Camaldolese Extraordinary
Author: Dom Jean Leclercq
Publisher:
Published: 2003-08
Total Pages: 560
ISBN-13: 9780972813228
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Leisure Resurrected
Author: Jeffrey Paul Crittenden
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2023-04-10
Total Pages: 183
ISBN-13: 1666751197
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs the church emerges from the impact of COVID, how will it reimagine its mission? With all the disruption COVID caused comes an opportunity for congregations. How will the local church organize itself, engage with the neighborhood and world, and offer pastoral care to a planet dealing with the significant issues heightened during COVID? Returning to old patterns of behavior is a wasted chance. A theological opportunity for the church lies in rediscovering the classical aim of leisure. The early church during the first two centuries offers us an understanding of leisure quite unique from the dominant expressions of leisure, such as Greek schole, Roman otium, and the Jewish Sabbath. By exploring early Christian practices, we can find insights about leisure for mission today. These practices include setting aside a single day of the week to worship, sharing in a common meal open to all, and, following the meal, incorporating into nonwork time care and engagement in the health and vitality of the community in the name of Jesus Christ. The followers of Jesus were consistent, if extraordinary, in meeting weekly, on the Lord’s Day, to worship, eat together, and go out into the neighborhood to live out their faith.
Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love
Author: Fr. Thomas Acklin, OSB
Publisher: Emmaus Road Publishing
Published: 2020-02-01
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 1645850250
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPrayer is at the heart of the Christian life. Given that we are weak and even sinful human beings, how can it be that God has anything to do with us? What does it mean to have a personal relationship with God? Why is God so silent and hidden? How do we grow in prayer? Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love brings the depth of human experience together with the Catholic tradition of prayer to present the path to an intimate and vulnerable relationship with God. Experienced spiritual directors Fr. Thomas Acklin, OSB, and Fr. Boniface Hicks, OSB, explore the many forms of Catholic prayer and demonstrate that vulnerability is essential to growing in relationship with God. Rich with the wisdom of Scripture, Catholic teaching, and the writings of the saints, Personal Prayer is an exhaustive guide for priests, religious, and laity desiring to receive the Father’s love in a profoundly personal way.
The Hermits of Big Sur
Author: Paula Huston
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Published: 2021-10-15
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 0814685064
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBetween World War II and Vatican II, as Italy struggled to rebuild after decades of Mussolini’s fascism, an eleventh-century order of contemplative monks in the Apennines were urged by Thomas Merton to found a daughter house on the rugged coast of California. A brilliant but world-weary ex-Jesuit, who had recently withdrawn from a high-intensity public life to go into reclusion at the ancient Sacro Eremo of Camaldoli, was tapped for the job. Based on notes kept for over sixty years by an early American novice at New Camaldoli Hermitage, The Hermits of Big Sur tells the compelling story of what unfolds within this small and idealistic community when medievalism must finally come to terms with modernism. It traces the call toward fuga mundi in the young seekers who arrive to try their vocations, only to discover that the monastic life requires much more of them than a bare desire for solitude. And it describes the miraculous transformation that sometimes occurs in individual monks after decades of lectio divina, silent meditation, liturgical faithfulness, and the communal bonds they have formed through the practice of the “privilege of love.”
Silence
Author: A Camaldolese Hermit
Publisher: Faith and Family Publications
Published: 2011-06-27
Total Pages: 117
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUnfortunately, today the ascetical part of our spiritual life does not have many admirers, still less, followers. Many would like to reach the peak of perfection in a very short time, without any mortification or self-denial. To them it seems that love is all that is needed because it is the bond of perfection. What they say is correct but incomplete — they do not fully understand how many sacrifices are demanded by Christian love. We cannot really love God and our brothers if we do not die to ourselves. In order to love perfectly God and our neighbor, we must practically give up many things and accept many sacrifices. Love asks for courageous and generous sacrifices! “Love must hurt us,” said Mother Teresa of Calcutta. — from the Concluding Conference
Nazarena
Author: Thomas Matus
Publisher: Paulist Press
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 212
ISBN-13: 9780809137923
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"In this book, Thomas Matus tells the true story of one woman's struggle to live her extraordinary vocation to a life of total silence, solitude and hiddenness. A gifted musician and ordinary Sunday Catholic, Nazarena, nee Julia Crotta, had a vision of Jesus calling her to the desert while in college in Connecticut. After much searching and numerous attempts to have her unique vocation recognized by the church, she eventually found her "desert" in a small room at the monastery of the Camaldolese Benedictine nuns in Rome. She lived there as an anchoress for forty-five years until her death in 1990." "Radical yet traditional, exceptional yet simple, Sister Nazarena had a long and spiritually fruitful ascetic life. Nazarena, an American Anchoress uses excerpts from her own letters of spiritual counseling and material taken from interviews with those who knew her to tell the remarkable story of her life of silence and prayer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In Praise of Hiddenness
Author: Fr. Louis-Albert Lassus O.P.
Publisher: Faith and Family Publications
Published: 2020-01-23
Total Pages: 73
ISBN-13: 0972813241
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLiving at the heart of the mystery of the hidden life of Jesus at Nazareth, a Camaldolese hermit here sings the praises of the silent life in the desert of those men and women whom Christ calls. These few and very simple conferences were given to some brother hermits. They endeavor to express the meaning of their "disappearance", which in our difficult and grandiose period of history has about it a savor of modernity. A subsequent reflection of the author on St. Romuald's monastic experience has been translated from the Italian and added to this edition as an appendix. "A son of St. Romuald, you have sensed the call to disappear, as do all lovers. Hermits themselves are, in fact, lovers who have chosen the shade, a life hidden with Jesus in God . . . . It ought to be enough for us to be known by God." Father Louis-Albert Lassus, O.P. (1916 - 2002), who prepared this anonymous work for publication in its original French edition and wrote the introduction, was a longtime friend of the Camaldolese Hermits. His writings include Livre de vie des ermites et des reclus du bienheureux Paul Giustiniani, Pierre Damien, l'homme des deserts de Dieu, and Nazarena, une recluse au Coeur de Rome. An Italian translation of the present work was published in 2003.
The Eremitic Life
Author: Cornelius Wencel
Publisher: Holy Family Hermitage
Published: 2006-06
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780972813235
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFather Cornelius Wencel, Er.Cam. was born in Gosty , Poland, in 1964. He made his final vows as a Camaldolese hermit in 1993 and was ordained priest in 1999. He now serves as prior and novice master at the Hermitage of the Five Martyrs in Bieniszew, Poland. Father Cornelius has published four books in Polish, and this is the first one to be translated into English. He received a doctorate in theology in 2004, successfully defending his dissertation on "The Trinitarian-Christological Perspective of Theological Anthropology in the Theodramatic of Hans Urs von Balthasar". The author profits from the insights of Balthasar, Kierkegaard, Merton, and various contemporary Polish thinkers. Topics treated in this book include seeking God, existential openness, discipline, simplicity, contemplation, interreligious dialogue, and ecology.
The American Benedictine Review
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 124
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThomas Merton and the Noonday Demon
Author: Donald Grayston
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2015-05-19
Total Pages: 300
ISBN-13: 1498209386
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow 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.
