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The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaningful Life
The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaningful Life
Every century, every culture has sought the spiritual dimensions of life in particular ways; and across the ages, women and men in East and West chose the path of monastic life, either in solitude or in community. One of them was Benedict of Nursia, the sixth-century founder of communal monasticism in the West. For Benedict, the spiritual life lay in simply living this life, our daily life, well. He turned the ordinary into an experience of the extraordinary, a union with the sacred in the here and now. His enduring legacy—Benedictine spirituality based on the Rule of Benedict—exists to this day, around the world.
The Monastery of the Heart is Joan Chittister’s powerful spiritual guide for all of us who are longing for a more purposeful life in this time of social upheavals and global transformations. It is written for seekers of any faith or none—individuals, couples, families, and small groups— who are looking for new ways of meaningful living in the very center of our world—without ever withdrawing from it. The Monastery of the Heart is anchored in the ancient Rule of Benedict but attempts to redefine it for seekers today. Fresh in its form and focus, it invites us to create within ourselves a Monastery of the Heart.
What Readers Say...
“…Chittister’s spiritual guide for seekers…addresses such timeless considerations as prayer, silence, good work, humility, and much more.”
—Booklist
“…reflects the creation of a new kind of quasi-monastic spirituality suited for the age of liberalization...”
—Library Journal
“...will be helpful to anyone looking for good spiritual direction to their personal journeys, and imaginative reflections on Benedictine life.”
—The American Benedictine Review
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Read an Excerpt
The search for God is a very intimate enterprise. It is at the core of every longing in the human heart. It is the search for ultimate love, for total belonging, for the meaningful life. It is our attempt to live life and find it worthwhile, to come to see the presence of God under all the phantoms and shadows—beyond all the illusions of life—and find it enough.
But the search depends, at least in part, on the complex of energies within us that we bring to the challenges of seeking.
We do not all hear the same tones at the same volume, or see the same visions in the same colors, or seek the same goods of life in the same way. The search for God depends, then, on choosing the spiritual path suited to our own spiritual temper and character….
There is, as a result, more than one way to go about the journey to God.
We may seek God alone, in the silence of our own hearts, where our attention is centered in a keen and conscious way on developing an ear for the leavening penetration in our lives by the mind and word of God.
Another kind of journey to God leads us to seek God with others in a covenantal common life, where by the physical joining of our lives together we become a daily witness to create in the world a community of strangers bound together by the will of God.
In our own time, in a society that is both mobile and connected at the same time, there is still another possible way to make the journey to God—and that is in a Monastery of the Heart. Here we choose to seek God in step with others—each of us on an apparently separate path and yet all of us in veritable community with one another on the way—as lifelines, as mentors, as brothers and sisters in whose loving company we choose to make our journey to God.
Discussion Questions
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Awards
2012 Catholic Press Association, 1st and 2nd place in two different categories