The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross INTRODUCTION

 

 

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross

Introduction

Carmelite Conversations

Philip Harvey

Wednesday the 7^th of December 2022

 Recently I have been reading the emails between Sister Wendy Beckett and Robert Ellsberg, letters in email written between 2015 and her death in 2018. Amongst the many wise things said in this correspondence, Sister Wendy says that God wishes to have a conversation with us, but the conversation won’t happen if we don’t do something about it. In other words, prayer is available at any time, it is up to us to take up the conversation, as God is ready to engage. I find that St John of the Cross has the same attitude to prayer. Whoever we are and wherever we find ourselves, the simple act of making ourselves available to God through prayer is the start, whatever our present prayer life happens to be.

 Elsewhere, Sister Wendy gets tetchy about manuals of prayer. She questions the usefulness of books about how to pray, as though prayer were a set of exercises. Putting aside the fact that we all have to talk about prayer who are in the business of praying, talk that may extend to putting the words in a book, Sister Wendy is getting at the fact that in prayer life we find our own way, that the main impetus is being called to prayer, of simply living a prayerful existence, in a place where how-to books become fairly superfluous. The writings of St John of the Cross are not how-to books. However, they are all about prayer, what is happening, and how we might better understand it. Like his companion Teresa of Avila, he also shows that prayer life happens in real life and is real life. That everything about prayer is going on through change.

  “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.”

 These words of St John of the Cross (1542-1591) serve as one way of learning about this poet and saint. They put us at ease, speak to whatever reality we find ourselves in at the time, and can be used to inspire us as we delve into the poetry. Although his writing can be unusual, multilayered, and difficult at times, our persistence is rewarded as we discover that he is in the business of putting love into the world in order that we will find love.

 Composed in a monastic prison and copied out later from memory, ‘The Spiritual Canticle’ of St John of the Cross is a long poem that was never published in his lifetime. Intrinsic to the poem is his commentary, which is an in-depth description of the spiritual life in different stages, written with remarkable and subtle insight into human consciousness and behaviour. The more we read into the commentary, the greater our appreciation of the images and language of the Canticle itself, the poem serving at one level as shorthand for the longer exposition and as a memory game for things said in the commentary.

 Context is important, so I quote Benedict Zimmerman OCD in his introduction to David Lewis’s 19^th century translation. “The Canticle was composed during the long imprisonment St. John underwent at Toledo from the beginning of December 1577 till the middle of August of the following year. Being one of the principal supporters of the Reform of St. Teresa, he was also one of the victims of the war waged against her work by the Superiors of the old branch of the Order. St. John’s prison was a narrow, stifling cell, with no window, but only a small loophole through which a ray of light entered for a short time of the day, just long enough to enable him to say his office, but affording little facility for reading or writing. However, St. John stood in no need of books. Having for many years meditated on every word of Holy Scripture, the Word of God was deeply written in his heart, supplying abundant food for conversation with God during the whole period of his imprisonment. From time to time he poured forth his soul in poetry; afterwards he communicated his verses to friends.” (Lewis xii)

 This morning I will identify main turning points in the Canticle. I hope that these close readings will open up understanding of this remarkable and very personal poem. ‘The Spiritual Canticle’ is a Spanish poem of 40 stanzas. Typically, the words track the relationship of the Soul to God in terms of a lover and the Beloved, drawing especially on the Song of Songs. Bride and Bridegroom are interchangeable words, though I prefer Lover and Beloved. I will read the first 21 stanzas in John Venard’s modern English translation, then offer readings of two stanzas. We will then have an interval in which Alex Safran will talk to us about an icon he is ‘writing’ based on St John of the Cross. Then, after discussion on Alex’s work, we will return to finish reading the Canticle, looking in depth at two stanzas from the second half.

 You will be disappointed to hear that these readings lack the colourful digressive style and accompanying joie de vivre of Michael Brundell O.Carm., the pioneer of this December session, however I hope they will open up appreciation of John’s words, but more especially awaken thoughts about your own prayer life. At the same time, I will be following Michael’s practice of taking different stanzas of the chosen poem, offering some established readings of their meanings, and including my own lived experience of prayer. 

