Download or read book Befriending Silence written by Carl McColman and published by Ave Maria Press. This book was released on 2015-11-20 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 Georgia Author of the Year: Inspirational-religious books. Respected speaker, author, and Patheos blogger Carl McColman introduces Cistercian spirituality as "the hidden jewel of the Church," presenting a surprisingly contemporary path grounded in monastic tradition. This accessible and comprehensive guide highlights a unique focus on simplicity, living close to the earth, and contemplative prayer, all of which make Cistercian spirituality relevant today. Steeped in chant and silence, grounded in down-to-earth work and service, and immersed in the mystical wisdom of teachers ancient (Bernard of Clairvaux) and modern (Thomas Merton), Cistercian spirituality's beautifully humble path has for centuries made monasteries places of rest, retreat, and renewal. Now, Carl McColman offers the first practical introduction to this ancient, contemplative spirituality for all people. Hailed by reviewers of his many books as playful, and profound, McColman draws on his experience as a lay Cistercian to provide insight into the relevance of the tradition to contemporary issues and spiritual practice. He explains how silence, simplicity, stability, stewardship of the earth, contemplation, ongoing conversion, and devotion to Mary combine to offer a rich and unique path to discipleship and intimacy with God.
Download or read book Cistercian Spirituality written by Francis Acharya and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cistercian Spirituality: An Ashram Perspective is a spiritual directory written by Fr. Francis Acharya for the monastic community that he founded at Kurisumala (Kerala, India). As the editor, Fr. Michael Casey, relates in the introduction: This book is offered to a wider world in the hope that it will serve as a means of making and deepening contact with the spirit of the Cistercian tradition not so much as it is written but as it has been lived for over six decades by a deeply spiritual man. To those who know of Kurisumala Ashram or who have read the biography of Fr. Francis, it will provide a gateway to an understanding of the interior life of this remarkable monk. In particular, his description of the stages of the experience of prayer will certainly be helpful to many who, like him, are lifelong seekers of the unseen God." Francis Acharya, OCSO, left the Belgian monastery of Scourmont in 1955, after twenty years as a Trappist, to live his monastic life in India. His experiences put him in contact with such other pioneering spirits as Henri Le Saux (Abishiktananda), Jules Monchanin (In Quest of the Absolute), and Bede Griffiths (Return to the Centre, The Golden String), and led to an uncommonly successful inculturation of Christian monasticism within Indian culture and spirituality at Kurisumala, where he served as Acharya, teacher, until his death in 2001. His biography, Kurisumala: Francis Mahieu Acharya, A Pioneer of Christian Monasticism in India, is also published by Cistercian Publications. "
Download or read book The First Cistercian Spiritual Writers written by Marie-André Fracheboud and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2000 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Northern Light written by The Cistercian Nuns of Tautra Mariakloster and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For at least eight centuries, the Norwegian island of Tautra in the Trondheim fjord has been known for its spiritual waves and special light. In the Middle Ages, Cistercian monks established the northernmost monastery of the Order, living God-centered lives and developing skills such as land use and animal husbandry until the Reformation. In 1999, Cistercian nuns reestablished Tautra Mariakloster, the monastery of Our Lady of the Safe Island. Visitors to the modern monastery, distinguished by its glass-roofed church, quickly sense the silence, peace, and light of the place. Four of the women who live at Tautra have contributed to this volume of monastic wisdom from the north. They write of their experiences as monastics living close to the land, sky, and water on this island, following the liturgical year of the monastery with its enduring rhythm while experiencing the changing seasons and landscape that help to shape their life of faith and light. Includes color photos. The nuns of Tautra Mariakloster are a group of women from eight countries who have been called to monastic life at Tautra, in central Norway.
Download or read book Thousands and Thousands of Lovers written by Anna Harrison and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2022-09-05 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thousands and Thousands of Lovers examines the spiritual significance of community to the Cistercian nuns of Helfta—a concern that lies at the heart of the monastery’s literature. Focusing on a woefully understudied resource and the largest body of female-authored writings in the thirteenth century, this book offers insight into the religious preoccupations of a theologically expert and intellectually vibrant cloister to reveal a subtle interplay between communal practice and private piety, other-directed attention, and inward-religious impulse. It considers the nuns’ attitudes toward community among themselves and with their household members as well as with souls in purgatory and the saints.
