Survival or Prophecy?

Description

This exchange of letters between Merton, the well-known American Trappist, and Leclercq, a French Benedictine, offers an intriguing glimpse into the minds of the two monks and their efforts to nudge monastic life toward reform in the 1950s and '60s. Although the missives, written over a period of 18 years, are peppered with such mundane details as requests for copies of articles and books, they shed light in particular on Merton's struggle to find solitude and a hermit's life within the confines of his Kentucky monastery. Forty years after the convening of the Second Vatican Council, which revolutionized many Catholic religious communities, Merton's simple request to live as a hermit seems reasonable and in fact appropriate given the history of monasticism. But his letters make clear that his desires were viewed then as radical and even dangerous. Leclercq emerges in the correspondence as a reassuring advocate who fully understands the tensions of the monastic vocation and urges Merton to follow what he believes to be God's will. "Let us all hope we can manage to be at the same time obedient and free," he writes in one letter to his American counterpart. This short collection may be too esoteric for general readers, but Merton buffs will welcome it as another window into the life of the man whose popularity endures more than 30 years after his untimely death in 1968.

Description

"Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk who wrote The Seven Storey Mountain, spent his literary career in a cloistered monastery in Kentucky. His great counterpart, the French Benedictine monk Jean Leclercq, traveled relentlessly to and from monasteries world-wide, trying to bring about a long-needed reform and renewal of Catholic religious life.". "Their correspondence over twenty years is a record of the common yearnings of two holy men. "What is a monk?" is the question at the center of their exchange, and in these letters they answer it with great aplomb, touching on the role of ancient texts and modern conveniences; the advantages of hermit life and community life; the fierce Catholicism of the monastic past and the new openness to the approaches of other traditions; the monastery's impulse toward survival and the monk's calling to prophecy. Full of learning, human insight, and self-deprecating wit, these letters capture the excitement of the Catholic Church in the era of the Second Vatican Council - and the perennial appeal of the life of monastic solitude."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

Genres

• Correspondence

Links

• Contributor biographical information
• Publisher description
• URL
• URL

Other Editions

• Survival or Prophecy?: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Jean LeClercqFarrar, Straus and Giroux2002-01-01
• Survival or prophecy?Farrar, Straus and Giroux2002-01-01
• Survival or prophecy?Farrar, Straus and Giroux2002-01-01
• Survival or Prophecy?Farrar, Straus & Giroux2002-01-01
• Survival or Prophecy?Farrar, Straus and Giroux2002-06-01