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross STANZA 6

 

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross

Carmelite Conversations

Philip Harvey

Wednesday the 7^th of December 2022

STANZA 6

 Ay!, quién podrá sanarme?

Acaba de entragarte ya de vero;

No quieras enviarme

De hoy más ya mesajero

Que no saben decirme lo que quiero.

 

Ah, who will be able to heal me?

End by wholly surrendering yourself!

Do not send me any more messengers

they cannot tell me what I wish to hear.

(Venard xix)

 The opening stanzas of the Canticle enumerate the experiences of someone trying to make sense of relationship with God, now that they have been ‘wounded’ with love, calling out after the Beloved, i.e. God. We hear of how the soul, the lover, encounters obstacles and challenges on the way. Signs of the Beloved are everywhere, but where has he gone? The beauty he leaves in his wake draws the soul forward in search. News that others give of him – “a thousand graceful things” – only cause more longing and hurt due to absence. More questions than answers keep arising. The lover declares total devotion and the need to be close to the Beloved at all times. Because God is the source of Love, the lover yearns to be there more and more. One writer summarises St. John’s thought in this stanza thus: “The more that the soul knows God, the more it is consumed with desire to see Him. And when it sees that there is nothing that can cure its pain except the sight and the presence of its Beloved, it wants no other remedy. It begs Him to make it fully enjoy His presence … Only the sight of Him can satisfy the love it has for Him. It then beseeches Him to surrender Himself to it fully in complete and perfect love: Surrender yourself completely!” (Tonnelier 32)

 My personal response to this stanza comes from my own lifetime experience of prayer. This is the way his poem works, as a guide to the life of prayer, but also as an identifier of where anyone of us may be in the practice of prayer, which is about relationship with God, at any time in our life. So even though I am no expert in prayer, I can recognise what John is saying and make sense of it as real and valid experience. I relate immediately, for example, to the plea for healing. Although I don’t always think of going into prayer at the time as a means to healing, my experience tells me that some sort of mending, restitution, restoration of being happens through the simple process of praying. To be healed of the longing for connection with God, the Beloved, means praying more. It is God who heals, if and when we ask, and it can be as simple as that. The desire to have complete access and surrender is a familiar state for anyone who has been passionately in love. St. John knows this state, which he ascribes to our need for increased access and surrender to God, using the language of the Song of Songs. What we don’t want are any impediments, distractions, or as he calls them ‘messengers’ that only get in the way of complete access to our Beloved. Yet when it comes to God, we are still at the stage where we must discern that all such distractions, no matter how marvellous and placed in our way for our own improvement, are only signs and wonders of God, rather than true and complete access. It is not surprising that the lover impatiently wants these things out of the way at once. But who are these ‘messengers’? In his commentary, the poet asks to “grant that I no longer know Thee in this imperfect way by the messengers of knowledge and impressions, which are so distant from that which my soul desires.” They are necessary but at the same time “inadequate communications” that only serve to “increase the pain of Thy absence” and “renew the wound which Thou hast inflicted by the knowledge of Thee which they convey.” (Lewis 55) My sense is that the frustration expressed here is with having all sorts of signs everywhere that remind us of God’s Love, but they are only signs, reminders of what is truly possible, namely direct and even complete engagement. The experience of desire for more of this kind of relationship, this kind of love and all that it gives in turn, reciprocally, is the driving force of the soul in this situation. But I think we can also read the messengers to include the things of the world, pleasures, past-times, everything that brings passing satisfaction, but not lasting happiness, let alone eternal belonging. It is not so much a rejection of worldly things, as we call them, as the awareness that worldly things don’t last. We learn to identify them in their proper place. Our own desire meanwhile is for something greater, a desire that yearns and continues on.

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross STANZA 15

 

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross

Carmelite Conversations

Philip Harvey

Wednesday the 7^th of December 2022

STANZA 15

 … la noche sosegada

en par de los levantes del aurora,

la mùsica callada,

la soledad sonora,

la cena que recrea y enamora.

 

The night serene

The time of rising dawn

The silent music

The sounding solitude

The supper which refreshes and increases love.

