, Dom James Fox. To say that these two men had a conflicted relationship would be an understatement, but the tension their differences in orientation brought actually led to creative results on both sides and to a kind of hard-won respect and love. Roger Lipsey’s portrait of this unusual relationship is compelling and moving; it shows Merton in the years his imagination was taking him far beyond the walls of the monastery, and eventually, literally to Asia.
"In this book an experienced spiritual master, a monk of Sept-Fons abbey in France, provides an intensive directed retreat which relies heavily on the rich Cistercian spiritual tradition. Readers are at liberty to read and digest at their own pace, while savoring the author's contagious enthusiasm for the values and attitudes he learned from the monastic way and the Cistercian Fathers he studied throughout his long life."--BOOK JACKET.
In matters of religion and spirituality the simplest phrases can be the most misleading. Or, if not misleading, misunderstood. There is no doubt that this is true of the Cistercian tradition. As Sister Edith Scholl writes in the introduction to this volume: When I started reading and studying the writings of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Cistercians years ago, I was struck by their rich vocabulary of Latin words 'words rich with resonances from Scripture, the liturgy, and patristic and earlier monastic authors, words for which no exact equivalents exist in English. It seemed to me that these words could be a key to a deeper understanding of their message. . . . This study of some of the most important of them could serve as a companion to the translations being published in the Cistercian Fathers Series, enabling nonspecialists to read those translations with greater understanding and appreciation. In fact, it might prove a fruitful source for approaching the whole monastic ethos." "Sister Edith Scholl has come to our rescue. . . . She has provided us with a book, and a very sensible book it is. The words she offers us are truly words for the journey, though like any journey, they are not without risk. Offering our human will to God is an extraordinarily risky business, but we may rest assured that our prayers will be answered." -From the Foreword by David N. Bell
Cassian and the Fathers is the initial volume in the series of Novitiate Conferences of Thomas Merton, the classes he presented to young men beginning their monastic life at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. They contain Merton's insights on important Patristic and monastic figures preceding the time of St. Benedict, above all John Cassian, the most significant bridge between the early desert fathers and the development of monastic life in the West, and they reveal the continuing relevance of their teachings for contemporary monastics and other Christians. Much of the value and interest of Cassian and the Fathers, as of the novitiate conferences in general, lies in the light it casts on Merton himself as teacher, novice master and monk. These notes provide a privileged standpoint for observing Merton functioning as an integral and important member of his monastic community. The 'public' Merton has long been visible in his works written for publication, and has more recently been complemented by the 'interpersonal' Merton disclosed in his correspondence and the 'intimate' Merton revealed in his complete journals. While the novitiate conferences may not equal in significance these other sources, they do allow access to yet another stratum of Merton's wide-ranging and immensely productive engagement with his world from the distinctive standpoint he had chosen within a tradition dating back more than sixteen centuries. While these lectures need to be used critically and carefully in evaluating Merton's own perspectives and commitments, nevertheless they do need to be used. The dialectical relationship between Merton's private and more public statements, including those made to his novice classes, makes possible a more complex and thus a richer picture of his monastic identity and so of his personal identity. In learning about Cassian and the Fathers from Merton, one learns as well about Merton as monk, as heir to the great monastic teachers, and as teacher of a new generation of monks, an easily overlooked and undervalued, yet integral, even central component of his vocation for more than half his monastic life. Thus the publication of the novitiate conferences will fill a significant lacuna in Merton studies and contribute to a balanced, holistic comprehension and appreciation of Thomas Merton's life and work. This edition includes an extensive introduction situating these conferences and Merton's years as novice master in the context of his broader life as monk and writer, an extensively annotated edition of the text of the conferences based on Merton's own typescript, and helpful appendices indicating changes Merton made to his text, correlating the written text with taped versions of the actual classes, and providing suggestions for further reading both in Merton's other works and in more recent studies of the figures he discusses here.
In 2003 Trisha Day spent three months living inside the enclosure of Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey, a community of twenty Cistercian nuns. Although she had long been monastic associate, she was startled by the unexpected challenges and insights that emerged as the weeks went by, and began a process of profound reflection on her experience. Now, drawing on her journals and reflections, and on her own experience as a professional woman, wife, daughter, and mother, she delves into the questions of how the centuries-old wisdom of monastic life can challenge, inspire, and guide those living outside the monastery. Organized around topics such as prayer, community, and the vows, each of Day's reflections begins with memories of her monastic experience, and then presents a perceptive and often humorous critique of the contrasting values of our present culture. For each topic she chronicles with honesty and humility her subsequent struggles to apply back home the alternative approaches learned from the sisters she lived with, and offers a wealth of practical suggestions. Filled with stories from her own life and fascinating details of daily life in the monastery, her book is sure to strike a spark with all those seeking to live in a fully human and Christ-centered way.
"A prostitute become hermit, Mary of Egypt has been held up, especially to monks, as the quintessential example of compunction and conversion. First written down around AD 600, her story was translated, first into Latin by Paul the Deacon in the ninth century, and then into vernacular languages. Three metrical versions of her Life are translated here: that of Flodoard of Reims in the tenth century, Hildebert of Lavardin in the twelfth century, and an anonymous Spanish poet of the thirteenth century." "Although these vernacular versions seem to have been directed in part at monks, they also envisaged a larger audience. For most of her life Mary of Egypt was a pilgrim; her story has travelled from Palestine to Europe, from Greek to Latin to French to Spanish, and from the monastery to the secular world."--BOOK JACKET.