Download or read book Jesus as Mother written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: The opportunity to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider the continuity-both of argument and of approach-that underlies them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first two address a question that was more in the forefront of scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of differences among religious orders. These two essays set out a method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for spiritual teaching in order to determine whether individuals who live in different institutional settings hold differing assumptions about the significance of their lives. The essays apply the method to the broader question of differences between regular canons and monks and the narrower question of differences between one kind of monk--the Cistercians--and other religious groups, monastic and nonmonastic, of the twelfth century. The third essay draws on some of the themes of the first two, particularly the discussion of canonical and Cistercian conceptions of the individual brother as example, to suggest an interpretation of twelfth-century religious life as concerned with the nature of groups as well as with affective expression. The fourth essay, again on Cistercian monks, elaborates themes of the first three. Its subsidiary goals are to provide further evidence on distinctively Cistercian attitudes and to elaborate the Cistercian ambivalence about vocation that I delineate in the essay on conceptions of community. It also raises questions that have now become popular in nonacademic as well as academic circles: what significance should we give to the increase of feminine imagery in twelfth-century religious writing by males? Can we learn anything about distinctively male or female spiritualities from this feminization of language? The fifth essay differs from the others in turning to the thirteenth century rather than the twelfth, to women rather than men, to detailed analysis of many themes in a few thinkers rather than one theme in many writers; it is nonetheless based on the conclusions of the earlier studies. The sense of monastic vocation and of the priesthood, of the authority of God and self, and of the significance of gender that I find in the three great mystics of late thirteenth-century Helfta can be understood only against the background of the growing twelfth- and thirteenth-century concern for evangelism and for an approachable God, which are the basic themes of the first four essays. Such connections between the essays will be clear to anyone who reads them. There are, however, deeper methodological and interpretive continuities among them that I wish to underline here. For these studies constitute a plea for an approach to medieval spirituality that is not now--and perhaps has never been--dominant in medieval scholarship. They also provide an interpretation of the religious life of the high Middle Ages that runs against the grain of recent emphases on the emergence of "lay spirituality." I therefore propose to give, as introduction, both a discussion of recent approaches to medieval piety and a short sketch of the religious history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasizing those themes that are the context for my specific investigations. I do not want to be misunderstood. In providing here a discussion of approaches to and trends in medieval religion I am not claiming that the studies that follow constitute a general history nor that my method should replace that of social, institutional, and intellectual historians. A handful of Cistercians does not typify the twelfth century, nor three nuns the thirteenth. Religious imagery, on which I concentrate, does not tell us how people lived. But because these essays approach texts in a way others have not done, focus on imagery others have not found important, and insist, as others have not insisted, on comparing groups to other groups (e.g., comparing what is peculiarly male to what is female as well as vice versa), I want to call attention to my approach to and my interpretation of the high Middle Ages in the hope of encouraging others to ask similar questions.
Download or read book The Cistercians in the Middle Ages written by Janet E. Burton and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cistercians (White Monks) were the most successful monastic experiment to emerge from the tumultuous intellectual and religious fervour of the 11th and 12th centuries. This book seeks to explore the phenomenon that was the Cistercian Order.
Download or read book Spirituality Of The Premonstratensians written by François Petit and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frana§ois Petit's study of the spirituality of the medieval Premonstratensians (Norbertines), published in the aftermath of the Second World War, remains the definitive treatment of the early centuries of the order of canons founded by Norbert of Xanten in 1121. Petit's attention to the texts, community life, and devotional practice of this Order of Pramontra anticipates recent scholarship in emphasizing the nexus of theology and lived religious experience. It demonstrates both the grandeur of Philip of Harvengt and Adam Scot as spiritual authors and the distinctiveness they share with others in the Norbertine tradition. This English translation renders Petit's magisterial work, long out of print, accessible to a wide international audience.
Download or read book Spiritual Direction in the Early Christian East written by Irénée Hausherr and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1990 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Way of Simplicity written by Esther De Waal and published by Monastic Wisdom. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Way of Simplicity Esther de Waal reveals the riches of the Cistercian (Trappist) tradition and its relevance for today's world. The book draws not only on such twelfth-century writers as Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx, but also on Thomas Merton and many contemporary Cistercians. These Cistercian men and women wrote on matters of perennial concern: the true self, growth, integration, friendship, the love of God, and above al the life of prayer. Anyone wishing to explore Cistercian spirituality will find this book an illuminating and practical guide. Esther de Waal is one of today's most celebrated spiritual writers. Seeking God, her classic book on the relevance of the Rule of Saint Benedict, has opened up the riches of the monastic tradition to readers throughout the world for almost twenty-five years. Greatly in demand as a speaker and retreat leader, she lives in Herefordshire, UK.