(Venard xx)

 

The opening of the Canticle describes the challenges and vicissitudes of the soul (the lover) in finding access to God (the Beloved). But then, through persistence and faith the soul plateaus towards an opening awareness of the beloved. The poet lists ways of perceiving God in relationship that are inspirational and consolatory. We are at a new stage in the relationship. The soul perceives God as mountains, lonely valleys, strange islands and resounding rivers, and declares the beauty and grandeur of her beloved accordingly. In this next stanza, praise continues, God being understood as the tranquil night and the early morning, then as being found in silence, and also in a supper that refreshes, a supper that gives love freely.

 Lockdowns were a good time to spend on prayer. During lockdowns at home I also discovered Spotify. This made available music I had never heard for years and much music I had never heard. Amongst the many new musicians discovered was the Catalan composer Federico Mompou (1893-1987). In the past three years I have listened over and again to different versions of Mompou’s piano work called Mùsica Callada, only to find during preparation of this paper that the expression ‘mùsica callada’ comes from Stanza 15 of this poem. Each line is elucidated in detail by the poet in his commentary. Here are his words of elucidation for his own expression ‘mùsica callada’.

 “In tranquillity and silence the soul becomes aware of Wisdom’s wonderful harmony and sequence in the variety of his creatures and works. Each of them is endowed with a certain likeness of God and in its own way gives voice to what God is in it. So creatures will be to the soul a harmonious symphony of music surpassing all concerts and melodies of the world. She calls this music ‘silent’ because it is tranquil and quiet knowledge, without the sound of voices. And thus there is in it the sweetness of music and the quietude of silence. Accordingly, she says that her Beloved is silent music because in him she knows and enjoys this symphony of spiritual music … [The praise of the blessed] is like music, for as each one possesses God’s gifts differently, each one sings his praises differently, and all of them together form a symphony of love, as of music.” (Nubecula 83)

 To read each stanza in this way, we find that the spirituality of St John is fully expressed in his commentary, which is essential to any deeper understanding of the poem. The commentary is essential to understanding St John himself, it provides broad access, but the commentary wouldn’t exist without the poem, as it’s the poem that came first. Like the reading of so much poetry, meaning develops and deepens through familiarisation, through continual re-reading. What makes St. John of the Cross different is that he later gave instruction sessions to the Carmelites in community, intimate explanations of the experiences that are not apparent in the poem. At least, not on first reading. This teaches us that prayer life is personal and therefore different for each of us. As Rowan Williams puts it, “For John, it was fundamentally important to be able to interpret his mental anguish as itself ‘grace’, the mark of God’s intimacy. The Canticle becomes more startling than ever if read in such a light.” (Williams 161) This stanza is filled with consolation, with gifts in time that come from working through extremes of experience. He enacts here places where prayer, increased relationship with God, bring him peace, connection, and refreshment. We must keep in mind though that this state of ‘silent music’ and ‘sounding solitude’ comes at some cost. Williams “warns us against supposing that what is in question is a dramatic interior ‘mystical’ thing … what he is talking about [is] the bitter and costly self-knowledge that comes through fear, inadequacy and failure, internal and external, the evaporation of ‘spiritual life’, the sense of the impossibility of pleasing God, or even of believing in God enough to want to please him: the reduction of spirituality to nothing. The illuminative way; nothing else can serve as a preparation for the authentic union of the self with God.” (Williams 175), “

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross STANZA 28

 

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross

Carmelite Conversations

Philip Harvey

Wednesday the 7^th of December 2022

STANZA 28

 Mi alma se ha empleado

y todo mi caudal en su servicio;

ya no guardo ganado,

ni ya tengo otro oficio,

que ya solo en amar es mi ejercicio.

 

Now I occupy my soul

and all that I possess in serving him;

I no longer tend the flock,

nor have I any other work

now that I practise love, and that alone.

