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.”