Download or read book The Spirit of Simplicity written by Jean-Baptiste Chautard and published by Ave Maria Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few people have ever seen or heard of The Spirit of Simplicity: it has been hidden for almost seventy years after quietly being published by the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1948. Anonymously translated and annotated by a young monk named Thomas Merton, the book’s author—who also is not mentioned by name in the original edition—is Jean-Baptiste Chautard, the famous French Cistercian whose only other book, The Soul of the Apostolate, has been a favorite of modern saints and popes, including Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Every generation struggles with the question of simplicity. In the history of our faith, there have been no more eloquent voices calling us back to simplicity than the monks of the Cistercian Order, from Bernard of Clairvaux to Chautard to Merton—all of whom contribute to this powerful book. Merton surrounds Chautard’s text with his own remarks on simplicity, translations of classic texts by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and commentary that allows readers to pursue the themes of simplicity in their own lives. "Only a very inadequate idea of exterior simplicity can be arrived at if we do not trace it back to its true source: interior simplicity. Without this, our resolution to practice exterior simplicity would be without light, without love …," Chautard wrote at the beginning of the book. He is writing to his fellow Cistercians, but he might as well be speaking to twenty-first century Christians. He goes on to lay out the best disciplines that a monk—or anyone—might practice to find the elusive simplicity, with quotations from St. Benedict, St. Bernard, and other pillars of monastic life and spirituality. A dozen photographs of Cistercian architecture illustrate how principles of simplicity are incorporated into Cistercian daily life. In Part 2, Merton opens up the teachings of St. Bernard, a great mystic and doctor of the Church, offering excerpts from St. Bernard’s writings on the original simplicity in the Garden of Eden, the difficulty of intellectual simplicity, the simplicity of the will (obedience), and other kindred topics. Merton also offers personal reflections from the perspective of one who had recently exchanged an active life in pursuit of worldly things for the solitude of a monk.
Download or read book A Course in Christian Mysticism written by Thomas Merton and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Merton's lectures to the young monastics at the Abbey of Gethsemani provide a good look at Merton the scholar. A Course in Christian Mysticism gathers together, for the first time, the best of these talks into a spiritual, historical, and theological survey of Christian mysticism--from St. John's gospel to St. John of the Cross. Sixteen centuries are covered over thirteen lectures. A general introduction sets the scene for when and how the talks were prepared and for the perennial themes one finds in them, making them relevant for spiritual seekers today. This compact volume allows anyone to learn from one of the twentieth century's greatest Catholic spiritual teachers. The study materials at the back of the book, including additional primary source readings and thoughtful questions for reflection and discussion, make this an essential text for any student of Christian mysticism.
Download or read book The Way of Simplicity written by Esther De Waal and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Golden String written by Bede Griffiths and published by . This book was released on 1980-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Record of a spiritual journey which led the author through the Church of England into Roman Catholic Church, by an English Benedictine abbot.
Download or read book Monastic Practices written by Charles Cummings and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For three decades, Monastic Practices has been a valued resource for English-speaking aspirants to monastic life. In this revised edition, updated and expanded, Charles Cummings, OCSO, explores the common practices of the monastic life in order to rediscover them as viable means of leading persons to a deeper encounter with God. How do monks and nuns occupy themselves throughout the day? Have they modernized their lifestyle or is it still cluttered with medieval customs? Could any of the monastic practices be of use to those outside the monastery? A certain wisdom is necessary to know how to use such practices and how to give oneself to them until they lead one to God. After long monastic experience, Cummings shows us how the ordinary things we do constitute our path to God. In the art of living life, he argues, we are always beginners, searching for God through our concrete circumstances and actions.
Download or read book The Spirituality of the Christian East written by Tomáš Špidlík and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Spirit Soul Body written by Cyprian Consiglio and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2015-01-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A perennial problem for spiritual traditions of all sorts is dualism—either a positing of a false distance between the Divine and the created or a rejection of creation and the human body. Many contemporary spiritual seekers have sensed this problem and sought to remedy it through myriad solutions drawn from various spiritual traditions and secular wisdom, both Eastern and Western. Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam, explores Christianity’s contribution to the discussion. He offers a revisioning and rearticulation of this teaching, based on the prophetic seminal work of Bede Griffiths, toward a practical and integral spirituality that reverences all aspects of our being human—spirit, soul, and body.