(Venard xxii)

 The second half of this long poem moves away from the various struggles and trials of the soul finding its way with God, and moves into more and more complete relationship with God, who is the God of Love. Each verse, whether spoken by lover or beloved, more steadily affirms the centrality of relationship with the Beloved, i.e. the source of our thoughts, words, and actions in love. In his commentary, John of the Cross says of the lover, the soul, “she is therefore not seeking her own proper satisfaction, nor the gratification of her own inclinations, neither does she occupy herself in anything whatever which is alien to God; yea, even her communion with God Himself is nothing else but acts of love, inasmuch as she has changed her former mode of conversing with Him into loving. “ (Lewis 218) We are told this devotion involves the soul in “all its faculties, understanding, will, and memory to his service.” In this same process, we notice the letting go of anything that impedes and distracts from this completeness. In this stanza, those distractions are called ‘the flock”, in Spanish ‘ganado’ which doesn’t just mean flock but also a swarm or mass of people in turmoil. John identifies these as the appetites and “other work”, or “unprofitable occupations”. John explains that amongst these are the following: “To these habits belong that of speaking, thinking, and the doing of things that are useless; and likewise, the not making use of these things according to the requirements of the soul’s perfection; other desires also the soul may have, wherewith it ministers to the desires of others, to which may be referred display, compliments, flattery, human respect, aiming at being well thought of, and the giving pleasure to people, and other useless actions, by which it laboured to content them, wasting its efforts herein, and finally all its strength. All this is over, says the soul here, for all its words, thoughts, and works are directed to God, and, conversant with Him, freed from their previous imperfections.” (Lewis 220-221) Lewis in his 1909 translation translates “que ya solo en amar es mi ejercicio” simply as “My sole occupation is love.”   

 I find this verse useful in stating the condition that any of us can find ourselves in who “practise love, and that alone.” For this is really, in all its simplicity, the single main import of the poem, as it is of Jesus’s words to love one another as I have loved you. Surrounding this poem is not just John’s spiritual commentary but also generations of later commentaries, many of which are captive to a language of beatific visions, rapturous unions, and other stunning human experiences that sometimes succeed in making his message sound impossibly otherworldly and not for the likes of mere mortals like ourselves. Western art has not helped us here with images of saints staring soulfully upward in some kind of personal mind blow. The word ‘perfection’ could do with a better alternative, given that today we are warned against perfectionism, so have doubts about becoming perfect anyway, even though the false image of perfectionism in our modern terminology is precisely what John is warning us against. Stanza 28 disabuses us of these misconceptions, fortunately. It comes at that time in anyone’s life where we discover, rather than just being told, love is the first cause of being, not something else; that time where we discover, that this is what is meant by serving him. John Venard writes that “a state of continual, uninterrupted prayer” means “it is not intermittent, as before; now it is habitual, uninterrupted … an habitual and loving attentiveness to the will of God.” (Venard 198-199) I find this very helpful because he is saying that prayer is the most integral part of our being. Far from being separated out from the rest of our experience, prayer and relationship with the God of Love can and will inform everything we do. And in a world today that is overwhelmed with distractions and things that are, in truth, useless, being able to learn through prayer to pay attention to what matters is a gift that John in his Canticle is offering freely. We still live in the world, with ourselves and others, yet everything changes and gets better through this practice of love.         

 

 

 

 

 

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross STANZA 35

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross

Carmelite Conversations

Philip Harvey

Wednesday the 7^th of December 2022

 STANZA 35

 En soledad vivia,

y en soledad ha puesto ya su nido,

y en soledad la guía

a solas su querido,

también en soledad de amor herido.

 

She lived in solitude

and now in solitude has built her nest;

and in solitude her dear one alone guides her,

who also bears in solitude

the wound of love.

(Venard xxiii)

 

This is the Beloved’s affirmation of the soul’s prolonged devotion to the Beloved, the source of Love. It is a statement of complete reciprocity, each side in wonder at and praise of the other. The soul is spoken of as a turtledove, using the language of Scripture. The turtledove is by legend a bird that is innocent, pure and the example of enduring love. Indeed, the bird’s existence and purpose are entirely reliant on being with its partner. This lifetime of increased love and devotion was an established literary model, notably during the Renaissance as when for example we hear of the turtledove in Shakespeare. The poet’s commentary discloses that the use of the word ‘solitude’ has a different meaning in each line. In line 1, ‘She lived in solitude’ takes us back to the start of this story, where “the soul that longs after God derives no consolation from any other companionship, - yea, until it finds Him everything does but increase its solitude.” Whereas line 2 moves on from the life of “voluntary privation of all the comforts of this world, for the sake of the [Beloved or] Bridegroom,” to a place where now the soul “in solitude has built her nest.” The poet explains the nest as “that perfect solitude wherein [the soul] attains to union with the Word, and in consequence to complete refreshment and repose.” God Himself is the guide to the soul who has become “detached from all things, having now ascended above all things, as we read in the next line: “in solitude her dear one alone guides her”. Until God or the Beloved “also bears in solitude the wound of love.” As the poet explains, the soul “having reached the summit of perfection and liberty of spirit in God, all the resistance and contradictions of the flesh being subdued, has no other occupation or employment than indulgence in the joys of its intimate love of the [Beloved].” So it is that we follow in microcosm in this stanza the stages of change that the soul goes through in this relationship. It can be observed that even though this happens in solitude, the lover is never alone as such, but always autonomous in and of itself, only being transformed through love into an increased understanding of God, and therefore of all being.

 When we remember that St John of the Cross composed this poem in solitude, an enforced solitude, a solitude of incarceration and abuse, the repetition of the words ‘en soledad’ in this stanza, like the counting out of days, comes to us as no surprise. ‘In solitude’ is where his soul was found and, after many struggles and endurances and privations, ‘in solitude’ is where his soul finds itself now, able to live at peace through communion with God. One way of reading the whole poem is as a prison journal, a journal in which perfect freedom will be reached through endurance, prayerful attention, and faith. Just as St Teresa of Avila in her ‘Interior Castle’ tracks the progress, temptations, distractions, growth and union with God, so St John describes this progress in his own language and via his own poetic means. And at the end of the Spiritual Canticle we meet what Rowan Williams calls the “controlling theme of all his writing … God is not the same as anything else. Nothing can ‘substitute’ for God; once he is tasted by the soul, all earthly or creaturely beauties become tantalizingly inadequate hints and reflections.” (Williams 162) This is not to say that the world is left behind and is of no value. Rather it means the world, or the creaturely to use a medieval term, is seen in perspective, and valued rightly. The claims of the world are let go of in order to be seen and understood through relationship with God. This image of the turtledove in her nest represents what Williams explains thus: “Growth in spiritual maturity is growth in detachment from the creaturely … John takes it for granted … that a person in some sense becomes what he or she loves.” (Williams 163) When I read this stanza, I am reminded of my own uniqueness, and so extension the uniqueness of each one of us in our relationships. The poet has experienced that singularity at an intense and painful level, one reason why he has written down his experience in terms of solitude.   

The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross SOURCES

 The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross

Carmelite Conversations

SOURCES

Wednesday the 7^th of December 2022

 Works of St John of the Cross read and used for the session:

 Cántico espiritual = Geistlicher Gesang. Edited and introduced by Claudia Krämer.  Druckerei Geiselberger, 2002

 ‘Carmelite classics : Saint John of the Cross: The spiritual canticle … 14-15, translated by Kavanagh and Rodriguez’, in Nubecula, v. 30, no. 1, 1979, pages 82-83.

 Song in the night : selections from the Spiritual canticle of St. John of the Cross. Scribed and edited by Sister Patricia of the Resurrection OCD. Source Books; Anthony Clarke, 1991

 Spiritual canticle. 3^rd edition. Translated and edited by E. Allison Peers. Doubleday, 1961

 The spiritual canticle of St. John of the Cross. Simplified version with notes by John Venard. E.J. Dwyer, 1980

 A spiritual canticle of the soul and the bridegroom Christ. Translated by David Lewis, with corrections and an introduction by Benedict Zimmerman. Thomas Baker, 1909

 Other works:

 Wendy Beckett and Robert Ellsberg. Dearest Sister Wendy : a surprising story of faith and friendship. Orbis Books, 2022

 Wayne Simsic. Seeking the beloved : a prayer journey with St. John of the Cross. The Word Among Us Press, 2013

 Constant Tonnelier. 15 days of prayer with Saint John of the Cross. New City Press, 2012

 Rowan Williams. The wound of knowledge : Christian spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross. Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1979

The Epistles of Sister Wendy Beckett & Robert Ellsberg

A review article written by Philip Harvey, first published this week online at Eureka Street under the title ‘An Unlikely Friendship’

 

I confess to sceptical feelings in the past about Sister Wendy Beckett. These feelings were not assuaged by people asking is she really a nun, or saying that her habit wasn’t any habit they’d ever seen, and anyway haven’t nuns stopped wearing habits? My own preconceptions found it hard to square a woman who had renounced the world with someone quite ready to share her personal opinions about high art with the world in general. To say the least, a hermit who chooses to be a TV star invites a sense of ambiguity. 

This mindless prattle, these superficial impressions, evaporated when I opened her newly published correspondence with the American writer and publisher, Robert Ellsberg. (‘Dearest Sister Wendy : a surprising story of faith and friendship’) It was a surpassing surprise to meet Sister Wendy being very much herself, at once deeply contemplative and endearingly playful, candid then circumspect, super-confident only then to be given over to self-doubt. But the real surprises were on every page. It was hard to keep up with the revelations and ideas that broke open from both sides of the equation. 

Robert Ellsberg is famous for having a famous father, Daniel Ellsberg, the man who copied top secret information about the Vietnam War which was published in the New York Times as the Pentagon Papers. Robert assisted him with the copying, being 13 years of age at the time. Thus he inherited his father’s social activism and civil disobedience, an open willingness to address injustice in the outside world. 

Yet Robert is equally well-known for his editorship of the Modern Spiritual Masters Series published by Orbis Books, one of today’s pre-eminent and most useful introductory series to writers of the interior life. Together with his original anthologies of saints’ lives, Alban Butler made personal, this series testifies to Robert’s vocation to being that rare bird, a hagiographer. Indeed, after the first shy tentative exchanges in 2016, Robert did not wish to interrupt Wendy’s contemplative existence further in any way, but it’s when the correspondence first comes to life that he sends her a set of the Orbis series as a gift, books that she takes up with typical excitement and her eye for close detail. 

Two like-minded people, one immersed in the dangers of the contemporary world, the other dwelling in a caravan as a guest of the Carmelite house at Quidenham in Norfolk (then later at one end of the house when she needs care), meet each other through words and across the Atlantic Ocean. Their forte is writing, their interest is in our relationship with God. 

Having an ocean between you immensely increases the need for correspondence. Robert talks about his dreams, many of them foregrounding his emotional life in startling fashion. Once he calls his dreams presents. What’s inside? What is he being given? What are we being given? Sister Wendy doesn’t talk about her dreams, until inspired to do so by Robert, but she responds to Robert’s much as an attentive, sensitive art critic might to an unnoticed detail or hidden meaning. She sometimes calls his dreams visions. 

They start drawing each other out. Robert’s anxiety dream of giving a lecture on a subject about which he is completely unfamiliar prompts Wendy to tell a story we would not otherwise have known: her first time giving a spiritual conference as head of her community. The reader senses faintly that such challenges grew later into Sister Wendy’s “strange vocation to talk about art,” that elsewhere she half-jokes about as “the only apostolic work I’ve ever done for the Lord.” 

That she became head of a religious community appears to be one of those administrative mistakes that were not good for the community, or for Sister Wendy, who suffered a breakdown in her health. We learn that it was as result of this that she gained a dispensation to leave in 1970, taking up an invitation from Sister Rachel, then prioress of the Carmelite monastery in Norfolk. 

Rachel is better known under her penname Ruth Burrows, one of the great English mystical writers of our times. Such a friendship is not a fluke, it is providential. This move helps clarify why Sister Wendy wore a black-and-white habit, that of her teaching order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and not the Carmelite brown. 

Inspirational and profound thoughts go back and forth, thoroughly grounded the while by domestics. Sister Wendy, for example, is a cat person. Robert is a dog person. She will have none of his view that cats are “cunning and devious”, replying, “Cats do not have that easy trustfulness and need of humanity that makes the dog so lovable … the dignity of the little cat, its comic curiosity, its easy and unstudied beauty, are God’s gift to us.” She admits to being “wildly enthusiastic about cats”, which she thinks “God’s most beautiful animal (just that little inch more beautiful than the horse.)” This exchange erupts during a discussion about whether Dame Julian of Norwich, who lived in the same county 700 years previous, had a cat. Wendy thinks no; Robert thinks yes: “I take it the allowance of a cat in an anchorhold was to keep down the rodent population.” Let the reader decide. 

Robert had worked with the radical prophetic activist Dorothy Day and after her death in 1980, not insignificantly in this context, edited her letters. She is formative in Robert’s life, one of the powerful presences in this book, and one model of holiness for its authors. Sister Wendy gets very excited about news of a new biography by Day’s granddaughter, Kate Hennessy. “Would that every saint had a granddaughter or a sister or a parent spilling the beans about them. Then people would realize how holiness is meant to be deeply human, non-perfectionist, part of a world in which people have to scrub floors and sweep drives and make foolish mistakes, irritate their best friends quite unwittingly, and be a nuisance generally. So, well done, Kate.”   

Their opinions on another well-known American, the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, however differ to the degree that Robert notes it was the closest they ever got to an argument. As someone who lives the monastic rule, Wendy is “grieved that Merton never seems contrite about his extraordinary breaches of the rule and his very flexible interpretation of the vows”; even as she recognises he is a “wonderful man”. Robert defends Merton, arguing that “he was a man with one foot in a style of monastic life that had been stable for centuries, but with the other foot he was exploring a new paradigm for religious life.” Wendy is distressed by this idea, saying there will “always be a need for the pure Benedictine/Cistercian monastic severity – like the Carmelites here” at Quidenham. Elsewhere she states that he needed philosophy and literature “because the great engine of his brain demanded activity,” while she prefers “a willingness to live quietly in the peace that His truth brings us.” Space cannot do justice to the shades of difference and new angles that they both bring to Merton, Sister Wendy concluding after reading a volume of his “highly entertaining” essays that “I find it difficult to see them as other than free-wheeling expressions of his inability to be silent.”  They both agree that Merton was not a saint and even though sainthood is one of their shared abiding interests, what is a saint? This book ranges sensitively and informatively over every kind of definition of this perennial subject. 

The art of letter-writing is not dead, as anyone knows who writes letters. It has transformed into blogging, websites, social media conversations, and the epistolary art (sometimes) of the email. As Robert says to Wendy on the 4^th of April, 2017: “A short message – but what a joy it is to wake up to a letter from you in the morning.” Email saves on time and postage. It saved Robert trying to read Sister Wendy’s reputedly indecipherable handwriting and introduces a third character in this book, Wendy’s laptop typist, someone who plays secretary and reality check to her more outlandish thoughts. This is Sister Lesley Lockwood OCD, a cat person, who says in her Foreword, “Sister Wendy rarely, and then very reluctantly, spoke of herself. But, as Robert noticed, there was an air of urgency, of providential purpose, surrounding the entire exchange. Sister Wendy sensed she was in the last months or perhaps year or two of her life …  I understand now that an autobiography by Sister Wendy could only happen in an easy reciprocal to and fro with someone whose heart and intellect she could dance with.” 

This is a correspondence of finely tuned complementarity. When Robert writes “I realise that my writing to you is a form of prayer,” it is a lead to the shared need they have to speak honestly and openly about the past, both its joys and sorrows, and the changing present. Daily events affect the course of the dialogue, for Robert the 2016 presidential election outcome is cause for angst, for Wendy a fall signals her increasing frailty, yet the prayerful source of the dialogue is constant and the interest wells up accordingly. 

The variety and depth of these letters defies summary. I will simply conclude with some thoughts from Sister Wendy on writing about a life of meaning, words that display the balance and understanding at work in this wonderful book. “I worry that in writing so much about extraordinary figures it can make people feel that they could never be like that, any more than they could paint like Cezanne. Reading the Gospels is helpful, because it is clear we are not called to be prodigies or geniuses, whether in the spiritual life or any other realm. Just to be merciful and forgiving: such ordinary virtues! With opportunities at hand every day to exercise them.”